20 Jun Gabon: The Impenetrable Forest

In case anyone has not yet realised, what I like is the desert, I took my first steps there and I would like to finish my journey there, but sometimes I like to change and explore other worlds.

And no matter where I go, every time I leave home a strange feeling invades me: I always need more, to get lost on every road, to take risks, to let myself go, to get into trouble, to fall in love, to lose my mind, to recover it after 2 days, to try everything (here I'm talking about food, I don't know what you have understood...).

I am desperately looking for that place where I can stay for a long time. I don't know what that place will be, but as they say in the Rif: "Maktub" (everything is written), so I keep looking, one day it will appear.

The truth is that in the last twelve months I thought I had found that place in Libya, Tunisia (here I would stay to live in the bar La Cloisteri, what a barbarity, what a place!), Egypt, Morocco, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Tanzania, etc etc, and of course, recently in Gabon.

And although any trip to the continent of the lion and the purple sunrises becomes special, I will tell you that it only took me 4 things to think that this place could get me hooked:

1.-A road. And the need to travel it by motorbike to the end, the inaccessible Loango, the paradise, where even hippos surf on the beach...

(note that this photo is not mine, it is from the BBC, but otherwise nobody would believe it).

A beach. The memory of that capitaine grillé I savoured at the Hoteliere du Phare still haunts me. And even more so the subsequent naked stroll along the beach of La Sablière, letting myself be surprised by the sunset, losing track of time as I threw poetry into the wind and the waves (I don't know if I've gone overboard with the staging of my ecstasy 🙂 ).

3.-A jungle. So impregnable, so attractive and so unknown to me. How true it is that you don't know you are hungry until they put a dish you like in front of you. I wouldn't change it for the desert, but...

4.-And of course, a bar, (well, more than one) I want to go back to dinner at the Skylife in Libreville and digest my dinner with the help of a gin and tonic at the No Stress bar.

But back to the jungle. They say that when Ché landed in Congo (DRC) as Cuban support for the cause of the Simba rebels (for love or revolution there is no great distance), Laurent Kabila warned him that he had not come to play Tarzan. Advice that I could have taken, because that's exactly how I felt, and of course, the Jungle took it upon itself to show me that I thought I was Tarzan of the Jungle when in reality I was more like Dani de Vito in "After the Green Heart".

The first attempt to beat the jungle was overland, so I hired a car with the idea of getting to Coco Beach on the border with Equatorial Guinea. Difficult (although it took me several hours to accept it).

Determined not to give up, the second attempt was to cross the Akanda National Park to try to shorten the route. Impossible.

And finally we tried our hand at going into the jungle by pirogue up the Ogooué River and the Gabon estuary to the Wonga Wongue Park. Madness.

Unfortunately, now that it's getting interesting, I'm going to cut it short, as I see I've gone on too long.

As you can imagine, all the attempts were a disaster, but it wasn't a bad adventure, was it Micky? I'm glad we at least tried....