Lope Okanda Reserve
Written: Jun 17 '02 (Updated Jun 17 '02)
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Pros: You can see animals that you wouldn't see in East or Southern Africa.
Cons: Facilities are not as developed as in the conventional African safari destinations.
The Bottom Line: There are a lot of beautiful forests left in Gabon. It's worth going if you can tolerate some of the bureaucratic hassles with getting a visa.
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| Prim8Pal's Full Review: Gabon |
Gabon has much to offer for tourists interested in nature, and the Lope Reserve is the most easily accessible. We spent about a week there in June 2002 and saw a little utilized park with much promise.
The park is a mix of tropical rainforest and savannah habitat. The main lodge (Lope Hotel) is a very nice and comfortable set of bungalows overlooking the Ogooue River. It's a really beautiful setting, and this lodge is more set up for the casual tourist. The lodge will take you out on a safari type vehicle, but there's a lot less wildlife to see on the savannah sections compared to East Africa. The best wildlife viewing comes from taking walks through established trails in the forested section. In our first introductory walk a few miles from the lodge, we saw a surprisingly large number of animals in only about 45 minutes of walking. These included a mother and infant chimpanzee, unidentified monkeys, a family of red river hogs (beautiful as hogs go), two forest buffalo, and wonderful prolonged views of two blue duikers. Anyone who's been to East or Southern Africa know that it's extremely difficult to get good views of duikers as they usually dash off as soon as they see a human, but here we were able to watch the duikers calmly feed and groom each other from a distance of about 50 feet.
We stayed at two other nature lodges that are clean and basic but more set up for the more dedicated wildlife enthusiast. The Ololo lodge is a very new lodge about three hours' drive from Lope Lodge. It's set in deep forest in an area where the rare sun-tailed monkey lives. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to take the nature walks here, but instead took a motorized pirogue (canoe) ride down the river for about four hours. We saw many different species of monkey including putty nosed monkey, moustached monkey, grey cheeked mangabey, black colobus, and crowned monkey. Lope is know for huge family groups of mandrills numbering up to 600-700 members in the peak months of May and June. However, we were only able to see a small family from the river. I wish we had more time!
We then spent some time at the Mikongo camp, which is another basic but clean lodge adjacent to where researchers are studying gorillas. The researchers are trying to habituate western lowland gorillas for tourist viewing, but the project is currently in its early stages. A large number of gorilla family groups traverse the area, and the trackers will attempt to find a group in the area, but there are no guarantees. In two days of tracking we saw signs that they were there but were unable to find them. It's said that the odds of finding them are 70-80% in the wet season (October through May) when there are more fruiting trees and they can be located feeding at these trees. The odds drop to about 30% in the other dryer months. Even though we didn't see the gorillas, we still enjoyed the forest walks. It was nice to be able to talk to the researchers and learn about their conservation efforts.
Overall, we felt this park had a lot of potential for nature enthusiasts, and the facilities were good but not up to the standards of the more established lodges and camps in East and Southern Africa.
The tourist facilities are run by an organization known as ECOFAC (http://www.ecofac.org is their website. It's in French, but there are pages in English that describe the facilities and tour programs. You can also view photos of the animals and the facilities by clicking on the icons on the map of the reserve).
The park can be reached from Libreville by train, a long road drive, or by small plane (we did it this way as we were on a tour group). In Libreville we stayed the the Tropicana Hotel on the beach near the airport. It's a bit run down but cheap and the food is good. We went through a UK company called Discovery Initiatives (www.discoveryinitiatives.com), and the ground operations were handlied efficiently by Mistral Voyages of Libreville. Other companies doing tours of Gabon include Explore and Mountain Travel Sobek.
One cautionary note: Gabon has a reputation for being very bureaucratic about giving visas, so allow plenty of time to get a visa. We had a lot of trouble getting visas through the Gabon Embassy in Washington D.C. Our visa was initially denied with no reason given even though we had provided even more information that requested on the application form. To top it off, the embassy did not even inform us that there was a problem and we didn't find out until we called two weeks after we had applied for the visa and heard nothing. All visa requests need to be approved by the Immigration Department in Libreville, and our ground operator had to get involved to get our visas processed. The whole process took five weeks, and the Gabon Embassy kept our passports during the entire time.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Suited For: Couples
Best Time to Travel Here: Anytime
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Epinions.com ID:
Prim8Pal
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Member: Glenn Hori
Location: Pleasant Hill, California
Reviews written: 41
Trusted by: 6 members
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