Dzanga Bai brings more forest elephants into the open than anywhere else known: in December 2025 researchers counted 211 in the clearing at once, and across twenty years of daily watching the average was 58 a day. The draw is chemistry. Volcanic rock lies below the sand, and water seeping up through it carries sodium, potassium and magnesium that rainforest leaves and fruit cannot supply. Elephants dig pits with feet and trunks to reach that mineral water, and by digging, trampling and feeding they stop the forest closing over the ground — this clearing, roughly 200 by 500 metres and split by a shallow stream, is their own work. The biologist Andrea Turkalo watched from its edge for a quarter of a century and came to know more than 3,000 of them by their ear notches and tusks. The bai lies in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, core of the Sangha Trinational World Heritage rainforest, shared with Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo.
Reaching it takes a 14-kilometre drive and then some 40 minutes on foot in silence, wading a sandy stream and following elephant paths under closed canopy. Then the trees stop. From a wooden platform you watch families greet each other in trumpets and low rumbles, calves drop into the mud, big males shoulder one another away from a good pit, and grey parrots come down in flocks for the same salts. The place has been fought over. In May 2013, as the country slid into civil war, armed poachers climbed this platform and shot at least 26 elephants below it. Guards, the reserve and the Ba'Aka trackers held the bai afterwards, and the herds still come. Visitor numbers stay low — about 800 in 2025 — and permits are issued in Bayanga, which also runs the treks to habituated western lowland gorillas.