Loango National Park is a stretch of the Atlantic coast of Gabon, in Ogooué-Maritime province, where the rainforest comes down to the sea and forest elephants, hippos and buffalo walk out of the trees onto empty beaches, with a lagoon, habituated gorillas and calving humpback whales behind, and it has almost no visitors. The park exists largely because of one long walk: in 1999 the biologist Mike Fay walked 3,200 kilometres across the Congo basin to this coast and showed the photographs to the president of Gabon, who created thirteen national parks in 2002, Loango among them. Its shore is the strangest safari in Africa, a mosaic of forest, savanna, mangrove and beach where at dusk forest elephants step out of the tree line onto the open grassland to feed, sometimes with buffalo beside them, and on the beach their tracks run along the surf; the forest elephant is a separate species from the savanna elephant, smaller, with straighter tusks, and it is in freefall from poaching across central Africa, so Gabon's herds are its last stronghold. Trackers lead small groups on foot through the dense forest to a habituated family of western lowland gorillas led by a silverback the guides call Kamaya, one of the very few places these gorillas are visited.
The Iguéla lagoon is drifted by boat, with the rainforest leaning over the water, hippos surfacing between the reeds and crocodiles on the banks, and the same hippos are sometimes seen surfing in the sea. From July to September humpback whales gather offshore to calve after the migration up from Antarctic waters, breaching and tail-slapping within sight of the sand, in seas that hold more whales and dolphins than any African coast except South Africa's, and from November giant leatherback and olive ridley turtles haul out of the surf on dark nights to dig their nests high on the beach. The camps are simple and stand alone where savanna, lagoon and ocean meet. Loango is the coast where the forest meets the beach, and the elephants use both.