Loango National Park is where National Geographic captured its famous images of hippos playing in the Atlantic surf — one of the very few coasts on Earth where forest elephants, hippos and buffalo walk out of the rainforest onto an ocean beach. The naturalist Mike Fay called it "Africa's Last Eden," and the name fits: along more than 100 kilometres of empty shoreline, dense forest, open savanna, mangrove lagoons and surf-washed sand press against one another within a few kilometres. Gabon created the park in 2002 as one of thirteen declared at a single stroke, setting aside almost a tenth of the country, and its 1,550 square kilometres shelter western lowland gorillas, mandrills and leopards alongside the elephants on the sand. Just offshore lies one of the richest seas in Africa — after South Africa, no coast on the continent gathers a greater variety of whales and dolphins.
Trackers lead small groups on foot to a habituated gorilla family led by a silverback the guides call Kamaya, while boats slip along the Iguéla and Ndogo lagoons past hippos, crocodiles and dense flocks of waterbirds. Humpback whales calve close to shore between July and September, and from November giant leatherback turtles haul up the beaches after dark to nest. Reaching all this is deliberately hard — a charter flight or a long boat transfer, a single licensed operator, and a handful of tented camps that are the only shelter for kilometres. That remoteness is the point. On the savanna edge at dusk, elephants and buffalo step from the tree line onto open grass with no road, fence or crowd in sight — a rare, tangible measure of how wild this coast still is.