Lopé National Park is a park in the Ogooué-Ivindo province of central Gabon where grassland from the ice age still breaks the rainforest apart, a mosaic of savanna and forest along the Ogooué river that opens sightlines onto forest elephants grazing in the open and columns of mandrills hundreds strong, and it is driven and walked from the research station and the lodge at Lopé village on the railway from Libreville. The savannas are relics of a drier Africa twenty thousand years ago, kept open by burning while the forest closed in around them, and they are the reason the park works, since forest elephants that normally keep to thick cover step out onto the grass to feed and are watched from the ridges; trails climb out of the valley to open ridges where the mosaic reads at once, rainforest breaking into rolling savanna to the horizon, and short walks and dugout trips along the wide slow Ogooué reach outcrops engraved 2,000 years ago with spirals, concentric circles, lizards and the double-bladed throwing knives their makers used, hammered into the rock with iron points and dated by the pots found beside them. The park is a UNESCO site for the engravings and the forest together.
The mandrills are the park's great sight, since a horde is made up of females and their young, and the adult males with their blue and red faces join it only while the females are cycling, from about June to September, when troops of 600 and more spill across the open savanna near the research station, tracked by the guides on the trail of radio-collared animals, thickest in July and August. The forest holds gorillas, chimpanzees and the fruit trees that the researchers count, since a single elephant meal can take the fruit of fifty trees, and the dry season is grey rather than blue, with mist lying in the savanna grass until mid-morning. The station has studied the park for forty years. Lopé is a forest with the ice age's grass still in it, and the animals come out onto the grass.