Monday- off to Sette Cama Today I’m heading to the north end of N’dogo Lagoon, luckily by truck along a sandy peninsula, because it is raining hard today so travel by boat would be dismal. Anyway, there’s no internet up there, so I’ll post more when I return to Gamba in a week! Here’s hoping I have lots of good manatee stories to tell.
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The Rembo Bongo On Thursday morning my guide and I packed up our gear and a lot of fuel into a boat and headed across the lagoon to the Rembo Bongo (Rembo means river). The boat is basically an open hull, but it has a covered storage space in the bow so gear can be out of the rain. It’s been overcast for the past
Gamba Gamba is a strange place- if it weren’t for Shell Oil, the town wouldn’t exist. Most of the people here rely on Shell either directly or indirectly to make a living. The town is kind of spread out on a grassy plain and it’s divided into different sections. As I flew in I could see the golf course in the Shell compound, and I
Air Travel within GabonFlying here is always an amusing enterprise. You get to the airport an hour an a half before the flight yet no one can tell you exactly where to check in. Some airlines apparently have multiple counters in multiple buildings and it appears to be a good game to see if you can find the correct one on your own, because no
Je suis arrive It is so nice to be back in Gabon! I arrived very late on Friday night after 33 continuous hours of travel. The six hour layover in Casablanca in the middle of the night felt like eternity- everyone sits around the airport, trapped in a sleep deprivation experiment until their next flight. When I got to Gabon the customs guy waved me
Angola Just over a year ago my colleague Howard Rosenbaum at WCS asked me to join a project they were proposing: cetacean, manatee and sea turtle surveys in northern Angola. After numerous proposal drafts, Skype conference calls and a scoping trip to the site last November by Tim and Angela, this week the contract has finally been signed. It’s funded by Angola Liquid Natural Gas
Gearing up for Gabon Plane tickets are purchased and I’m getting ready to return to Gabon on Sept. 20. Logistics details are starting to fall into place and it will be an action packed few months in Africa. Here’s a brief overview of some of my plans: – I’ll be traveling to N’dogo Lagoon in central Gabon to do surveys of this area (faithful readers
Exciting NewsYesterday I received word that the Columbus Zoo Conservation Fund has awarded me a $10,000 grant! This money will be used to help support my next field season in Gabon. To learn more about Columbus Zoo’s conservation program and the wide range of projects they support, click here. Also, in May Gabon’s National Center for Scientific Research and Technology (CENAREST) invited me to become