Sette Cama is wonderful That about sums up my week here! On Monday, after buying my fuel, a driver brought me here from Gamba. Driving is interesting… the only real dirt road dies out after several miles and then there’s just a deep sandy track across the savannah that gets progressively worse as you go along. We were in a Landrover and the plastic gas […]
Gas On Monday morning on my way out of town to Sette Cama, we went to the Shell station to buy all my boat fuel. I had to buy 300 liters (that’s a full size oil drum plus 4 extra 25 liter jerri cans) because of the amount of lagoon we’re trying to cover. There are no stores or supplies in Sette Cama, so you
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.
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