"THE rain forest" a Gabon Travel Page by kokoryko

Well the title is just a hello to John Boorman's movie recorded in Amazonia.
Here it is Gabon, the African rain forest.
It was not exactly a travel; I spent 18 month in Gabon as a volunteer with the French ministry of cooperation and development. I was assigned as exploration geologist to the ministry of mines and spent 12 month in the rain forest doing my job: Exploration.

Living in the rain forest is something special for an European, and probably for most of people, even in Africa, where more and more people live in cities or villages.
Most of the work I was living like a nomad in the forest, changing camp every day or every 2-3 days. When you enter the forest, you do not know when you will come out.
The Monts de Cristal area in northern Gabon is almost barren of people (at the time, there were less than 1 million inhabitants in Gabon, for an area half of France and if you think there are cities and villages, there is not a lot left for the "countryside")
I walked between 15 and 30 km per day and during two weeks sometimes we met no human being neither we even saw traces of population.

When work had to be done in certain ares where we stayed for more than one week we build "secondary camps", tents and tarpaulins, trying to bring as much equipment as possible, to make the "explorers" life easy.
The rain forest is a place where it . . . rains ! During the rainy season,heavy rains sometimes last continuously for 2-3 days, and during the "dry" season, there is no week without rain.
Well there will not be a lot of tips here, they may be outdated, just some general impressions, few advice for the ones who may have the luck to go really inside the forest.
All this is really "off the beaten path" and as all is like that I put them in "normal" categories.
Remark: the pictures are old, the colors faded out with time, and the scanning reduces a bit the sharpness.
Other remark: there are some tips about wildlife (food for me, at that time), some possibly chocking pictures (dead animals), some remarks which may be unappropriate in the 21th century; remember this was 26 years ago ; I was a nature lover at that time, and I am still one- a realistic nature lover- and I do not at all support hunting or game eating in Europe or other "civilised countries, so please, do not misunderstand what I write sometimes.