We have come upon many issues during our independent travels and I don’t know anyone who can adapt and overcome obstacles quite like my husband. It’s one of my favorite things about him. His logistics and operations background, not to mention his problem solving expertise and experience travelling around multiple countries, along with sheer bird motivation, is why we are able to perform so well under less than ideal circumstances on budget, independent, birding trips. I’m utterly convinced no one can do the things he can do.
But this?? This was an entirely different beast.
Western Africa is simply not set up for tourism and multiple hoops needed to be jumped through. Anytime we thought we got something accomplished, something else would fall apart. When about eight or nine “big” things are going wrong all at once, it’s easy to want to throw in the towel. The stress, anxiety, and sheer magnitude of being in a part of the world so difficult to navigate, so expensive, and so far away from comfort was getting to us.
Due to COVID we couldn’t visit Angola or Ethiopia and thus had nearly two months to play around with before we needed to go back to the USA. Here was the new plan: finish up birding with our truck in South Africa, and then fly from South Africa to bird the countries of São Tomé & Principé and Gabon. The plan was to do ST&P first (which I just wrote about here, here, and here) but flights from South Africa directly to ST&P were not possible so we needed to fly to Gabon for a night and then fly from Gabon to São Tomé.
Oh, but flying to Gabon to begin with — that was our first mistake.
Let me see, where do I even start??
1. The Gabonese e-visa we applied for online said it would take 72 hours for approval. Over a week later we hadn’t heard anything.
2. The US embassy website said US citizens could apply for a visa on arrival so we decided to fly to Gabon anyway. On arrival we were told by immigration that what was on the website was not true and they refused to let us in.
3. It took nearly 4 hours of begging, pleading, and explaining (pulling up multiple websites for reference) for immigration to issue us a single entry visa valid for 15 days. What we actually needed was a multi entry visa valid for 60. But at this point, we would take what we could get!
4. We speak very little useful French so getting around and explaining our case was extremely painful.
5. Once we were let in to Gabon (a solid SEVEN HOURS after landing), we dropped off our bags at our AirBnB and headed to the immigration office on the other side of town and attempted to get a Visa extension. We nearly got this accomplished, until we found out that our visa would become void the minute we flew to São Tomé. (We assumed this would be the case but immigration at the airport was adamant that it was not and thus we wasted several hours of time on this pointless endeavor.) The immigration office we were sitting in could not issue us a second visa with one already open.
6. Gabon is ridiculously expensive and in less than 48 hours we spent nearly 500 USD (a price that included skipping breakfast and dinner, and cooking our own lunch inside of our Airbnb) and still we got almost nothing accomplished logistically for moving forward with our trip. The fees we paid in taxi rides were outrageous!
7. São Tomé was not fully planned. Principé was not fully planned. And we were supposed to be leaving for this trip in less than 24 hours!
8. Due to the ideal flight being completely full, we had to fly to Principé in the middle of our São Tomé trip, cutting directly into birding time. We feared we may lose birds as a result of not having sufficient time.
9. Factor in COVID tests and even less time would be available for birding.
10. Ross sent out messages to local contacts on the islands. One man, Antonio, has accompanied birders before but he quoted us a price of 500 euros per person for 2 days (!!!!?!?!?!!!) so we decided not to use him. He then began harassing us and said he would be showing up to the airport on the day of our arrival anyway since he knew our flight!
11. We were essentially at the point where we didn’t know how we could do ST&P. Nothing was planned except an unideal flight.
12. Gabon was also not planned, especially in regards to transportation. We had no idea how we were going to be getting from point A to B, and every time we thought we found a way, the quote for price would be upwards of 800 USD for a single, six-hour trip. These kinds of prices simply were not feasible!
13. The fact that Gabon wasn’t planned was the least of our concerns — we still weren’t sure they would even issue us a visa! We could get turned away at the airport when we returned from São Tomé.
14. And if they turned us away at the airport what would happen to the two bags we were storing at our Airbnb?? We had 6 months worth of stuff to bring back to the USA after living out of a truck and thus were leaving the things we wouldn’t need for ST&P/Gabon in storage at our Airbnb but if we flew to São Tomé and then were denied visas, would we be able to get those things back?
We sat in our Airbnb in Libreville, Gabon attempting to sort out all of this and both of us were feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. I was ready to call it quits. If a friend from South Africa, Rich Lindie, and another friend from the states, Jason Horn (who happened to already be on his flight to São Tomé), weren’t planning to join we probably would have explored how to go about cancelling the Gabon part of the trip.
Ross didn’t like the idea, but like I said, when over a dozen big things are going wrong all at the same time, even the best of the best can want to be done with it all.
Thankfully we had friends on their way and thankfully we didn’t call it quits. It might not turn out to be the flawless Ross Gallardy tour that I am so used to, but we were going to make it work. If anyone can figure it out, Ross can.
We were so busy running around that I failed to take ANY photos of our time in Gabon save for this one:
Spoiler Alert: Gabon was a HUGE success and we managed to do the entire country on just $100 per day, something I never thought would have been possible given how much we spent in just our first 48 hours! I was worried that Gabon would be stressful and scary but it was one of my favorite countries we visited in all of Africa. The country was wildly beautiful and everyone we met was gracious and extremely friendly — everyone except the immigration lady at the airport that is!
Stay tuned to read all about our time in this amazing country!
Not going to lie, you’re going to have to work very hard to sell Gabon after this post – but I look forward to it as always anyway!
I’m feeling anxious just reading this.