August 31, 2026

Back to Angola

August 31, 2026/ Sarah Lock

If lack of communication and an increasing sense of claustrophobia among Bob’s passengers was anything to go by, a change of scenery was overdue. That’s not to say there was anything wrong with the scenery. Quite the opposite. Being surrounded by virtually untouched rainforest in a vast, barely inhabited corner of Central Africa was pretty extraordinary. But the seemingly relentless challenges of overlanding had begun to wear us down. Bob had spent the last few thousand kilometers in limp mode, the heat and humidity and were unrelenting and we were becoming increasingly desperate for some infrastructure.

We are acutely aware of how fortunate we are to be able to relocate whenever we feel like it, so as soon as we reached Luanda, Angola, we flew to the UK with indecent haste. With legs desperate for some action and lungs long overdue for some fresh air, we headed for the Peak District and Malvern Hills, hiking through some of England’s loveliest countryside. It was a suitably gentle warm-up before tackling a 285 km march along the English-Welsh border on the national trail of Offa’s Dyke.

Offa, was king of Mercia, one of the dominant English realms during the Dark Ages. After claiming the throne on the battlefield in 757, he ruled for nearly 40 turbulent years. A committed, if belligerent, Christian who had prickly relations with the French; regularly fought the Welsh; subjugated several rival English kingdoms; and ruthlessly eliminated any relatives who might have challenged his only son succeeding him – which backfired when the son died six months later, effectively terminating Offa’s royal blood line.

The Dyke is a remarkably ambitious earthwork built on the orders of Offa. Quite why he built it is still debated, but the favoured explanation is that it was intended to discourage the Welsh from wandering too far east. A large ditch backed by a bank nearly three metres high in places was presumably considered a more effective deterrent than a polite exchange of diplomatic notes. Whether it actually kept anyone out is another matter, but it has certainly provided walkers with 285 km of reasons to question Offa’s definition of a sensible boundary.

A slight oversight in our planning had us following Offa’s legacy from Prestatyn rather than the more traditional trailhead at Sedbury, just outside Chepstow. It hadn’t occurred to us that one direction might be preferable to the other, but after a few days on the trail, the prevailing weather and the fact that almost every other walker seemed to be heading in the opposite direction made the answer fairly obvious. South to north was clearly the sensible option. Unless, of course, you wanted to spend a fortnight walking directly into a heatwave, in which case we had chosen brilliantly.

Any downtime between hikes was spent acquiring two new bikes (replacements for those now the main mode of transport in a remote Congo Basin settlement) and arrange for a new heavy-duty bike rack (broken pieces of the original also with the Congo locals) to be shipped from Australia. Importing the rack was straightforward. Finding bikes considerably less so. The Covid cycling boom had long since subsided, leaving many British bike shops struggling and keeping their stock levels to a minimum. Waiting for a particular model wasn’t necessarily the problem; finding one that actually existed was.

Persistence eventually paid off and we returned to Luanda fully loaded, accompanied by more than than 100kg of luggage. This included two boxed bikes, a 17 kg rack and an impressive quantity of other equipment that had somehow progressed from optional to essential during our brief absence.

And Africa was more than ready for us…..

….. Angola’s main telecommunications operator, Unitel, had suffered a ransomware attack, taking an already temperamental system completely offline. Angola is tricky at the best of times, but it had now become almost impossible to navigate unless, by some stroke of unusual foresight, you had ignored Airtel and opted for an Africell SIM. Needless to say, we had followed the prevailing flock and were sorely missing our Starlink access due to a licensing impasse which is now in its fourth year.

In our absence, Bob had been stored at Kakuakos overlanding camp on a trickle charger and, encouragingly, started first time. Our brief delight was almost immediately extinguished by the bright glow of the engine warning light. Armed with a random and, as it turned out, largely useless collection of replacement parts, we trundled round to the Land Rover mechanic. A new and genuine MAF sensor made no impact whatsoever.

After lengthy inspection, the problem, it seemed, was the turbo. A replacement was required. After several months of African massage, Bob had clearly decided it was time we paid him some attention.

Modern Angola remains dominated by the MPLA, the party that led the independence struggle and has been in power ever since. During the oil boom of the 2000’s, the country earned tens of billions of dollars from exports and Luanda became one of the world’s most expensive cities. Huge infrastructure projects followed, but despite the wealth pouring into the country, Angola remained heavily dependent on external finance for much of its reconstruction, while international organisations continued to fund health, education, water, and governance.

Perhaps the best illustration of this contradiction is a much-loved anecdote. An Angolan delegation would arrive at an international conference seeking assistance with the country’s reconstruction, only to leave having placed orders for enough German cars to ensure that every Minister had multiple transport options. The problem was never quite a shortage of money; it was deciding where the money should end up.

It is a dilemma that remains evident today. Even in Luanda, electricity often depends on private generators, water on storage tanks, and reliable services on an individual’s ability to provide them for themselves. Parts of Angola look remarkably wealthy, yet the country still functions cautiously. Imported goods are available, but getting them into the country is neither simple, efficient nor cheap.

Less than 24 hours later we were back on a plane, this time to Windhoek, Namibia, where an impressively well-stocked Land Rover parts shop had what we were looking for. Rather prematurely, we thought we were ready to return to Angola when a WhatsApp pinged through.

Bob’s intercooler was broken.

Back to the shop we went and more money changed hands.

Another WhatsApp

The air-conditioning compressor had corroded.

We were fast approaching the point where the chap running the Land Rover shop might reasonably have invited us to his weekend barbecue. He warned us that, being Friday afternoon and with the shop closed on Saturdays, our window for discovering further problems was rapidly closing.

Our departure from Hosea Kutako Airport back to Luanda provided another lesson in African bureaucracy. Our newly acquired car parts had been hidden distributed in various pieces of luggage; except for the intercooler, which was too large for a suitcase and had been given its own heavily taped cardboard box.

“Is this new?” The check-in girl asked.

“No”, said Ian, slightly confused as to which country was likely to trigger a customs issue.

A quick look at the invoice, combined with an admission that Ian’s hearing was not what it once was and perhaps a brief inspection of the suspiciously large cardboard box, should have settled matters. Instead, we embarked on more than an hour of he-said, she-said, phone calls and consultations with the airline’s office in Luanda.

Eventually we were allowed to get on the plane.

Most of our fellow passengers appeared to be returning to Angola with a remarkable quantity of cardboard boxes, presumably containing goods destined for resale. Customs were considerably more interested in them than us, allowing us through the “nothing to declare’ channel with barely a glance. We paused only long enough to make sure our photoshopped, heavily discounted invoices had disappeared into a bin.

Once the parts had been handed over to Hernane, the mechanic, and not wanting to see Bob dismantled, we set off on a three-day tour into Angola’s interior. Despite high unemployment and widespread poverty, travelling as a tourist in Angola is anything but cheap. The price of the tour seemed particularly ambitious when a tiny Suzuki Swift arrived to collect us the following morning. The eight-hour journey to our destination felt considerably longer with our chins almost resting on our knees and a suspension system designed to punish optimism.

Our first stop was Kalandula Falls, one of Africa’s great waterfalls and an impressive sight even before we discovered where we were staying. High on the opposite side of the canyon was a glass-fronted lodge accessible to us only by a steep descent, a short canoe crossing and an enthusiastic climb.

Any overlanding credibility we may have accumulated during more than 5 years on the road disappeared in less than 5 minutes. Having had no real access to Bob since returning from Namibia, I had a large suitcase in tow. It was mortifying following a local guide balancing my heavy case on his shoulders as we descended the slippery path. After crossing the river by canoe, my embarrassment was slightly tempered by the guilty pleasure of watching him haul it back up the opposite bank while I followed empty-handed.

Sweating and out of breath, we eventually emerged onto the lodge lawns looking less like adventurous travelers and more like people who had misplaced their taxi. Our discomfort was compounded by the presence of two Danish guys raising awareness of Africa’s freshwater problems; they had walked all the way from Denmark pushing a pram!!

The Palanca, or Giant Sable Antelope, is Angola’s national animal, yet most Angolans will never see one other than on stamps, banknotes, passports and as the emblem of TAAG Airways. What makes it unique is that it is found nowhere else on earth and fewer than 300 are thought to survive, making it one of Africa’s rarest large mammals. Confined to a relatively small area of central Angola, a sighting of these magnificent beasts, that have somehow survived decades of war and poaching, was rather more significant than the average safari encounter.

We had specifically arranged our trip around finding them, so naturally we were informed the following morning that there was no suitable vehicle to take us into the park.

Unwilling to accept this without a fight, we hassled our guide until a driver with a Hilux was found. By the time the vehicle had been located and negotiations over payment had reached an acceptable conclusion, it was well past midday. The change of transport would have been a vast improvement, had it not resulted in almost everyone who happened to be nearby deciding that they too should come along. A trip to see Angola’s national animal was clearly not an everyday event.

Two hours and 60 km of sand tracks later, we reached the enclosed park. A safari vehicle would have been useful, but as the only other vehicle around was a tractor, we remained in the Hilux, with two park rangers and their rifles squeezed in for good measure.

We wondered briefly whether Giant Sable Antelope were unusually aggressive.

Despite the driver’s increasingly obvious reluctance to take his vehicle any further into the wilderness, the armed ranger was persuasive. We bounced through long grass, craning our necks, in the hope of spotting something. We didn’t have to wait long. Large black shapes began appearing between the trees and we soon found ourselves driving alongside a small herd shepherded by a jet black bull with brilliant white facial markings and a white belly. Enormous backward-curving horns, in excess of 1.5 metres in length perhaps explained the presence of the guns.

The excitement inside and on top of the Hilux was extraordinary. Even the driver briefly stopped worrying about what the terrain was doing to his undercarriage. Rangers aside, none of us had ever seen a Giant Sable before. It was a special moment when, for once, all the persuasion, delays and negotiations were justified.

Returning to Hernane’s a few days later, we were slightly alarmed at the state of Bob. The entire dashboard had been dismantled, several large engine components had disappeared, and everything was covered in a thick layer of grime. Heavy traffic on the unpaved roads around the enormous industrial area throwing up a constant cloud of dust.

With nowhere else to go, and unable to call a taxi due to the still ongoing problems with the country’s communications, we made ourselves as comfortable as possible in the yard. Hernane, his wife and two children lived in a property adjacent to the yard and proved generous hosts. Inclusion at family meals, an evening at the local padel centre – an excellent place to work off any lingering Land Rover frustrations – and trips to supermarkets and restaurants helped to pass the time. It was beginning to feel less like a mechanical repair and more like an extended family visit, albeit one in which our host had possession of our vehicle.

Late on Sunday, Bob was finally given the thumbs up and we headed back to Kakuakos to collect the remainder of our belongings. The engine had rediscovered its familiar diesel thrum and the steady mechanical rumble sounding reassuringly healthy. But, the air-conditioning controls were all jammed, directing a newly impressive and powerful blast of cold air exclusively at our feet. Fortunately, this was a relatively minor problem and a couple of hours back at the yard the following day put it right.

After an interminable time, we were finally back on the road.

It took more than two hours to cover the first few kilometres, our average speed rarely reaching 4 kph as we battled our way out of Luanda. Eventually, the traffic thinned and we were free of a capital containing roughly 9 million of Angola’s 37 million inhabitants.

The roads were, for the most part, good, and our route south progressed at a thrilling speed. Initially, the route followed a coastal escarpment, marking the transition from sandy beaches to interior plains. Large river valleys cut through the rocky landscape, narrowing in places into pretty canyons and gorges as they headed towards the Atlantic.

One of our more unusual camping spots was at a paragliding centre.

Paragliding arrived late in Angola. After almost three decades of civil war, recreational flying was understandably not high on the national agenda. Following peace in 2002 however, pilots began exploring the country’s coastal escarpments, eventually leading to the establishment of Parapente Angola by the country’s first registered and certified pilot.

The original aim was to introduce 30 children and teenagers to the basics of paragliding. It proved considerably more successful than that, transforming young lives, bringing the local community together and, rather unexpectedly, opening a door for adventure tourism.

Leaving the large coastal town of Benguela, the road climbed steadily away from the Atlantic, crossing a dry coastal plain, before reaching the Angolan highlands and the cooler Huila plateau around Lubango; the country’s second largest city almost 1,800 metres above sea level. The N105, largely rebuilt after the civil war is now one of Angola’s major paved routes. Some sections were still under construction and there were enough potholes to make micro-napping inadvisable, but with Bob happily firing on all cylinders, it was the most enjoyable bit of overlanding we had experienced for some time.

Our stay in Lubango was extended by a few days thanks to an unfortunate encounter with roadside chicken but the delay allowed more time to explore another of Angola’s great natural spectacles: the Tundavala Gap.

Here, the plateau, rising to around 2,200 metres, simply falls away almost vertically towards the Namib plain. You drive through perfectly ordinary highland countryside and then, with remarkably little warning, run out of Africa. One minute there are fields and cattle; the next there is a cliff almost a kilometre high and a view so vast it looks as though somebody has forgotten to put the bottom half of the country back.

The Tundavala Gap may be Huila’s great geological spectacle, but the plateau itself belongs to the Mumuila, who have lived among these grasslands and escarpments for generations, traditionally measuring wealth in cattle rather than oil wells.

The Mumuila women were impossible to overlook. Their plaited hair was heavily coated in a mixture of red earth and butterfat until it seemed to have absorbed the colour of the plateau itself. Heavy layers of beads formed collars around their necks, creating an appearance that was both strikingly elegant and unmistakably traditional.

What struck us most was not the elaborate appearance but the complete lack of self-consciousness with which it was worn. They weren’t putting on a show for tourists – although Africa is rarely slow to recognize a revenue opportunity – this was simply how they presented themselves.

Having finally persuaded Bob to perform as a Defender rarely does, we were particularly pleased to discover that the next challenge involved a thousand-metre descent on a road consisting largely of hairpins. The Sera da Leba, built during the late Portuguese colonial period, is one of Angola’s great landscape spectacles. The asphalt snakes down the mountainside, a thin ribbon of tarmac, zigzagging down an enormous rocky wall, in a series of tight bends. It was certainly an elaborate way of getting from Lubango to Namibe

Unencumbered by mechanical failings, our route options south to the Namibian border were now wide open. The spectacularly remote Iona National Park was an option and so shunning the security of a 400 km stretch of relatively straight tarmac, we headed back towards the coast.

Iona, the largest of Angola’s Parks, is unusual in that it sits at the meeting point of desert, mountains and the Atlantic. It is the northern extension of the Namib Desert, the oldest desert in the world, yet supports a surprising variety of well-adapted wildlife and plant life.

It took us three long jarring days to cross, but wow was it worth it. We encountered the semi-nomadic Himba for the first time – three beautiful young women who appeared out of nowhere - camped in Colinas Canyon, saw numerous springbok, witnessed the humiliation of a Defender being towed out by a Toyota and stopped alongside a large Welwitschia mirabilis. Looking rather forlorn, it deserved our respect. Despite appearing to have a large collection of tatty leaves, the plant actually produces just two, which grow continuously throughout its life, becoming increasingly long, shredded and untidy with age. With a life span that can extend for centuries, we guessed our specimen was getting on a bit.

An ongoing problem in Angola was extending Bob’s Temporary Import Permit beyond the permitted 30 days. Using a combination of persistent loitering at government offices, creativity and overland networking, we did managed to renew this document three times; once officially through Luanda customs and twice unofficially with the help of Stefan Van Eck, one of those rare people who seems to know Angola from the ground up. An overlander, expedition leader and conservation guide, Stefan has spent years exploring the country’s more remote regions and assisting travellers’ such as ourselves with some of the more tricky bureaucratic conundrums. Despite all this assistance, we still arrived at the Ruacana border three days later than our documentation allowed.

This is a bittersweet juncture for us. Our journey through some of the world’s poorest countries is, for now at least, coming to an end as we cross into Namibia, a country the World Bank rather encouragingly classifies as an upper-middle-income economy.

The road behind us has not always been easy. There had been breakdowns, bureaucracy, questionable food, fuel shortages and enough uncertainty to make careful planning seem hugely optimistic. Yet, throughout it all, we have been met with ready smiles and an easy acceptance that has only ever felt genuine.

The strongest impression we will carry with us is not one of poverty, but of community. Despite difficult living conditions, we have witnessed resilience, adaptability and a remarkable ingenuity that repeatedly left us questioning our own capabilities. We arrived thinking we were reasonably self-sufficient; we continue with a rather more modest assessment of ourselves.

July 29, 2026

Angola

July 29, 2026/ Sarah Lock

After surviving a border crossing in the Democratic Republic of Congo that contained all the ingredients required for a perfectly respectable riot, we rolled into Angola, Africa’s seventh largest country.

Few nations have been fought over with such enthusiasm. The Portuguese wanted it. Three rival liberation movements wanted it. The Cold War superpowers wanted influence over it. More recently, the oil industry has wanted what lies beneath it. After twenty-seven years of civil war, peace finally arrived in 2002 and Angola embarked on one of Africa’s most remarkable reconstruction projects.

The war had left little untouched. Bridges had been blown apart, railways abandoned, roads reduced to little more than optimistic suggestions and millions of landmines scattered across the countryside. Oil money, helped by billions of dollars in foreign investment, transformed the country at remarkable speed. Highways, ports, airports and railways appeared across the landscape, while the ruling MPLA – the party that has governed since independence – attempted the rather more difficult task of turning oil wealth into widespread prosperity.

Looking through Bob’s windscreen, however, none of this was immediately obvious. Northern Angola still belonged to the Congo Basin. Dense rainforest pressed in from both sides of the road and settlements appeared only occasionally. Fuel stations, when they did appear, were usually closed, an impressive achievement for one of Africa’s largest oil producers. Angola exports crude by the tanker-load but, thanks to limited refining capacity, can still struggle to put fuel into its own pumps. Africa has never allowed common sense to interfere with geography or economics.

Fortunately, we had filled up in the DRC.

The road itself was excellent. Unfortunately, Bob wasn’t. Still resolutely committed to limp mode, we crawled south at little more than 40 kph. It did at least give us plenty of time to admire the changing landscape. Gradually the rainforest loosened its grip, giving way to open woodland and broad savannah and the horizon retreated into the distance, hinting at the immense scale of the country ahead.

Abandoned quarry sites aside, our first stop was Kakuakos, the overlanding camp a few miles north of Luanda and the first genuine refuge for southbound travellers since Nigeria. We had been slightly concerned there wouldn’t be room. There was.

Getting inside proved harder than expected. We’d messaged the owner, Luis, beforehand, but he had sensibly concluded that our WhatsApp was a scam. After eventually attracting someone’s attention through the imposing razor-wire perimeter, someone appeared to push open the gate and we were in.

The only other residents were two German women in an expedition truck roughly the size of a detached house. Travelling south they had been refused entry into Namibia; something to do with their two small dogs and were now trying to ship the truck back to Pointe-Noire to avoid crossing the DRC, which had refused to issue visas. Their initial plan of putting the truck on a ship in South Africa back to Germany was no longer an option and they were now faced with the long, challenging drive back the way they had come. Suddenly Bob’s problems didn’t seem quite so unreasonable.

Overlanders may have been scarce, but mosquitoes certainly weren’t. They arrived in such numbers that it felt as though somebody had rung a dinner bell. In a country where malaria remains one of the leading causes of death, they demanded rather more respect than they appeared willing to show us.

Fortunately, the camp itself was superb. Beyond the dusty, dirty and chaotic streets outside, where groups of hopeful entrepreneurs appeared every few metres asking for money, Luis and his wife Juliet had created an oasis. Four generators quietly compensated for the national electricity supply, the food was excellent, the bar well stocked, the pool was clean and refreshing and hot water was available on tap.

Before relaxing amid the delights on offer, we headed off to the local Defender specialist, eventually locating him behind another intimidating wall, complete with guard dogs that looked far more interested in us than we were in them.

Originally from Coimbra, Portugal, he immediately spotted the sticker on Bob’s back door from his hometown and, for a brief moment, optimism raised its head. Several hours of diagnostics, wiring repairs and mechanical head-scratching later, optimism quietly left again.

Bob remained firmly committed to limp mode.

There was a small win. Our slow oil leak that we had been aware of since The Gambia, nearly 12 months ago, was traced to the gearbox. The repair would take two or three days, which, by this stage of the journey, sounded positively efficient.

While Bob continued his mechanical protest, we turned our attention to everything else. New Passports, DPT boosters, new bicycles, a heavy-duty bike rack and renewing our International Driving Permits.

I suspect very few overlanders actually carry one. Ours is a small grey cardboard booklet with a passport photograph stapled inside, produced by a diminishing number of PayPoint shops in the UK for the princely sum of £5. Within Africa it has proved to possess near-magical powers.

On countless occasions, when discussions at police checkpoints had reached an impasse and every other document had failed to impress, producing the IDPO has transformed suspicious officials into smiling bureaucrats. Quite why remains one of the Continent’s great mysteries. We long ago stopped questioning it.

Unbeknown to us, Angola had recently changed the rules governing how long foreign vehicles could remain in the country. The plan had been simple enough: leave Bob with Luis while we flew back to the UK for a couple of months, returning with fresh passports, new bikes, and almost certainly, more Land Rover parts.

Unfortunately, Angola had other ideas.

Unlike most other African countries, Angola doesn’t use the Carnet de Passage system. Instead, Bob had been issued with a 30-day Temporary Import Permit at the border, extendable once from within the country for a further 30 days. That was the absolute limit.

The next two days were spent making regular pilgrimages to Luanda’s customs headquarters in the hope that somebody, somewhere, might possess both authority and imagination.

Eventually we found ourselves seated opposite three senior customs officials. Much discussion followed. Phones were consulted. Heads were scratched. Various documents were examined with great seriousness. After what felt like an encouraging amount of deliberation, a solution finally emerged.

Once back in the UK and just prior to our TIP expiring, we were to telephone the customs office in Luanda. They would then generate a unique twenty-digit code. We would pass this code to Luis, who would use it to extend Bob’s permit by thirty days.

This solved precisely half of the problem. By our calculations, Bob would still overstay his welcome by at least a fortnight before we reached the Namibian border. Everyone other than us seemed perfectly content with this arrangement, Exactly how this would be viewed by the immigration officer at the Namibian border remains to be seen.

Eventually it was time to fly back to UK.

TAAG Airways was advertising brand—new Dreamliners, Airbus A220s and business-class fares at roughly half the price of everyone else. The economics alone should probably have raised questions.

Luanda’s new £2.4 billion airport looked magnificent. Vast, modern and almost completely empty, it felt like someone had built the future but nobody knew about it. The aircraft, however, appeared to have been built considerably earlier.

We had been forewarned that TAAG flights occasionally disappeared from the schedule at short notice or were commandeered by government delegations, so merely leaving, let alone on time, counted as success. Expectations rose briefly. They fell again almost immediately.

The entertainment system had evidently retired some years previously. None of the other passengers even attempted to switch theirs on, suggesting this wasn’t a temporary fault but an accepted feature of the airline. The drinks service eventually materialised, although only briefly. After the initial half glass of wine, securing a refill required the patience and timing normally associated with spotting elusive wildlife. The cabin crew displayed an extraordinary ability to avoid eye contact, making each top-up feel like a successful ambush.

Still, the tickets had been cheap and taking into account the enormous luggage allowance, we considered ourselves marginally ahead.

To be continued ……

June 28, 2026

Two Congos, Gabon, Sao Tome & Principe and Cabinda

June 28, 2026/ Sarah Lock

Adding an extra 1,500km to our route out of southeast Cameroon, courtesy of a river system with an unhelpful shortage of crossing points, was testing even by our standards. On the map it looked like a minor inconvenience. On the ground it meant a very long detour over roads that had already done their best to derail us.

The dirt tracks that had carried us into the Congo Basin had been just about manageable on the way in, as most things are when you don’t yet fully understand what you’ve signed up for. In a region that receives roughly twenty times the UK’s rainfall there was also the nagging possibility that our exit route would become impassable and we would, like Dr Livingstone, disappear for some time.

We spent much of the journey watching the sky with the sort of attention normally reserved for mechanical warning lights (spoiler alert) but, apart from one night of violent storms that transformed our quarry campground into an orange lagoon, the tracks remained open. Bob, for his part, continued with the stoicism of an elderly packhorse. Three days later we were back where we started in the relative civilization of Yaounde, coated in a thick film of red dust but otherwise intact.

In front of us now was a newly completed tarmac road stretching southeast towards Congo-Brazzaville: 1,600 km of uninterrupted ambition. Visas for the Central African countries ahead of us were smugly glued into our passports, and it was a rare overlanding interlude where everything was, temporarily, in agreement.

There are two Congos. The Republic of Congo (ROC) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) sit side by side in Central Africa, divided for much of their length by the mighty Congo River. Together with Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic (now behind us) and Gabon (off to our right somewhere in the greenery), they form the Congo Basin: a neat green patch on the maps but, on the ground, an endless wall of vegetation stretching beyond the horizon in every direction.

A vast, humid wilderness covering around 3.7 million square kilometers, it is the world’s second-largest rainforest after the Amazon but, interestingly, generates between 75% and 90% of its own rainfall, significantly more than the 50% produced by its global counterpart.

Crossing into the Republic of Congo marked our nineteenth African country. Around two-thirds of the ROC lies within the basin and most of its six million inhabitants are sensibly concentrated around the main cities. Away from these overpopulated hubs we were statistically more likely to encounter elephants or gorillas, although we did meet two overlanding Brits in an abandoned quarry. An implausible encounter to anyone unfamiliar with overlanding.

Oil dominates the economy, but the steady stream of logging trucks, heavily laden with tropical hardwoods, was visible evidence of another valuable export heading towards distant markets. ROC’s largest customer is China, the relationship a classic African development trade-off: roads and investment on one side, dependence and resource extraction on the other. The dilemma is difficult to ignore, but as modern-day travellers we were definitely benefiting.

The smooth road carried us through an endless corridor of rainforest. A tiny detour allowed us to circle the equator monument a couple of times, but otherwise the view rarely changed as one hour stretched into the next. Thoughts wandered to European explorers, disappearing for years at a time into this malaria-infested wilderness, and we found ourselves admiring Stanley’s persistence. Whatever else history may choose to say about him, crossing the Congo Basin armed with little more than a notebook, a questionable map and a growing collection of increasingly unhappy porters was a level of commitment that deserves at least a passing acknowledgement.

We may well have mused longer on nineteenth-century exploration had the check engine warning light not illuminated prompting an unusually rapid response from Bob, who promptly dropped into limp mode.

Our mechanical skills are embarrassingly pitiful. Yes, Bob is forcing us to expand our limited knowledge, but neither of us is particularly inclined and even simple maintenance, such as cleaning the air filter, often gets forgotten. Recalling recent weeks of dirty, dusty conditions, we were confident that we could fix our problem with a couple of hard slaps and a shake to the once-white filter, now bright orange and dense with trapped debris. Unfortunately, this achieved little beyond giving us something to do and, out of ideas, we averaged 40 kph over the remaining several hundred kilometres into Brazzaville. Finding a Lebanese garage owner armed with a diagnostic machine proved easy enough; a P0103-17 code - mass air flow problem – not so much.

What followed was a ritual that would be repeated at several garages in more than one country. Hoses were inspected, wiring was scrutinised, and the MAF sensor was cleaned and even temporarily replaced, but our problem persisted. Tired, increasingly irritated and no closer to a solution, we sought refuge in the only remaining diagnostic tool available: alcohol.

Sitting on the terrace of the best hotel in town, looking across the Congo River at the twinkling lights of Kinshasa (capital of DRC), wasn’t the worst place to be, but dulling the frustration of our predicament with a stream of cocktails was going to be expensive. Pointe-Noire, Congo’s economic capital and largest port, promised a greater concentration of mechanics and short-lived hope.

The newly completed 535 km road linking the two cities should have been a delight as it wound through the Mayombe Mountains. The rainforest had been temporarily replaced with rolling, grassy savannahs and the dramatic steep-sided cliffs of the Diosso Gorge. But Bob was stubbornly remaining in limp mode, resulting in much of the journey being in second gear crawling up one steep ascent after another, a growing convoy of trucks behind us. Unable to reach Pointe-Noire in a day, we pulled into another abandoned quarry, this time finding a Dutch couple already installed. They had spent the previous night in a Brazzaville police station after being forcibly moved from their camping spot next to a local cemetery by gun-wielding officers.

Despite sharing our perhaps equally misplaced affection for Land Rovers, and spending well over an hour trying to find a solution, Bob remained stubbornly convinced that limp mode was the appropriate response to whatever was going on. There is a peculiar satisfaction in discovering fellow travellers whose experiences are every bit as testing as your own. Mutual sympathy was exchanged as another evening disappeared into a haze of alcohol.

Pointe-Noire’s garages proved no more successful, although one particularly determined French mechanic did manage to change the behaviour of the warning light (and associated limp mode) by applying duct tape to the wiring within the connection block. A brief burst of optimism.

Driving into Gabon was now too ambitious. One of the most heavily forested countries on earth, images of endless jungle roads through vast areas of remote and unpopulated regions, with the threat of heavy rain never far away were conjured up. Deciding on an easier option, we abandoned Bob in a hotel car park to reflect on his recent underperformance and flew in.

It took less than an hour to fly into the capital of Libreville, long enough to witness the endless carpet of forest below us and a feeling of relief that we weren’t navigating our way through it. Libreville, proved more pleasant than expected, once we escaped the airport; collecting our luggage took longer than the flight itself. Wide roads, lined with palms and flowering trees suggested a city designed by sensible civil servants with access to substantial oil revenues. It was clean and pleasantly functional provided you stayed clear of the overflowing pharmacies buckling under the demand for prescription drugs.

For more than five decades, Gabon was governed by two members of the same family. Omar Bongo and later his son Ali Bongo were widely criticised for corruption, authoritarianism and elite enrichment, but one decision the made has left a legacy. In 2002, Gabon created thirteen national parks covering roughly 10% of the country’s territory – an unusually ambitious conservation effort by any standard, let along in Central Africa.

The result is one of Africa’s most intact natural environments. Vast areas of rainforest remain protected, providing habitat for forest elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, and countless other species. As the world has become increasingly concerned with climate change, Gabon has found itself in the unusual position of being valued not only for its oil but also for its trees, the forests absorbing more carbon than the country emits.

The downside is accessibility. Many of the parks are extremely remote and infrastructure remains limited. Reports from fellow overlanders swung between an inability to reach some of the parks or disappointment at the management, or lack of, when they did.

Without wheels, our own solution was considerably less adventurous. A ninety-minute boat ride from Michele Marina carried us across the Komo estuary, followed by a forty-five-minute journey in an open-sided safari truck to Chez Beti, a beachside rustic eco-lodge on the edge of the Nyonie region.

Elephants in Gabon, Chez Bety safari.jpg

The lodge was run by Beti, a food loving Frenchman who embodied several national stereotypes simultaneously. Each mealtime, guests (mostly Gabon ex-pats) gathered around a communal table where excellent food, unlimited wine and generous spirits flowed with reassuring consistency.

Wildlife sightings were mixed. Elephants and buffalo proved reasonably cooperative, gorillas and leopards remained committed to maintaining their reputations for rarity. It hardly mattered. On the edge of the Wonga Wongue National Park, the setting was extraordinary: pristine beaches, wide open savannah and dense equatorial forest all combined in a landscape that felt almost untouched. It would have been easy to stay longer but another flight awaited.

Some 200km off Gabon and almost exactly on the equator, Sao Tome and Principe form Africa’s second-smallest nation after the Seychelles. Having been assured that we could transit back through Libreville and onward to Pointe-Noire without the inconvenience of another visa application, we boarded the plane before anyone had the chance to reconsider.

Landing on Sao Tome - the larger island, home to most of the country’s 200,000 inhabitants and named after the doubting apostle – we found a capital draped around a picturesque bay. Some colonial buildings, such as the Presidential Palace, retained a degree of faded grandeur; but most were dilapidated and boarded up. None of the ATMs were prepared to dispense cash, a recurring African problem for which Euros remain an effective cure.

The compact National Museum occupied a squat coastal fort and offered a concise history of the islands. Outside stood statues of the Portuguese explorers who arrived in 1471 to discover an uninhabited paradise and immediately set about importing sugar cane and slaves. Nearby was a bust of Amador Viera, who led a major slave revolt before being captured, hanged and quartered and remains one of the country’s national heroes.

Our self-guided tour was brief. One room celebrated cocoa, which transformed the islands into the world’s largest producer in the early twentieth century and earned them the nickname: “The Chocolate Islands”. Another displayed colonial furniture. A third, showed grainy photographs of tortured Black Africans, providing a less comfortable reminder that, even after slavery was abolished, plantation labour remained a decidedly unpleasant occupation

Scattered across the island are around 150 former rocas – vast colonial plantation estates that once functioned as self-contained miniature towns. Some have been restored as boutique hotels and restaurants, others are still inhabited, despite their crumbling state, by the descendants of indentured labourers, but most sit abandoned, slowly disappearing beneath the jungle they once displaced.

Driving around the island on potholed roads, we saw derelict villas, collapsing jettioes, baobabs, coconut palms and brilliant turquoise bays where fishermen bobbed in dugout canoes. The further south we travelled, the more the island seemed to relax. By the time we reached the southern tip, the local philosophy of Leve Leve - “take it easy” - seemed entirely logical. After sufficient quantities of sweet palm wine, it was difficult to argue for any alternative.

A short boat trip over the crystal-clear waters of the Atlantic deposited us on the sandy shores of Ilheu das Rolas, a tiny, 2-square kilometre islet straddling both hemispheres. Here a short but sweaty climb led to the Equator Monument, a giant mosaic world map built by Portuguese naval officer and explorer Gago Coutinho.

Before becoming one of the first people to fly across the South Atlantic in 1922, Coutinho had also completed the first recorded ascent of Pico do Sao Tome. Rising to 2,024 metres, the peak supposedly resembles a clothes iron, although this is difficult to verify since its summit spends much of its life concealed beneath a dense cloud layer known locally as leite de vaodor – flying fish milk.

Naturally, we decided to climb it. Two local guides arrived at our lodge the following morning, slightly late but cheerful enough to be forgiven. The standard trek takes two days, with a night spent camping near the summit. Going against sound recommendations, we elected to climb and descend in a single day.

The first couple of hours passed pleasantly enough through cocoa and banana plantations before the trail entered primary rainforest. Giant ferns, tangled lianas, orchids and towering trees closed in around us. The Mona monkeys crashing through the canopy overhead were a much more reassuring sight than Sao Tome’s infamous three metre Cobra Preta, whose bite reportedly gives victims roughly two hours to find anti-venom before fatal paralysis sets in.

We reached the summit shortly after midday. The final approach,m a scramble along a narrow ridge, clinging to roots and negotiating steep drop-offs. After all that effort, the summit rewarded us with a chipped concrete marker and absolutely no view whatsoever, the flying fish milk lapping at our feet.

Our descent coincided with heavy rain. The degree of protection provided by the forest canopy wasn’t sufficient to prevent all of us sliding downhill in a series of increasingly undignified manoeuvres. With latitude coordinates of 0° 16' 10'', it was pitch black by 6pm and our last hour was an undignified stumble by phone torch. Only once we were safely back at the lodge, opening a bottle of vinho verde, did we conclude that the one-day excursion had been a good idea.

Any ambitions for further strenuous hiking were abandoned the following morning. Instead, we flew to Principe, the smaller island, 160km to the northeast. Home to fewer than 9,000 people, it is only 15 km long and possesses an airport so compact that disembarkation, immigration and exiting of the terminal took less than five minutes.

Our accommodation was at one of several resorts owned by South African tech entrepreneur and astronaut Mark Shuttleworth. According to local lore, after spotting Principe’s green dot from his rocket, ‘the Man in the Moon’ decided to live there. His company HBD Principe - “Here Be Dragons” – now employs most of the population.

Back in Pointe Noire, no miracle had materialised and Bob was still seriously underpowered. Having exhausted all the mechanics within a decent radius there was nothing for it but to continue – slowly. Our route now would take us into from the ROC into Cabinda (Angola), across a sliver of the DRC and finally into Angola proper.

Cabinda is one of Africa more peculiar geographical arrangements: a small piece of Angola that isn’t actually connected to the rest of Angola. Marooned between the two Congos and sitting atop an inordinate quantity of oil, it is a highly militarised province. Armed soldiers were managing long fuel queues and stopping part way across a sandy plain for a pee we were a bit alarmed to hear gunfire close by. Five minutes later we passed a group of guys in army fatigues apparently on maneouvres, although with one of them with his pants around his ankles, the nature of the exercise remained unclear.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is large enough to be its own continent. Nearly four times the size of Western Europe, it contains well over 100 million people, hundreds of ethnic groups, countless languages and enough minerals to make multinational corporations weak at the knees.

The east of the country remains highly insecure, with armed groups ensuring it features prominently on most foreign ministries’ lists of places best admired from elsewhere. Our intention was therefore simple: hug the western edge and escape into Angola as efficiently as possible.

Our route led inland and we re-entered rainforest-clad hills. Progress was again slow which meant that we had to spend the night beside the road not far from the border. Apart from trying to decipher a road tax system involving the purchase of multiple tickets which were randomly collected at armed checkpoints, our passage through western DRC was gratefully uneventful. The border, however, was another matter.

We had the choice of two possible crossings into Angola: Matadi/Noqui and Lufu/Luvo. The latter involved a longer detour but promised better roads. Both required passage through Matadi, the last major navigable point on the Congo River. Still undecided, we crossed the Matadi Bridge, a 520 metre suspension span that held the title of Africa’s longest bridge of its type for twenty-five years before Mozambique’s Maputo-Katembe Bridge stole its crown.

Prepared for the well documented chaos of Matadi, it appeared that we had arrived on one of its quieter days and we arrived at our crucial junction far sooner than anticipated and, making the sort of snap decision that usually precedes an inconvenience, ignored the turn towards Noqui and continued straight ahead.

Five minutes later we were stationary, literally swallowed up by an impenetrable mass of trucks, cars and enough motorbikes to fill several football stadiums. Previously wide, level roads, had narrowed into steep streets and the traffic stretched uphill as far as we could see. We progressed in inches, enduring regular abuse from motorcyclists for offences that appeared entirely imaginary, and performed one breath-holding hill start after another. We thought the worst of it was over when we managed to get past the enormous boat that one truck was trying to get to the top of the hill but it took another couple of hours until everyone fell away and we were once again alone, surrounded by the forest.

Judging by the queue of freight trucks outside immigration, Lufu-Luvo was clearly a busy commercial crossing. But, immediately noticed, formalities were completed quickly providing some vindication for our choice. Then, just as we were preparing to drive through the barriers separating us from Angola, an armed guard appeared and instructed us to wait.

All traffic was halted. As was the growing crowds of pedestrians gathering near the barriers. Before long, men draped in flags and shouting through loudhailers arrived, prompting considerably excitement amongst the assembled masses. Several surges towards the border followed, each repelled by a collection of police and army armed with rifles and sticks.

The immigration office was being closely guarded and pressed up against the outside wall looked to be an optimum position as we repeatedly attempted to persuade officials that, as entirely uninvolved foreigners, it would be better if we were allowed through. Regardless of whether or not our requests were understood, the answer remained a firm no.

After about an hour, whatever demonstration, rally or disagreement was going on, appeared to lose momentum. Not hanging around for a resurgence, or permission, we climbed back into Bob and rolled quietly towards the middle of the concourse just as the barriers were lifted. Angola here we come!

May 28, 2026

Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea & Central African Republic

May 28, 2026/ Sarah Lock

The mountain crossing from Nigeria into Cameroon has something of a reputation in overlanding circles. Stories circulate of vehicles swallowed by mud, of endless winching in torrential rain, and of travelers emerging days later with shattered nerves and marriages hanging by a thread.

At 145 km it is not especially long. It simply concentrates a remarkable variety of unpleasant road conditions into one sustained experience: deeply rutted tracks, steep clay inclines, river crossings and surfaces that, at the first hint of rain, transform into something between grease and a practical joke.

We were fortunate. Crossing at the very end of the dry season meant conditions were about as good as they ever get. Bob, after several weeks of mechanical melodrama that had caused us to question both his reliability and our life choices, behaved impeccably. What had sat niggling at the back of our minds for weeks turned out to be one of dramatic mountain scenery, empty tracks and just enough difficulty to feel adventurous without requiring follow-up counselling.

We rolled into the Muslim town of Banyo on the first day of Eid to discover that Cameroon’s customs officials had, quite reasonably, better things to be doing. The Douane office was shuttered, the weekend loomed, and it appeared we might be settling in for an unplanned residency.

Our search for accommodation produced one of those establishments where the distinction between “room available” and “room you would like to sleep in” is largely semantic. We paid for a room but slept in Bob, which turned out to be money well spent. The owner proved to be the brother of the absent customs officer and, more importantly, had connections at the local army base where diesel could still be procured.

The following morning, we returned to the Douane just as a man on a motorbike appeared, evidently summoned from more pressing engagements. Without even bothering to dismount, he produced a rubber stamp from his backpack, applied it to our Carnet and drove off. Thus was our entry into Cameroon solemnly ratified.

Immigration was rather less formal. There wasn’t any. Our only official acknowledgement of entering the country came in the form of a policewoman who photographed Bob on her phone. We seemed to be the only people remotely concerned by the absence of passport stamps.

Cameroon likes to market itself as “Africa in miniature”, which sounds charmingly manageable until one discovers this includes miniature versions of colonial partition, linguistic division and low-grade insurgency. Roughly the size of Spain and home to some 29 million people, it has a youthful, fast-growing population and a religious divide that, unlike in many places, generally rubs along with commendable restraint: predominantly Muslim in the north, mostly Christian elsewhere, and with remarkably little of the theological enthusiasm for making life difficult for one another. So why is it so difficult to access from Nigeria?

The explanation lies in the sort of colonial tidying-up exercise at which European powers once excelled. Cameroon began life as a German colony before, following the inconvenience of the First World War, being carved up between Britain and France. The British were allocated two narrow strips along the Nigerian border, while the French helped themselves to the remaining eighty percent.

When independence arrived in 1960, the map was stitched back together but the differing legal systems, languages and political expectations remained. Over time, many English-speaking Cameroonians came to be increasingly sidelined by the Francophone government in Yaounde – rather as if invited to a party only to discover they’d been seated at the children’s table.

Tensions simmered for decades before boiling over in 2016, when protests by lawyers and teachers over language and judicial representation were met with the sort of heavy-handed response that rarely improves matters. Separatists declared an independent state, rather grandly christened “Ambazonia”, and a low-level insurgency has smoldered ever since, producing sporadic clashes, kidnappings and enough roadblocks to keep any bureaucracy enthusiast thoroughly occupied.

The only alternative to our mountain crossing was to join a 300km twice-weekly military convoy through separatist territory – no doubt an efficient service, though faintly at odds with the spirit of overlanding Africa to spend the journey under armed escort.

From Banyo, our route wound south through Cameroon’s western Anglophone highlands, a landscape of volcanic peaks, steep agricultural terraces and luxuriant green slopes that felt refreshingly alpine after the furnace conditions of Benin and Nigeria.

Perhaps our being English helped, but we found people unfailingly warm and welcoming. The sole exception were the men in orange road-safety vests, who displayed an almost touching commitment to stopping us at every conceivable opportunity in the hope that either Bob or his occupants had committed some previously undiscovered motoring offence. One radar trap conveniently positioned a few hundred metres before the speed reduction sign, led to half an hour of argument before the matter was settled by our suggestion of taking down details and visiting the Minister for Tourism.

The cooler temperatures encouraged activity. We detoured to the thunderous Ekom-Nkam Falls and the twin crater lakes of Mount Manengouba, before turning our attention to Mount Cameroon, the brooding active volcano which, at 4,095 metres is West Africa’s highest peak. Our summit attempt was, in mountaineering terminology a complete shambles.

Having spent weeks in such relentless heat that we had more or less forgotten weather possessed other settings, we set off carrying entirely inappropriate gear and the sort of misplaced optimism usually associated with amateur investors. Several hours later we were engulfed by a sleet storm of startling vindictiveness. Within minutes we were soaked, freezing and trudging miserably downhill. Thus chastened, we descended to the sticky coastal sprawl of Douala ready for a brief retirement from the road.

Fortunately, salvation lay just 128 km offshore. A twenty-minute flight would carry us to Bioko, the volcanic island home to Equatorial Guinea’s capital, and equally importantly, allow us to add another flag to Bob’s steadily expanding collection. This latter objective may not have been entirely rational, but overlanding has never been an activity especially burdened by such descriptions.

view of mount cameroon from equatorial guinea

Equatorial Guinea consists of the mainland region of Rio Muni and five islands, including Bioko, where the capital Malabo is located. It is a country that has traditionally hidden from tourism though the recent introduction of an e-visa (air access only) has eased matters somewhat. Overland access to the mainland remains a lottery best avoided.

It was hard not to be impressed on arrival. The clean, modern airport – admittedly rather short on people – was efficient, and our guide was waiting to greet us. The drive to our hotel followed a new three-lane highway as eerily devoid of life as the terminal itself. Glossy office blocks and apartment complexes rose from the lush vegetation, polished and immaculate, but almost entirely empty.

We passed the conference centre, built for African Union summits, beside fifty-two identical empty mansions complete with helipads for visiting heads of state. To date, two summits have been held, the most recent in 2014. The infrastructure was undeniably superb, provided one’s definition of success does not depend on people actually using it.

Passing an artificial beach and an ultramodern hospital so exclusive as to be largely non-operational, we arrived in Sipopo: Equatorial Guinea’s carefully constructed showpiece. President Teodoro Obiang, Africa’s longest-serving ruler spent more than half a billion pounds on this rebrand of prosperity while presiding over one of the world’s most unequal societies.

Few outsiders paid much attention to this Spanish-speaking backwater until the discovery of oil brought Western energy giants flocking in and propelled the ruling family onto the global rich list. Although per-capita wealth exceeds Britain’s, around two-thirds of Equatorial Guinea’s population - less than 2 million - survives on one or two dollars a day. Infant mortality rates remain among the world’s worst, access to electricity and healthcare is poor fewer than 20% of the population have access to potable water.

In stark contrast, through relentless embezzlement and extortion, the President and his family inhabit a world of multi-million-dollar mansions, private jets, superyachts and - if local stories are to be believed - a rainbow-coloured fleet of Ferraris on standby to coordinate with handbags and socks.

Freedom House places Equatorial Guinea alongside Burma, North Korea and Somalia on its list of the world's worst regimes: a ruthless one-party state where elections are stage-managed, opponents jailed and state coffers enthusiastically looted. Daily life is tightly controlled, while the government stands accused of torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

Breakfast at the Sofitel Sipopo – not to be confused with the equally fabulous-looking but conspicuously empty Sofitel Malabo back towards the airport - was lavish enough to feed every occupant of the hotel’s two hundred rooms. Instead, it catered to perhaps a dozen guests. As we watched one large, heavily tattooed individual slowly cracking his neck while contemplating the pastries, it occurred to us that we were the only people present without personal security. Pehaps the eye-watering €300-a-day fee for our guide was justified after all.

Mr. Augustine was surprisingly candid about life on the island as we passed through an abundance of armed checkpoints. Paranoia perhaps seemed excessive on such a small island but after the failed “Wonga Coup” of 2004 - when a group of British-led mercenaries tried to overthrow Obiang in pursuit of the country’s oil wealth – perhaps it was not entirely misplaced. Thanks to a brother-in-law high up in the military, our guide was able to take us into areas officially off-limits without a tourist permit that, owing to the usual bureaucratic gymnastics, we had been unable to obtain.

Walk along black sand beach, southern Bioko Island.jpg

Rarely had we encountered such untouched nature. We hiked for hours through pristine rainforest to reach the crater lake of Moka. At Ureka, the black-sand beach stretched to the horizon, the relentless drone of insects from the dense jungle competing with the crashing Atlantic surf. Our footprints were the only ones marking the shore. It was a raw, astonishing paradise, made all the more difficult to reconcile with the profound dysfunction and repression beyond it.

This tiny African country, stripped of the easy smiles that have accompanied us through much of the Continent, left an outsized impression, its citizens quietly hopeful for change. At the time of our visit, rather improbably, some seemed to be pinning those hopes on intervention from Trump.

Back in Cameroon we drove inland to the hilly capital of Yaounde, where despite a newly improved road network, traffic had achieved total paralysis. Drivers ignored traffic lights, treated roundabouts as gladiatorial arenas, and defended every inch of tarmac with grim determination. A sizeable contingent of traffic police attempted to restore order and failed magnificently.

Still, it had a nice vibe.

We had visited the mountains, seen the coast and explored its two largest cities. It was now time to head into the vast rainforests on the western edge of the Congo Basin.

It took three arduous days of driving to reach the tiny jungle village of Libongo. Despite being unable to find any recent information on the state of the road, we had set off in reasonably good spirits, buoyed by the knowledge that this had once been a well- trodden route for tour groups. The key phrase being once.

Any close inspection suggested the road had been quietly deteriorating ever since Covid put an end to such things. A decent stretch of tarmac gradually gave way to a less decent one before disappearing entirely beneath iron rich red dirt - a particular nemesis of ours. This stuff gets everywhere. When dry, it somehow infiltrates drawers, bedding, clothing and every conceivably surface. When wet, it transforms into a slick orange slime with all the traction of buttered glass, coating everything it touches in fluorescent mud.

As we wrestled to keep Bob travelling in something approximating a straight line, we also had to contend with hundreds of kilometres of savage washboard corrugations and heavily laden logging trucks, hurtling towards us with all the caution of incoming artillery.

On the plus side, at least we no longer had the bicycles to worry about. Unable to endure the punishment any longer, our bike rack finally admitted defeat. The bikes would probably have been dragged behind us for considerably longer had we not passed through a remote jungle village where the locals kindly pointed out our rather unconventional method of transportation. Many hands swiftly set about disentangling the mangled remains from what was left of the rack, and with no practical way of carrying them any further, we handed them over.

Severed brake wires, missing pedals and bent frames were all graciously overlooked as these “gifts from god” were received with considerably more enthusiasm than they objectively warranted. We did not linger for the celebrations, and a quick glance in the rear-view mirror suggested lively negotiations over ownership were already underway.

By now darkness was falling, and finding somewhere to wild camp was proving difficult. The road had effectively been hacked out of solid jungle, with the occasional patches of cleared ground already occupied. Eventually, we spotted a level grassy football pitch beside a village and sought permission from the chief to stay the night.

He gladly accepted a small donation to the village. A young man appeared with water and began sponging several inches of red clay from Bob’s flanks, while around forty spectators gathered to watch the evening’s entertainment: two exhausted white people attempting to look competent. Once darkness made further observation impractical, the audience dispersed.

Late the following day we finally reached Libongo. After introducing ourselves to the young men of the National Gendarmerie, we negotiated safe parking beside their hut in exchange for access to our Starlink. This tiny and remote logging settlement in Cameroon’s far southeast stood on one side of the Sangha river; the Central African Republic lay on the other.

Disappointed at the prospect of losing their internet connection, but promising to keep a close eye on Bob, the Gendarmes waved us off the next morning. Having secured a ludicrously expensive boat crossing - € 60 for 10 minutes’ work – immigration on both sides was handled by armed officials reclining in tiny huts at the waters’ edge.

border crossing cameroon to central africa republic

Once across, and apparently eager to claim the bags of vegetables we had been instructed to procure at Libongo’s tiny market, our lodge had dispatched “the chainsaw man” to collect us for the onward journey. The bumpy 3-hour trip along a rutted and overgrown jungle track might have taken somewhat less time had our vehicle not required its axle to be removed en-route so that the universal joint could be replaced.

From a tourist’s perspective, the Central African Republic is one of the most remote, difficult and unpredictable countries in Africa. Infrastructure is minimal, security can change rapidly, and travel is often complicated by fuel shortages, poor roads and vast tracts of empty country. Yet, at its southwestern tip lies a genuine gem: the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve, a vast protected rainforest that supports some of the most remarkably intact wildlife populations left on the continent.

Entry to the park by boat and overland from neighbouring Cameroon or the Republic of Congo is made possible by a special permit issued on arrival. This conveniently removes the need for a full CAR visa, though it also rather firmly restricts your movements to the reserve itself. On arrival accommodation options are limited to a couple of eco-lodges where prices reflect less luxury than the sheer logistical achievement of operating in such isolation.

Sangha Lodge had clearly seen better days though one has to admire anyone who has managed to establish functioning accommodation in the middle of a rainforest. The South African owner was absent during our visit, but had left us in capable hands: cheerful staff, an attentive English-speaking, French guide, and a safari vehicle entirely at our disposal.

The reserve’s most celebrated feature is Dzanga Bai, a natural forest clearing where animals congregate to feed on mineral-rich soils and water. A large wooden observation platform overlooks the bai, and the scene awaiting us at the top is one we will never forget. Ian counted more than 130 forest elephants simply going about their business: socializing, child-minding, squabbling over the best mineral pits and, in the case of several amorous bulls, attempting to score.

Clearings like this, monitored with support from the World Wide Fund for Nature, have proved invaluable for reducing poaching and tracking elephant populations.

The reserve’s other flagship project is its Primate Habituation Programme, established in the mid-1990s to study and protect western lowland gorillas. It has also created one of the few opportunities on earth to spend time with a habituated family group.

After an hour of sweating through dense rainforest, our guides abruptly signalled for silence and directed us down a slippery slope into a narrow gulley of shallow water. On the opposite bank, no more than 5 metres away and partially obscured by foliage, sat a female gorilla. She was one of six belonging to the group of the large silverback, Limo.

As our eyes adjusted, more shapes gradually materialized: several females and four juveniles scattered among the undergrowth. When the group moved higher up the slope, we followed, surprised at how completely our presence failed to distract them from the pressing business of settling down for a midday snooze.

Freed from adult supervision, the juveniles took the opportunity to engage in a vigorous display of acrobatics and general showing off until one exasperated female intervened, reprimanding the youngsters. This didn’t go down too well with the other females who promptly added their opinion. The resulting commotion was short-lived. Limo, roused from his own slumber, intervened with the resigned authority of a weary patriarch who had defused this exact dispute far too many times before.

We spent an hour with Limo and his family before it was time to leave. The parallels with human family dynamics were impossible to ignore, and it was an extraordinary privilege made possible only through years of careful habituation, during which the gorillas gradually become accustomed to human observers.

When initially contacted, our absent lodge owner had assured us that we could continue south from Libongo and ferry across the narrow Ngoko river border to Ouesso, Republic of Congo. This may once have been true, but with the completion of a tarmac road from Yaounde all the way to Congo’s capital, Brazaville, traffic is now expected to cross at the main Ntam border. In the absence of any ferries, our anticipated 250km journey now looked to include balancing Bob atop two narrow planks balanced across two adjacent pirogues. Technically possible but then so is juggling chainsaws. There also remained the minor issue of whether immigration officials would approve.

Reluctant to risk Bob receiving an unscheduled baptism, we resigned ourselves to retracing our tracks - 750km back to Yaounde followed by another 810km to Ouesso. It is a peculiar overlanding state of mind in which adding well over 1,500 km to the route registers merely as a minor adjustment.

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Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea & Central African Republic

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