Moving on from our halfway point (the next big milestone is to get to tripe digits), we're heading over to another African country, Gabon, Africa's last Eden.
Our landmark for Gabon is the Palais Presidential. Gabon's former president ordered the construction of the palace on the waterfront of Gabon's capital, Libreville (so can you guess this one was under French colonial rule?) It was built in the 1970's with a pricetag of about $800 million US dollars. The country wasn't even a decade old, and it nearly bankrupted it.
You're not permitted to go inside the heavily guarded palace, but you can view it from the outside. Well, sort of. Trip Advisor warns you not to take a picture or you could be arrested. That tells you about what you need to know about the state of the government and the rights of the people in Gabon.
So we chose to focus on a different part of Gabon, a significant portion of it in fact: the national parks. There are 13 of them, all created in 2002. Together they protect 10% of the entire country's landmass. But that's just a small portion of the dense jungles and lush landscape.
Just under half of the country's one and a half million residents live in Libreville. That's because outside the capital city is a world full of wildlife and true adventure. 85% of Gabon is rainforest, scientists and researchers believe it's been a hiding spot for humans for more than 400,000 years.
But it's not just humans that may be hiding. Take the sun-tailed monkey, nobody even knew it existed until the 1980's! Gabon has many species endemic to them, like the sun-tailed monkey, as they are home to a wide array of animals and birds.
There's bongos and red river hogs, there's buffalo and leopards, chimps and gorillas, and three different kinds of crocodiles.
There's even the surfing hippos! The beaches of Loango National Park is one of the only places in the world to watch hippos frolicking in the waves!
There's the Pangolin, which I'm pretty sure is Peyton's new favorite animal. It's like if an anteater and a lizard had a baby. Except, it would be giant size (Pangolin's can reach 5 feet in length). They eat ants and termites and have a golden, scaly exterior.
And then there's the elephants. They like to snack on iboga, a plant which is said to cause powerful hallucinations that can last up to four days.
For this one, Hayden asked if he could draw the flag. I happily obliged. He said it would help him remember it, and since it was just three lines (green, yellow, then blue), I knew it would easy for him.
The boys all focused on the wildlife with their postcards.
Calib's elephant is ingesting the iboga plant.
Peyton made the suntailed monkey.
And Hayden put a hippo on a surf board.
We also had Gabon Cucumber Salad, Baked Bananas, and Gabon Mustard chicken over rice. (That website by the way was great, it was one stop shopping for a full Gabon meal).
This dinner earned five spoons up.
The boys weren't particularly excited about chicken with rice- because the world eats A LOT of chicken and rice. But this one was actually pretty decent.
The french fries were a welcome sight, Peyton happily dumped a bunch of chippy salt on them.
The salad was nothing we hadn't seen before, but everyone ate it happily.
The bananas were really only the mixed review. They're supposed to be served with sour cream and brown sugar over top. I knew I had to skip this on Peyton's plate, but he hated the banana anyway. The rest of us tried the sour cream. Calib hated it, but loved the banana. He ended up eating Peyton's without the sour cream. Hayden had seconds WITH the sour cream. Asa and I were both ok with the sour cream, but agreed we enjoyed the part of the banana without the sour cream better.
We colored Gabon in Red, next to dark green Congo and little tiny yellow Equatorial Guinea.
We colored Gabon in Red, next to dark green Congo and little tiny yellow Equatorial Guinea.
That is 98 down, 95 to go!
Next Up: Estonia
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