We are now in Libreville – but more about that in the next post.

On our way out of Mayumba on Thursday last week we stopped in at the “Beninnoise” village to pick up a bottle of Cai Cai. The Beninnoise are immigrants from Benin who make up the entire fishing population of Mayumba and, I gather, most other coastal Gabonese villages.

As well as being expert fisherman, they also make the strongest moonshine known to man – known only as Cai Cai. No one actually knows what goes into Cai Cai but, whatever it is, it must have been fermenting a very long time. The WCS crew insisted that we take some along and this gentleman was kind enough to fill our bottle from his home-still:

Because Mayumba is on the end of a long peninsula you need to take a ferry to get back onto the mainland-proper. The ferry pictured below got us across the lagoon, but we couldn’t help but notice that the bilge pump had a bigger motor than the actual ferry – never a good sign on a West African river crossing!

We drove on some pretty potholed road to Ndende where we spent the night at a mission with the kindly Father Thomas who let us sleep in the rectory for free – and hooked us up with a great French-style breakfast (fresh baguettes with large bowls of coffee).

The next day we drove to Lambarene. Rattled and bounced to Lambarene, rather – the road was literally corrugated clay and we felt every pebble. You know a road is bad when the car is rattling so much that the noise drowns out the deafening roar of a 26 year old diesel Landcruiser engine. We lost another body mount, innumerable nuts and bolts and a large portion of our respective sanity.

Once we got there, however, we set up camp in another peaceful haven: the Convent of the Immaculate Conception with a bubbly Argentinian Sister.

While we were in Lambarene we visited Dr Albert Schweitzer‘s famous hospital whose museum pays homage to a remarkable life, discovered numerous new varieties of deep fried dough products and met up with a generous crew of Dutch travellers in three of the biggest trucks we’d ever seen…

We left them at the Mission and headed for Libreville feeling that ours was quite a modest little truck after all, but loving the fact that she was still going strong after all we’ve put her through. Not even a cut in the tyre wall (necessitating a tyre change) and a puncture just outside Libreville (necessitating another) could dampen our spirits…