I’m delighted to note that the FT’s David Pilling made the UK Press Awards’s Travel Journalist of the Year shortlist in part for his piece(s) on his trip to and through the rainforests of the Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.
I was fortunate enough to have accompanied Pilling on the journey and shared, on our return, my thoughts on both northern ROC’s Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park and south-western CAR’s Dzanga Bai. As Pilling mentions in In the village of the elephants, the ‘ultimate goal’ of the trip was to reach Bayanga, ‘a small town beside the Sangha River’, which he describes as a ‘legendary destination for conservationists because of a jungle clearing’ where forest elephant ‘congregate in greater numbers than anywhere else on earth’, which is why it is also known as ‘the village of the elephants’.
Before reaching this mother of all bais, we would sleep on wooden platforms in relatively unvisited Ndoki, stay at Sangha Lodge, possibly the remotest camp in Africa, and accompany the local Ba’Aka on a net hunt, each experience a revelation in its own right. Once there, it did not disappoint. ‘When we reach the clearing,’ writes Pilling, ‘at least 60 elephants have already gathered, a number that will triple as the day wears on’. On this and everything else, I won’t say much more, given the possibility that you have yet to read the piece. Suffice it to say, it was an extraordinary journey.
