Gabon: Road to Loango National Park
About five years ago, the government of Gabon launched an ambitious project to connect the south of the country with Port Gentil by building a state of the art road going over many salt water lagoons and peninsulas. A Chinese company imaginatively called CRBC (Chinese Road & Bridge Company) was contracted to build the road at a staggering cost. Two massively long bridges – longest and second longest in entire Africa – were built, resembling the road to Key West in the USA. Except…. it was never finished as a dispute arose over payment and the work essentially stalled – Gabon balked at giving China resource development concessions. So the road remains closed and unusable while being nearly 80% complete – a road to nowhere – as the final link was never built. Only one tour operator is allowed to use the secondary dirt road going along the main one to take tourists to the remote Loango National Park – a five hour ultra bumpy trip, in many places spanning rough-looking metal sheet bridges.
