The year was 2015 and I was living my best life as an expat in the jungles of Gabon in central Africa. My existence consisted of predictable days of 12 hours of sunlight and 12 of night time as you’d expect from a country situated at the equator. I was wrapping up a 5-month stint and my near-death experience occurred approximately 2 weeks before I was scheduled to return to life in the civilized West. As you’d expect, I made every effort to wrap up my Gabon adventures with as many activities as possible and this one approximately two weeks before I left almost resulted in my demise. My local co-workers enticed me into attending their annual football match with the promise of local food and a good time. My buddy and local guide, Romaric was late picking me up so there was no time to get the promised food before the match began. As soon as the match ended, we rushed off on our quest to find the promised coupee coupee (for those unfamiliar with African delicacies, coupee coupee is delicious juicy bbq meat hot and fresh off the fire cooked outdoors of course). I was completely starving by this point as you can imagine. Watching football is a tiring exercise and just really works up an appetite. We found the elusive coupee coupee in a little neighborhood off the national highway and decided to eat “a la Gabonaise” as I hadn’t done this before and this was something I needed to tick off my bucket list before leaving Gabon. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a la Gabonaise basically means eating in the shady Customer Area in one of the local gas stations. Imagine an outdoor night club, except during the day, in the grassy area of a gas station with tables and chairs and dance music blaring over the gas station loud speaker, and patrons buying beer and wine in the gas station shop as you would in a bar (except no mix drinks of course though). 🙂 The area was extremely packed with few empty seats and was a buzz with multiple conversations going on. So picture Romaric and I, 4 locals beers between us having just sat down and starting to unwrap these aluminum foil packages of delicious fragrant smelling coupee coupee when there is an unexpectedly loud thud and the hugest, ugliest large orange-green half lizard half crocodile part alligator beast (about as big as a 2 metre-tall man and as wide in my estimation) is less than a meter away from me. I am terrified and frozen in shock as is Romaric, and just about everyone else around us. Luckily, the beast is momentarily stunned from the fall and doesn’t move. Time seems to stand still for just an instant and everyone is wide eyed and doesn’t know what to do. When the beast does move, everyone starts screaming and scatters, running away in all directions overturning tables and chairs in the confusion. I almost had a heart attack but luckily, I didn’t soil my pants and I grabbed one of the bottles of beer and took off, turning over a few chairs in the commotion. This mini dinosaur wannabe, takes off running in the opposite direction, away from all us crazy screaming people, scales the 3 meter high wall at the back of the station and hops effortlessly over it. Needless to say no photos were taken and a youtube worthy video wasn’t shot. Can you folks imagine if this beast had landed on top of me or on top of our table (and stolen our food, did I mention that I was hungry)? I found a picture online of what I think that I remember the beast looked like. The colors are off but imagine oranges and greens and huge (at least 2 meters long and about thigh high) expressionless face – just scary period. BTW I’ve since learned that this beast is eaten by the locals and tastes better than fish, it’s called a varan. I have no desire to find out how true this local folklore is. Apart from this little adventure the rest of my time in Gabon was pretty uneventful with only cockroach, lizard, dog and cat sightings. This shouldn’t surprise any of you, but until my departure from Gabon, I stayed away from trees and kept a low profile since apparently huge animals tend to hang out in them intent on scaring the you know what out of unsuspecting people. This appears to have worked since I have not had any similar near-death experiences since 2015.
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