It seemed undignified for an elephant to look like Mickey Mouse. Its big round ears looming above the lagoonside grass pointed to another oddity: it was small, a fact emphasised by the curtain of huge tropical forest trees rearing up behind it. But its tusks and aggression dispelled my suspicion that it was a youngster. This was a full-grown forest elephant and we were being revved.
We reversed the boat and the jumbo returned to ripping out tufts of grass and stuffing them into its mouth. When I looked across at the jungle, the elephant's size made perfect sense: its bigger Kruger cousins wouldn't have a chance of pushing through that green tangle.
We were in Loango National Park in southern Gabon. Earlier that day, we'd left Loango Lodge in a fast boat, skimming across lagoons stained by tannins leached from inland swamps and looking like polished ebony. The park has around 100km of coastline, backed by mangrove-lined lagoons and huge swathes of tropical rainforest.
Before leaving for the West African country, several people had asked: "Um, Gabon Where is it exactly?" One friend whom I'd thought was well-travelled told me I was lucky, because he'd never been to South America.
"It's the heart of the African jungle," I told them smugly, "with chimps and gorillas."
Getting there is an adventure in itself. SAA flies to Gabon's capital, Libreville, and a local connection gets you to the nearest commercial airport in Port Gentil.
From there you could try a water taxi, but a far better option is to ask Loango Lodge to pick you up in their plane. From the airstrip between forest trees, it's a lagoon boat ride to the lodge. When the engines stopped and I climbed on to the lodge jetty, all I could hear was African grey parrots - the first I'd ever seen not sitting mournfully in cages.
Vulnerable nature
Loango is the brainchild of a remarkable engineer named Rombout Swan: the son of a Dutch oilman, who grew up in Gabon and followed his father's footsteps into the industry.
In 2000, he found space for a bit of downtime and returned to Gabon from Holland, where he'd been living. "Gabon is one of the most beautiful places on earth, but there was logging and hunting and oil exploration. I felt the urgent need to come up with some sort of concept or project that would take the pressure off the environment I hit on ecotourism."
Rombout began small: a sanctuary on the island of Evengué for gorillas saved from the bush-meat trade. Soon after creating this sanctuary, he negotiated park status for Loango and began building a lodge, training locals to do the work.
It was great timing. President Omar Bongo used Loango as a pilot project for the establishment of 13 national parks in Gabon. The lodge draws public attention to the wonders of the rainforest and plays a pioneer role in attracting investments into ecotourism."
Blackwater lagoons
It's no good trying to understand the scale of a rainforest from the base of its massive trees; you have to get above it. As we gained altitude in the bright blue Pilatus Porter - a sort of Land Rover of the air - the forest unspooled to the horizon. Below us was a technicolour wonderland of greens, blues and purples. Huge trees, some maybe 100m tall, dominated the canopy.
I noticed a flight of parrots in formation over an iridescent green grass swath crisscrossed with hippo paths, then watched as the plane's shadow leapt from tree to tree and lost itself in the ebony water of a meandering lagoon.
It all seemed ancient, inscrutable and infinitely precious.
We landed at Evengué Island and met Mabeke, a huge silverback western lowland gorilla, and his adoring furry attendants, Owendja and Izo-wuet, who wouldn't give us the time of day.
Logs in the sea
Rainforests have been badly misrepresented in Western imagination. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad described them as "wilderness without sound". In truth, they are life-growling, flowering, leaping, hooting, wriggling and budding. The clickety-clapping sound of leaves in the breeze, bird song in the canopy, the slather of rain and the sudden chatter of a red-capped mangabey - it's a whole universe laughing with life.
I left Loango by launch, which zoomed us across Iguela Lagoon to the airstrip. Before the plane landed, it had to shoo off a family of red forest hogs, which had masked faces and fly-whisk ears.
As we flew north to Port Gentil, I looked down at the lagoon beside the busy port and a chill ran down my spine. It was filled with hundreds of thousands of huge floating hardwood logs.
"Where are they going?" I asked a local engineer sitting next to me.
"China, mostly," he said. "Hardwood makes good veneer."
The full impact of Rombout's urgency to protect the rainforest suddenly hit home.
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