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()DEEP IN the okume forest, on a muddy path covered in gorilla droppings, I catch a small, beautifully camouflaged frog. The guides gather to inspect the tiny amphibian as he sits rather fatalistically in my palm. Around here, getting caught is usually your last mistake. A lively discussion breaks out as these superbly knowledgeable men — most of them poachers turned gamekeepers — fail to agree on the taxonomy. Loango’s Natalie Masseüs raises an eyebrow. “Maybe it’s a new species,” she suggests. “It happens here all the time.”

At last, the guides admit they’ve never seen it before, and as my heart leaps at the possibility of a discovery, so does the frog. The last I see of Haslam’s wide-mouthed frog is a brown blur, hopping it.

The sense of exploration is enhanced by an itinerary that allows you to sleep in a different camp every night. These range from Loango Lodge, with its bustling research activity, to the eerily remote tented camp at Tassi, where you can fall asleep to the sound of the surf on the distant shore. The best, however, is the camp at Evengue: four bungalows, two tents and a lodge reached after a marvellously evocative journey by motorised pirogue along the blood-red Mpvie River. This is Africa gone totally tropical — Stanley’s Dark Continent and Conrad’s godforsaken wilderness — where the forest is so dense on either bank that the trees seem to be pushed from behind, like passengers on a crowded platform, to stumble into the tannin-rich waters. Malachite kingfishers dart past like blue flashes and cheerful flocks of African grey parrots squawk in the canopy. Tiger herons creep away, as herons do, and floating logs metamorphose into glowering crocodiles.

We move fast, to leave the tsetse flies behind, passing pole-driven pirogues piloted by smiling locals and mysterious creeks draped in film-set lianas where be leopards, vipers and voracious columns of army ants, six feet wide and hundreds of yards long. Then the river widens, its tumbling banks punctuated by brightly coloured moored dugouts and the odd glimpse of equally colourful dresses seen through doorways in the green.

We pause at St Anne’s church — a slowly rotting cast-iron prefab built in Paris by Gustave Eiffel and shipped to the middle of nowhere in 1885 — before turning into a side channel to reach Evengue. The sun is setting, and clouds of crow-sized bats are rising from the jungle as Mireille Meersman greets me with the cocktail de la maison and a warning to look out for the female forest cobra known to hunt along the shoreline. After dinner, she lights a Gauloise and blows smoke at the river. “In March, it gets so hot here,” she says, in a languid, Garbo-esque drawl. “Ze river is so still, you see ze water evaporating in ze heat.” She sips her cognac and sighs. “That’s when ze madness sets in.” There are few moments that can be improved by a Belgian. This was one of them.

I spend my last day tracking a drift of outrageously good-looking red river hogs and following, but never seeing, a band of pungent lowland gorillas through the forest. The elephant incident is fresh in our minds, and the guide who can’t be named is mischievously putting it about that I invited trouble by eating their iboga fruit. That night, around the fire at Loango’s Point St Catherine beach camp — famous for those surfing hippos — I learn the truth. Two years ago, when he was still a poacher, the guide shot an elephant, and he’s still paying off the fine imposed by his outraged village. He can tell whoever he likes that it was me who upset the elephants, but we all know who they really wanted, don’t we? They never forget, you know.

Details: Steppes Travel (01285 651010, www.steppestravel.co.uk) offers 13-day trips to Loango from £2,765pp, including flights from Heathrow to Libreville with Royal Air Maroc via Casablanca, full-board accommodation, game-viewing, whale-watching, kayaking and transfers. Or try Explore Worldwide (0870 333 4001, www.explore.co.uk). For more information, visit www.operation-loango.com.

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