At press time, I heard from Dougba, who says preparations for his hunting camp (he calls it a "hunting village") will be done by the time you read this, and he'll be ready to receive his first hunters. Here are some more details on the location of the camp and what to expect in his concession. He writes:
"The Forestry Department will officially open the village on January 7th. The camp is located 134 miles from Monrovia on the banks of the Mano River in western Liberia. It takes eight hours of driving over rough, rocky, hilly, dirt roads and narrow bridges to get to the camp. The forest is big, and to get to the part not frequented by local hunters due to the distance from the villages, you have to ride our boats. During our recent reconnaissance, it took me an hour by boat to get to the part of the forest frequented by dwarf forest buffalo and bongo. I was told that, if we had to walk, it would take six to seven hours to reach an area covered in an hour by a boat ride. Also, the advantage of the boat hunting is that many animals frequent the river banks during the dry season in search of drinking water as all the forest streams dry up. So, be prepared to ride a boat to get to the hunting area.
"For those of you who would not like to lose an entire hunting day driving to camp, a commercial helicopter charter service operated by a European company is available from Monrovia to camp for $2,000 per hour. Based on the distance, it takes 45 minutes to get to the camp, therefore a roundtrip charter will be an hour and 30 minutes, or $3,000. A group of three hunters could........(continued)
