Thirsty Thursdays: Sunset Birthday By The Beach And Live Music at La Voile Rouge, Libreville, Gabon 🇬🇦

After fluking a visa on arrival at Libreville International Airport in Gabon, I ended up enjoying my birthday by a beach in Gabon! This was wild, pure wild. I hadn’t even expected to be in Gabon and on inspection of my wacaday journey, this would be country 226 for me. I sandwiched it between Cameroon and Sao Tome I Principe.

Birthday Taxi to the beach in Libreville, Gabon

This time, I decided there was absolutely no need to go backpacking all the sights for me. I headed straight for a swim, at one of the main beaches. I was actually a bit shocked at the fact that Gabon has only 2.3 million people in a massive country area of 267,668 km^2!This beach was fantastic, I was at the beach in the centre of Libreville which didn’t seem to have an actual name, not even on Google Maps.

Thirsty Thursdays: Sunset Birthday By The Beach And Live Music at La Voile Rouge, Libreville, Gabon 🇬🇦

I found a few bars here but I chose La Voile Rouge. It just looked the coolest. In I went and ordered up the local beer, a Regab of course.

I watched an epic sun set here, making notes on the beach sipping my beer. I had turned 44…

Once the sun had sank over this Atlantic Ocean on another night on my journey, I headed inside in search of Wi-Fi or at least the football score. It was my birthday and I was wearing my AFC Bournemouth shirt. I needed to know if the Cherries had won. Sadly La Voile Rouge didn’t have Wi-Fi, but..I met a great local guy at the bar called Yannick. He took out his phone and checked the score for me! AFC Bournemouth had beaten Everton 2-1 at home, in the last minute, on my birthday!

I ordered up another beer and Yannick and his friends had invited me to join them. Soon I was having a party with them and was then up dancing with the band that came on! Yannick’s wife was here too.

We had pizza, some great bar snacks and I went onto the whiskey sours to celebrate my birthday in style in Africa. It was my third birthday in Africa. The Gabonese had been so welcoming – thanks for a superb birthday.