A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve located in the southeast of this West African country, this wooded, more-than-2,000-square-mile territory is great for spotting wildlife including leopards, chimpanzees, gorillas,  and forest elephants and buffalo. It's also notably home to a group of some 30,000 to 40,000 pygmies (usually reaching barely five feet tall) of the Baka ethnicity, comprising about a fifth of Africa's pygmy population. For the most part they still live a semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Really the only way to visit them is with tour operators out of Yaoundé, about eight hours away (and by the way, these  tours - up to a week long - are generally not cheap).  



Corinne Staley