Traveling in Cameroon- a second post on Traveling, courtesy of my son Andrew

Ah no di waka fine for Cameroon-ohhh!

Posted on July 30, 2014 by arbloch

I’ve made brief references to the horrors of traveling here, but let’s get into it. Let’s get our hands dirty. The following manual will teach you, loyal reader, how to travel from the nearest banking city of Bamenda, to Wum. Esoteric knowledge abounds!

If you want to go to Wum, the first thing you need to do is find a taxi willing to go eight miles out of the city. Usually this means taxi hopping. Throw in a lot of stuff to carry or a sweaty traffic jam and these forty-five minutes can easily put you into that aggravated, just-below-boiling state familiar to travelers everywhere. Then the fun begins.

Once you get to the “Wum park”, there are two travel options: Corollas, and prison buses. In case the nomenclature didn’t tip you, Corollas are by far the better option, but they aren’t always available (side note: 94% of all cars in Cameroon are Corollas).

In a Corolla, there will typically be four passengers in the back seat, two in the front seat, and then a seventh wedged in between the driver and the stick shift. This person is called the “petite chauffeur”. Don’t be this person. Usually a baby or a child or three, plus the driver, will push the total number of humans in the car into the double digits.

Note that children do not count as a seat up to age twelve or so. Yes. Age twelve. They are definitely big enough, at that point, to make your body more uncomfortable than it would have been otherwise, but they do not affect the number of paying adults. It’s like ridiculous carry-on luggage at the airport, except a thousand times worse. Frequently, when a mother has multiple babies, you might be asked to  hold her damp and wailing baby the entire trip. Amateur move! Don’t fall into this trap!

All of the luggage gets thrown into the back, which can be a spectacle to behold. We’re talking the trunk of a Corolla here. People will put in multiple 100lb bags of rice, a few duffel bags, a goat, a cage of chickens, several cones of plantains, a mattress, four table chairs, and a bed frame. The trunk is almost always open. Every driver has a few dozen yards of rubber straps tied to various points on the back of his car; these will be used  to clamp the trunk down, and hold the cargo from spilling out of the back. You No matter how much is in (our bulging out of) the trunk, they can make more fit. Somehow, against all spatial understanding, they can always make more fit…

…of course, if you happen to be transporting something fragile…

So, sometimes you aren’t as lucky as all that. Sometimes the fleet of Corollas has already been dispatched, and you’re stuck taking a prison bus. Woe is you! These are small buses which have been specially outfitted by Cameroonians for comfort and ergonomics… ha! Just kidding. So the buses were manufactured with three seats per row, but when they arrived in Cameroon the agencies installed a fourth seat that folds down into the aisle to fit more passengers. Wall-to-wall bodies. As you glumly trot over from the empty Corolla stable to the prison bus agency, try your hardest not to think about what would happen if your rickety, jerry-rigged, clanker of a prison bus caught on fire. Warning,  think of anything except that. OK, are you not thinking about it yet? Good.

Oh yeah, also, it’s not called a “prison bus” for nothing, so literally everything inside is metal and pointy and un-cushioned and instantly painful as soon as you touch it.

You might think that your first order of business would be buying a ticket. You’d be wrong. Seats vary wildly in their comfort range, so it can get pretty cutthroat. One time, the folding seat was missing its cushion, leaving only a rusted iron rim with a paint bucket underneath. Claim your seat immediately! Take what’s yours! No mercy!

There are a few things to consider with seat selection. First, the front row next to the driver is prime real estate. You might have to fight someone for it even if you put your bag down first, but it’s worth it. Avoid the row behind the driver, however! With so much leg room it’s very tempting, but they like to suspend a board in that leg space and seat another row of passengers facing the back of the bus, so your legs are kind of zippered in and someone is breathing on to your face. It’s a gamble you don’t want to take.

Next, avoid the folding chairs and the next seat over. The backs on the folding seats are very short, resulting in debilitating spinal collapse. The final thing you want to take into account is getting a window seat. 80 degrees is unbearably cold for most Cameroonians, and somehow the wind coming in from an open window makes it “difficult for them to breathe”… I haven’t gotten a good answer yet, it doesn’t matter. What it means for you is that if you don’t want to add traveling  with unwashed bodies for a long period of time to the list of unpleasant things you’re going to deal with on this journey, get control of the window! The downside is that you will have to fight with Cameroonians the entire trip: “Please, can somebody stop that horrible fresh air from coming in! I’m dying here!”

Quick aside, I am struggling to include all the gory details. Seriously, I might miss some. It is overwhelming how many factors conspire to make you miserable. I can’t make this up.

In case you haven’t picked up on the way things go here yet, the four seats (including the folding chair) accommodate five persons. You can usually count on one spare baby, child, or mesh cage of chickens per row, but you won’t always get so lucky. One time I saw a woman try to add four unpaid children to her row, and two to the row behind her. It can get messy.

So, you got “your” seat (subjective term), you’ve waited two and a half hours for all thirty-one seats to fill up (buses don’t leave at a particular time, they leave when they’re full), and the cargo on top of the bus literally doubles its height and almost matches its weight but you’re trying really hard not to think about fires and you’re pretty sure it’s time to get going. Not so fast, tiger! Hold tight for at least one savage, screaming argument about who’s going to sit where. It happens every time, without fail.

Fifteen humid minutes later, the bus is finally moving… No! Wait! What!? Why did it stop moving!? Ah, the driver had to go yell at his friend. Five minutes pass. The bus moves again. Two minutes pass… uhm, why are we stopping again?  Oh, the driver needed to go yell at his other friend. Ten minutes pass. OK, here we go… no. Not again. I can’t do it again I mean ARE YOU SERIOUS IT’S BEEN A HALF HOUR AND WE HAVEN’T GONE MORE THAN TWO MILES I’M SOAKING IN SWEAT.

This time it’s the Gendarmes checkpoint. This is the moment when everyone realizes that they forgot to stow their IDs in a convenient location and all thirty-one sardines clumsily and painfully try to reach their wallets at the same time. Invariably, one person won’t have valid documentation, and he will always be sitting in the back row. It’s kind of amazing. Everyone will have to get out so he can get out, and the whole bus will wait fifteen minutes while he negotiates the bribe he’s going to pay the inspecting officer before you can continue. Then this will happen two more times at the Police and Road Safety checkpoints. Also the driver has thirteen more friends to stop and greet.

Now, things are certainly worse on the prison buses, but don’t mistake me, the Corolla is a far cry from delightful. At the end of the day, you still have fifty miles on the most bombed-out goat path in the history of civilization. You know potholes, right? Potholes are what happen on those cute little Vermont back roads. Cameroon doesn’t have potholes, we have meteoric craters. Mine fields of them.  They add bone-shattering texture to the surrounding boulders and loose rocks and riverbeds. Oh yeah, and you’re traveling in a car with 800.000 miles, minimum. There are no shocks.

Something is going to hurt, plain and simple… probably multiple things. Let me rephrase. If only one thing hurts, you’re having a great day. Maybe the metal bar on the seat in front of you is burying into your flesh and chipping away at your kneecaps. More than likely your hips are being slowly, excruciatingly dislocated by the multiple pressures imposed on them. Your spine is twisted hunk of compacted flesh into a three-dimensional chiropractic holocaust and your head is bleeding, yes, bleeding, after the driver misjudged a crater and jumped you into one of the angular metal support beams which traverse the roof. I estimate that these frequent, devastating cranial collisions have cost me some 40% of my what was I talking about?

When you’re sitting there trying to decide whether you want to try and jockey for a little more leg room, or a less cataclysmic spinal twist, keep in mind the following rule: no matter how bad it is, it can always get worse. Any space you make could be filled immediately by someone else’s body part just waiting to spill out into a narrow new cavity, and you might actually concede precious territory. There’s no way to guarantee that you will be the one to profit from the adjustment, and let’s be honest, there’s only about a half a centimeter of adjustment room to begin with. Maybe 5% of these adjustments pay off.  After that, a coin toss will tell you whether it stays the same or gets worse. Usually you squirm just to take your mind off how much pain you’re in.

One advantage to the Corolla is that it’s comparatively light and agile, and you only suffer for about two and a half hours. A trip in a prison bus is a three and a half hour minimum, but I’ve seen six hours more than once. Either way, you’re almost there. Your body is bent, twisted, bruised, and sweaty, your skeletal structure is permanently re arranged, and consistent deprivation of blood and oxygen has instigated mild muscular dystrophy in your legs, but it’s the home stretch…

WILD CARD, BITCHES! EVERY TIME!

Maybe it’s a flat tire or an overheated engine. Sometimes someone will reequest to get off the bus less than a mile away from home, forcing everyone to get out for her, and forcing the driver to climb on top of the bus to untie all the cargo to find her bags. For some reason people actually put up with this. One time someone did this at the bottom of a huge hill, and fifteen minutes later, after all the cargo was tied back down, it became apparent that the bus couldn’t take the hill without momentum. The driver actually turned the bus around and climbed the hill in reverse, which worked for some reason I still would like a mechanic to explain to me. I really wish I was kidding.

When you finally dismount, your numb, dead legs usually fail you immediately and you have to cling to the bus for support. Numerous motorcycle drivers will belligerently impose their assistance on you. Your eyes are soulless and your mouth is slack. Everything hurts… Welcome home!

I LOOK IN THE MIRROR AND WHAT DO I SEE? NOT ME!

Cameroon, a country of contrasts

One of the most interesting things we found out at Mefou is that Gorillas have an almost identical physiology to humans.  Now when I look at a Gorilla I find it difficult to make the connection.  That animal has absolutely no resemblance to me!  Chimps on the other hand, are physiologically less like humans but mentally much more akin to us. They are smart, smart, smart!  At the Limbe Wildlife Preserve our guide Glen had a stockpile of escapee stories to tell, most of them about Max the Chimp they have grown to love and respect for his uncanny ability to find new and inventive ways to get out! Max didn’t really even want to leave; he just wanted to prove a point, one that he COULD get out and two that he could do it by outsmarting his caretakers. 

So in thinking about comparisons and contrasts it is interesting to note that we feel little to no connection to a Gorilla who is built almost identically to humans,  and a powerful connection to Chimps who are our closest evolutionary relative but are physiologically less like us.  At both Limbe and Mefou the primates are in a living situation that fairly closely resembles their natural habitat, so visitors get to see them interacting pretty realistically.

         Human beings tend to be very conscious of “looks”.  Now this predilection for judging others on looks is common, totally natural (as sight is usually the first messenger of information).  Sadly this will often lead us astray.  Think…grass is greener, the Jones’ next door, pop star adulation, our first crush, or the “coolest” kid in high school.

However most of us also know that true connections are made via the soul.  Eye contact that goes beyond the depth of the outward eye, that amazing feeling that somehow you might have known this person in another life, finding commonalities with a person whom you couldn’t imagine having anything in common with,  or that sense that this person will be your lifelong friend when you’ve only known them 5 minutes. I’m sure you’ve met many couples that at first introduction you think to yourself, how did they end up together; they seem so different? There’s that soul connection.

 As we watched the Chimps at both reserves, I certainly wouldn’t say my connection felt like a friendship, but it did feel eerily human.  Close your eyes and imagine them transforming into human adults and children, interacting as we do.  I FELT their feelings as they were having fun, enjoying each other’s company, getting frustrated with the “annoying one” of the group or just sitting and feeling content at being part of a community.  They laughed, scolded, made faces, jumped up and down excitedly, sulked, pouted and yelled.  Sound familiar?

So there it is.  Our first most powerful sense is our sense of sight.  Even though we KNOW that looks aren’t what makes a person, we register that information, and sometimes have to VERY consciously choose NOT to make a judgment on that first impression. Why? Because our tendency is to make a judgment, whether we want to or not.  Why do you think people always give advice on how to dress for an interview?  It’s the first impression you make, there’s just no way around it.

As we look at the Gorillas as beautiful as they are (and they ARE beautiful), we are kind of put off thinking that they are so like us. Yet as we watch chimps, who also don’t look like our reflection in the mirror, there is this sense that we truly were connected way back when.  We are touched at how human they are. 

Both Gorillas and chimps have very complex social structures, Gorillas more so than chimps.  Chimps tend to be a bit more easygoing.  But Gorilla caretakers spend a lot of their day rearranging Gorilla social time.  In the wild the young males can go off on their own when they are not powerful enough to overthrow the dominant (almost always oldest) male.  Or if the younger male challenges the older, one of them may not make it.  In a zoo they can’t let them kill each other off, but they have to respect their social order and artificially manage the hierarchy that orders Gorilla society. 

Interestingly enough the chimps, those “cute” little animals that everyone thinks would make a great pet, ARE great pets for the first five years.  An odd, (but according to the Wildlife caretakers) totally predictable change occurs at five years of age.  The chimps become very aggressive.  Often chimps are rescued from bad situations because pet owners suddenly find themselves with this completely unmanageable animal and don’t know any other way to control them but to contain them in a cage or with a chain.  This leads to very sad consequences. 

So there we have it.  I learned a lot about Chimps and Gorillas, but more importantly I saw human nature on display from a very different perspective.

FIRST LEG OF MY JOURNEY- OR TEACHING TOURISM TO THE LOCALS

Our first trip through Yaounde was exciting.  I was finally going to meet Andrew's adopted family, Estella, John and their children.  Although they live in Wum, Estella’s husband John owns a printing/copy shop in Yaounde and travels home when he can, so they keep a small apartment there. 

{Pictures of Nixon, Nixon and the chimp, the baby gorilla and the one of the baby chimps on the blanket are taken from this website, http://kayeincameroon.blogspot.com/2011/12/mefou-primate-reserve.html   The rest of the pictures are mine. The huge tree we are standing in front of is at least 1000 years old! Nixon told us that they have been recording as living as long as 2000 years!  The monkeys and The Spot Nosed, Red capped (most aggressive), Mustached Monkey, Bearded Monkey (the one with the baby) and of course the ever brilliant chimpanzee!}

Yaounde is  the main headquarters for the Peace Corps in Cameroon.  They have a brand new office right in the center of all the other government buildings.  For awhile after the office moved the area was plagued by thieves, who were happy to find a new group of “non-Africans to prey on. I was a bit nervous to head there, but evidently the area was cleared out and Andrew and I experienced none of this.

Dumping the duffel, my traveling Albatross, was our main priority!   I had dragged it overseas as my second suitcase, filled with 47 some pounds of books.  This was my final contribution of books UID families donated to the Literacy program Andrew  began through R.E.A.C.H, the non-profit he works with in Wum.   So many times I wanted to just leave it somewhere, anywhere! but I just couldn’t do it. These children were anxiously waiting for these books  and unfortunately weren't heading to Wum until the tail end of my trip. Luckily for us  we were able to store it in the Yaounde office and later on in the Bamenda Regional office, while we traveled.  Given the transportation situation it would have been next to impossible to get around.  After we unloaded the duffel, we got a hotel room and left our larger hiking packs there as we headed out for our day trips.

Andrew arranged for a “small car” (taxi) for all of us the next morning.  Estella and children were meeting us at a taxi stop.  I Love Estella, but as with all of Cameroon, meeting times are not something strictly adhered to, so we began the day a bit frustrated at her tardiness.  It was also looking seriously like rain and according to Andrew, “In Cameroon..Nothing, I  mean NOTHING happens when it rains.”  I doubted the seriousness of this until experience taught me otherwise.  The other Cameroonian trait is that dressing “to the nines” is always in order.  Estella and her family (Beckline, Brandon, Prosper and Bertilla) were no exception.  They arrived in full regalia,  Sunday dress and heels for Estella, suits for the boys…you get the idea. 

It began to rain pretty hard soon after we piled into the car, 4 in the backseat with baby Bertilla and 3 in the front (a normal taxi ride). 

As we entered the road to the Mefou Reserve the rain was coming down in torrents and the road was taking on the thick red, silken,  sheen of all Cameroon roads in the  rainy season.  It takes very little to turn the roads into the Red Sea, but sadly there is no “parting”, only plowing through. The road was thankfully short, but Andrew and I did vote the access road into Mefou as THE worst road of any we took during my three weeks there! When we got out, the driver made it clear that staying too long was not an option, at least if we wanted to get out of there any time that day. 

Andrew was seriously worried that the rain would ruin everything and was looking pretty glum about it all.  We met our guide Richard Nixon (yes, named because he was born on the day Nixon was inaugurated as president).  Our first stop was the chimp cage, and of course they were doing the usual antics of chimps.  It was all over from that point on.  Estalla and the children were hooked.  This was their first ever tourist experience and first time ever seeing the wild animals indigenous to their own country!  Their excitement was over flowing, they were running and laughing, pointing and asking dozens of questions.  What a site to see.  It was everything Andrew hoped it would be for them.  Nixon even tried to cut the tour short at one point because of the rain and they would have none of it.

We had an absolutely wonderful time. 

Now Estella, wanting (as always) to repay kindness with kindness, invited us back to their apartment.  This is a two bedroom apartment with a small runway kitchen which consists of a two burner camp stove and a sink with running cold water.  A refrigerator is in the living room /kids bedroom.  There is a double bed size bunk bed where the four or five children sleep, a couple of chairs and a small TV.  In a small second room is where Mom and Dad sleep.  That’s it!  Estella fixed us a fine lunch of Pepe soup (chicken broth with a small amount of meat, and a few vegetables, including hot peppers if you want. There was also a huge platter of fried plantains because I told her I liked them!  The plates were put on the floor, and Andrew and I served ourselves and then balanced the plates on our laps.  Everyone else waited until they were sure we had all we wanted. 

When you are on the receiving end of this level of hospitality, it is very humbling. They have so little, yet share anything they have.  We had hoped to reconnect with at Estella and a few of the children in Wum but it didn’t happen.  Sadly it was the first, and probably the last time I’ll see her.  She is an amazingly resilient, intelligent, hard working woman, fiercely protective of her children and driven by the knowledge that education is the only way her children will be successful.  She and her husband John sacrifice everything so they have only the best level of education available to them..  We take so much for granted.  

THE THINGS THEY DON’T CARRY…

This title plays on the fact that in Africa there is almost nothing that can’t be carried on your head!  Africans even have special little hats just to protect their heads when carrying hard objects. They may wear them around, “just in case” something needs to be carried. 

Perhaps if I had trained early on to carry large items on my head I would have been able to carry that albatross of a dufflel I mention in my Yaounde post!  I was both amazed and appalled at the weight, size and variety of objects carried on one's head.  I was also shocked at the ages and size of the children performing these tasks. For these children begin at a very early age. It’s like breathing; you just do it!

There’s a song I learned as a child called “The Connecticut Peddler”, which goes something like this. “I’m a peddler, I’m a peddler, I’m a peddler from Connecticut.  I’m a peddler, I’m a peddler, so don’t you want to buy?  Many things I have in store, so listen while I name them o’re, so very many goods you’ve never seen before…all of which I will sell you…..

Wooden wares, carpets for parlors and stairs,
Matches and Spanish cigars, Articles splendid I tell you,
Here are tins, papers of needles and pins,
Tracts upon popular sins, Any of which I would sell you.

And,  here is the seed of asparagus,
Lettuce, beets, onions and peppergrass,
From the United Societies, Seeds of all kinds and varieties,
Shaving soap, excellent razor-strops, 
Razors that smoothly will shave your chops,
Swaim's panacea, and Jones's drops, Any of which I would sell you.

All of which I will sell to you….. Watching the street peddlers in Africa I often thought of this song.  Andrew and I had so many laughs at what we saw.  Our favorite hawkers were the shoe sales people, always with ONE shoe on their head, as their “window display”.  But there were also, peanuts , packets of tissue, boxes of cookies, bread, street meat, chickens (live or cooked), eggs, bottles of water and other drinks, bathmats, towels, scarves, socks and pretty much anything you could possibly want…or not…

There were items that were not so laughable as well, especially on the long, deserted roads between towns and villages. Children carrying huge loads of sticks, horns of plantains or bananas, corn or water jugs that resembled 5 gallon gasoline cans. Often they would be carrying several jugs or bags of the same items in their hands. On the beach in Limbe  Andrew and I saw men carrying loads of tree trunks, full length, staggering under the weight. 

Check out this link about the issues of water in Africa.  A short but very powerful video on the issue of having to portage clean water. http://www.charitywater.org/whywater/

It is an efficient way to transport things; however the long term affect on the necks and spines of these people is documented in the bent over, misshapen bodies of the elders, especially in the small villages. 

One of the things I noticed about the Cameroon people is that between the ages of 30ish to anywhere in their 60s, it is extremely difficult to judge the age of a person.  However once they begin aging, the downhill slide is rapid and ravaging.  Often it is the constant abuse this type of activity has on the body that creates these long term effects. I don’t plan on practicing carrying things on my head any time soon!

CRAZY Travel

To say the roads in Cameroon are terrible is laughable.  I have been telling people to imagine the worst possible road in Vermont in mud season and multiply that times a 1000 or so.  You might come near to visualizing the deplorable lack of infrastructure this country has.  To top it off Cameroon is a "bi-lingual" country.  They speak French (FrancoPhones) and English (Pidgin) (AngloPhones).  However the AngloPhones are highly marginalized, and whatever is bad in the French speaking areas are triply bad in the English speaking areas. So the roads in the Northwest are beyond horrible.  Travel is arduous at best, and the norm is expect at least 2-4 hours more than you planned for your trip, either due to not being on time (highly usual)or 50 stops along the way to pick up one more roadside passenger (when you were positive not one more human cell could fit onto the vehicle) or to navigate roads we would consider goat paths.  There are also Police checkpoints, where driver and often passengers must show their identification.  Yes, even citizens of Cameroon must come forth with ID or pay the "fine" or bribe.  If there's a problem it could delay the trip even further.  Or perhaps you might experience a flat tire. Even as Andrew described the changing of the tire akin to a NASCAR Pit crew speed, I'm not sure they are quite up to that standard.  Out of 3 weeks I probably spent at least 6 full days on the road or more.  We are talking, 6-12 hours per day.  After a bone jarring, bone crunching 4 1/2 hour trip up the mountains to Andrew's home I already dreaded the return trip and began to long for Vermont roads!