31. Cameroon: Bamenda to Limbe

In the previous chapter we mentioned the relief of getting into Cameroon after Nigeria.  After we finished our trip through 21 African countries, Cameroon was our favorite and one of three that we felt had their overall act together (the other two were Senegal and Rwanda).  Of course only a few years later Rwanda exploded, but when we went through, things were working, at least from the point of view of travelers.  In the case of Cameroon the relatively good situation of the country was apparently against all odds, since 6 provinces were French-speaking and 2 provinces English speaking.  This had come about because Cameroon had been a German colony between the conference of Berlin in the 1880s and the end of World War I, when it was divided between Britain and France.  The other German colonies were Tanganyika, “entrusted” to the British after WWI, Rwanda and Burundi “entrusted” to Belgium and Namibia to South Africa.

In addition, Cameroon had at least its share of ethnic groups and languages, not to mention the old religious divide between a Christian south and a Muslim north. In any case things seemed to work for us; we felt comfortable camping and hitchhiking.  Soon after, Cameroon became the African country to break through on the international soccer scene.  In fact I have fond memories of Cameroon beating Argentina, the defending world champion, in the inaugural game of the 1990 World Cup.  It is especially memorable because my boss at the time was Argentine, but that is another story.

Most recently Cameroon was in the news because seven members of a French family were taken hostage in the north of the country. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21518116  But even then, the admitted kidnappers were Boko Haram from neighboring Nigeria, and as I post this chapter, the family has been released; gaunt, but alive.  That is not how many of these stories have been ending.

Yellow dots indicate our route from Calabar to Limbe.  Base map Michelin road map of West Africa, 1982.

                                               Bamenda - Kumba, Cameroon, Tuesday, 15 February, 1983

(HELENA) We packed up the tent (not much of a pleasure since it was wet with dew) and set off walking to a place we thought we might hitch a ride. We stood for a while at a curve in the road (where we saw the crashed truck on our walk on Sunday), but there were too many people standing around trying to catch taxis. We had walked a good while even to get there, but we decided to head up the hill a good ways to see if we could find a more likely hitching place. Luckily a USAID man had pity on us and took us to the top of the hill. Right before he let us off, he said that a driver named Eric would be taking that same vehicle (a blue Chevrolet Blazer) to Kumba via Bafoussam, but that he’d be making several stops along the way. Perfect!, but we thought we’d see if any other likely rides came along. The man said the driver would be leaving “sometime after 9:00”.

It was 8:30 when he set us down at the corner at the top of the hill, and since he’d said he would advise the driver about us “in case you are still there”, we didn’t try very hard to get another ride. We ended up waiting for Eric for three hours, always wondering if somehow he’d gone by without our seeing him. In the meantime, Dan and I took turns standing in the sun, watching carefully for the Blazer. Three times a friendly young woman went by while it was my turn. She couldn’t quite understand why we’d chosen to wait in the sun and why we were waiting so long. A European woman drove by several times and finally she stopped on the other side of the street, crossed over and asked very worriedly if some­thing were wrong. Another USAID vehicle stopped just down the street, so Dan went to see if he knew anything of “our” ride. He didn’t, but this Mr. Williams turned out to be head of Heifer Project here and he told Dan that if we were still around this evening, we should stop by his house for a bowl of soup.

Finally at 11:20 (we had long since started to doubt that Eric would show) I spotted the Blazer, and we flagged him down. The person who had originally offered us the ride had not told Eric about us, so he wasn’t inclined to take us because of strong regulations about picking up passengers. After about five minutes, Dan managed to persuade him that we must be telling the truth since we knew his name and where he was going. Fortunately someone he knew drove by just then, and he was able to send a message to the effect that he was taking us. We had our ride!

After standing so long in the blazing sun, it felt “quite nice” (to put it mildly) to sit back and relax in a comfortable, air-conditioned car. Eric was driving (listening of course to Reggae), a woman who may have been his wife was beside him, and we shared the back seat with a man who works somehow with tourism. They were friendly, but we didn’t converse much.

The road was nicely paved (not too well engineered) through Bofang, Nkongsamba, and Yabassi, but there we turned onto a dirt road to Kumba. The whole road was on hilly terrain, as we were headed back into lower lands with the palm trees we’d seen between Mamfe and Bamenda. Now though, you could see houses all along the way. Some of the houses had very distinctive pointy tin roofs. Most of the roofs here are corrugated tin, but they have a gradual slant, a slant for each of the four sides. These new ones topped smaller houses that were often bunched together by fours.

Once we’d turned off the “tarmac”, we started seeing huge, and I mean km after km, banana plantations owned by the Cameroon Development Corporation. For as far as you could see, it was bananas. Farther on, we got to rubber plantations also owned by the CDC (government). We saw some of the cheap-labor housing that has to exist for that type of operation. We also saw smaller coffee plantations, the coffee bushes being of a kind that Dan hadn’t seen. It was as we were driving rain on the windshield. First rain Dan and I have seen in over 3 months! (Last time was when we washed clothes in Las Palmas.) Gradually it got steadier and the wind got gustier and we started hearing thunder. Before long, visibility was poor and we drove past ten trees (rubber) that had been blown down across the road, with many, many more felled in our view. Driving into Kumba at 1700 hrs we saw a lot of tin roofs blown off onto the streets.

We stopped several places in Kumba, including a house (Eric’s mother’s?) where they shared a bowl of pounded yam fufu with meat sauce (everybody dipping in with washed hands). Geoff mentioned several hotels, but we decided to try the Presbyterian Mission again. Eric drove us there and we were received quite well. Only one small problem, the storm cut off the electricity and there may be mosquitoes. This was an “early rain”.

 (DAN) The “Mission” was another big church center on the edge of town. Built in the same philosophy as the center in Bamenda, it has areas for meeting and accommodations for putting groups up. Their sign said that the center was for women, youth, and lay training. Since we pay a medium price ($4 apiece) I figure we are not imposing but helping to pay for the overhead of such a place. It was all very clean. Since it was sloppy due to the rain they did not think it would be a good idea to pitch the tent so we stayed in the dormitory.

                        Kumba – Limbe (former Victoria), Cameroon, Wednesday, February 16, 1982

Today marks the fifth month since we got on the bus in Winfield, Kansas. Only six more months to go! It does not seem like we have been on the road that long but I guess that Mother and the typewriter can vouch for it.

Today was the second day that we have started by loading up and walking several km with full packs. The streets were not too bad, but the unpaved taxi park was a mess. There was an innovation in the transport system here. Same old Peugeot 504 station wagon and sleazy money collector, but they had scales and charged by weight. Somehow they find a way to charge for big bags. I’m afraid we paid nearly another fare for our two bags. Helena’s weighed 19 kg and mine 28 kg. Part of that was damp clothes that are not drying but especially a wet tent.

The drive was fairly comfortable down a paved road, 140 km. We were going mostly downhill to the coast except when we turned toward Buea which is at the foot of Mt. Cameroon. As we drove past we could see the outline of the mountain and it just did not seem 13000 ft high! From where we were it had a rise of about 12000 ft. It is the highest peak in western Africa. It is an active volcano, according to the tourism man yesterday, and they had a “massive” lava flow in December and had to evacuate a lot of people. The mountain is in the same volcanic chain with the islands of Fernando Póo, Sao Tome and Principe. I don’t know whether we ever said it, but our main purpose for coming to Victoria is to see if we can get to the former Spanish colony of Fernando Póo. It now forms part of the country of Equatorial Guinea.

We arrived here about 10:30, and having learned our lesson for Cameroon, we asked directions for the Presbyterian Center. As usual they had a bookstore and a handicraft store. I went in to talk to see if somebody knew where they put up travelers. They showed me to the manager. He said that since we had a tent we could stay there in the compound and use the bookstore bathroom for nothing. It turned out, on the inside, to be a large compound with various aging buildings and about 100 m of ocean front where a river runs into the bay. The place he said he would rather we pitch the tent was about 10 ft from a bank that is the edge of the water during high tide. There is no beach, but a very scenic view of the rest of the bay and town and about 6 islands out farther in the water. It is a grassy spot in the shade of six palm trees and a mango tree.

 

Limbe: our campsite at the Presbyterian Mission with a view to the bay

I had a good conversation with one of the church accountants later in the evening, and found that the compound dates back to 1858 when a Baptist missionary named Alfred Saker landed there. He started a mission but we also saw a statue in his honor as the founder of the township of Victoria. The compound has several very old buildings, but the neatest is a long house built high on a rock with a wide veranda that runs all the way around the house. It looks out on the ocean through a row of old, tall palm trees.

 

Limbe Mission, view from the sea.

(DAN) After pitching the tent we set out to explore and make inquiries.  We walked to a long pier and warehouse section that has seen better days. Further on was a beach lined with fishing canoes and people crowding around gutting fish they picked directly from the nets. We found that the trip to Fernando Póo (On modern maps Bioko Island, with the city of Malabo, belonging to Equatorial Guinea) would cost $30 apiece round trip. Given that we will not likely have another chance to see these volcanic islands I think we should have gone. However since we are on a set income till Zaire we will have to forgo. These islands have struck our fancy ever since we first started reading up on Africa.   [1]

 

Limbe Bay, Cameroon

Walking the other direction from the beach there are some wooded hills right against the water that have housing for the fortunate. One house on top of the highest place especially catches one’s attention. One can see it from most any place in town. We figure it to be the old governor’s mansion, at least. There are two very nice, old-style hotels along the front. One, judging by the spelling, Atlantik, may date back to the German colony before WWI. In between two of the hills, bounded on one side by the rapidly running stream and on the other by these houses, is one of the nicest, well kept, botanical gardens we’ve seen. It not only has a good variety of exotic tropical trees, but has scattered benches and tables where people were studying quietly.

As the sun was getting low and the tide was at its highest, I went swimming in the mouth of the river. I know it is taking a risk, but the salt water had backed up the river a good distance and I think I remembered hearing that fresh water parasites cannot survive in salt water. There was a good surf, but it was too rocky to be supremely enjoyable. Following that we hosed each other down in lieu of a shower. A woman (in pants) was washing her Volvo (Wisconsin plates) with the same hose and invited us in for tea later. She lives in one half of the house that I described earlier.  Her name is Prudence, has a 3-year-old son and has spent the last seven years in the States; before that she was in England. She avoided talking about herself, so we cannot say how she came to have a car with US plates living there in that gorgeous house.

Earlier we had gone by the movie theatre and found that they were showing a James Bond flick. We have not seen a movie since Spain, so we broke down to see our first African theatre. We went over at 20:30 and actually stood in a line for tickets[2]. Most of the people there were young, late-teen couples. We were, of course, the only “whiteys” but it did not cause any stir. The flick was dubbed in French, and since this is the English part of Cameroon everybody just conversed out loud and watched the action. . There is also something humorous about a stereotyped Texan tourist in Bangkok speaking fluent French.

                                               Limbe (formerly Victoria), Thursday, 17 February, 1983

(HELENA) I’ve had very few poor nights on this trip and last night was one of them. I suppose it was mostly due to the fact that we got back from the movie at 23:50 and, after introducing ourselves to the slightly tipsy night watch (or “my guardy” as they say in Nigeria), went straight to bed. That’s when I realized that the lovely ocean breeze we’d had all day had completely died down.  I’ve very seldom spent such a muggy, sticky, rest­less night. But it was pretty nice to wake up to a beautiful ocean view.

 

View from our tent. Limbe, Cameroon

We’ve definitely hit wear-once-and-wash weather, so after breakfast we (or I should say Dan) borrowed a bucket for a spot of washing. It looked pretty bleak for a while because the water was off. The only problem with this new kind of weather is that the clothes take ages to dry and even then they feel sort of damp. Got spoiled by the dryness across West Africa.

We took a long mid-day walk in search of lunch makings and then sat in the nice, quiet, shady botanical garden. On our way back to the tent, as we walked along figuring up our daily expenditures, looking desperately for a good excuse to buy another “mineral”, we rounded a curve and ran into none other than the Swiss couple we met almost two months ago in Niamey. As Dan later said, we probably wouldn’t have recognized them except for the little braid she wears at the edge of her hair -- and the diamond in her nose. It felt good to see someone we already “knew” (we remember she is Esther, but can’t remember his name), even if it was only someone we’d spent one night with and with whom we’d shared a mosquito net.

They’ve been in Cameroon for a couple of weeks now and he had gotten a job (for a trial period) at the Hotel Atlantik as a pastry chef. If things work out, they may stay on for a couple of years. A German man owns several hotels here plus the Safari Lodge we saw in Bali, so our Swiss friend has a chance of working there.

I must take this opportunity to mention “Plenty Small”, our dishonestly acquired bottle opener. We have been trying so hard to avoid accumulating things, but when we caught our lucky ride from the border to Mamfe, we managed to get away with a bottle and a big, huge opener. It is homemade out of wood and two screws, very awkward to carry, but so far we can’t bear to part with it and have nicknamed it after our first Cameroonian drivah.

This time we knew what to expect for the night, so we hosed down right before we went to bed and had a comfortable night. That was after we’d wandered through a “popular” section of town scavenging for our supper. Results: very picante tamale-type food rolled into leaves, shiskabobs  and bananas.

How could I forget our most important purchase of the day!? The biggest and one of the nicest custard apples (chirimoyas in our youth) I’ve ever had. It was more tart than those in Bolivia and the taste was somehow different, but it was a real treat.

Limbe Mission, another view from the sea

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[1] 30 dollars seems a reasonable price to see another country, but in the days before ATM machines, we really did not know how we were going to get any more money beyond what we were carrying.  As another side note, apparently Mark Thatcher (who disappeared for a few days on the Paris-Dakar Rally in the early ‘80s) is reputed to have been behind a group of mercensaries that were caught before they could overthrow the Equatorial Guinea government.  He is, of course, Margaret Thatcher’s son.  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/freed-mercenary-calls-for-mark-thatcher-to-face-justice-1814625.html

[2] Queues had been pretty chaotic up to this point on our trip, and continued to be.