holiday in south Cameroon with rainforest

 

For the most part this last month I have been on holiday. It took me 4 days travelling to get down to Douala and to meet FP from the plane and then we have been beach hopping, even though it is technically the rainy season and it is extremely humid down here and not always sunny. We started off in the German seaman’s mission in Douala which sounds horrid, but wasn’t – set on a hill side so you can eat on a terrace overlooking the port and with a lovely garden and swimming pool, but full of old white men and very young, beautiful black girls who may or may not have been prostitutes. We walked round all there is of note in Douala other than extensive ramshackle buildings/shanty town in about 3 hours.

 

Next stop a 3 hour coach trip and the white sands of Kribi. It feels a bit more westernised as rich people have had walled villas built here, but most of it is still tin roofed wooden shacks. The only difference to up north is there they are thatched mud huts. There is also more variety of food, but the meat is still tough. I also forget to mention trees. The rainforest goes right down to the sea so you have amazing, enormous, stunningly beautiful varieties of trees – some very very tall and others with huge gnarled trunks that are obviously hundreds of years old. That’s quite moving. One day I came across a little pet monkey with a white button nose attached to a tree that I gave a banana. It was so cute watching him get all excited eating it.

 

I have to admit with some shame, bearing in mind I am 51 but did give up geography in year 9 and that as the African countries I have visited are Egypt, Tunisia, Morrocco, Namibia and South Africa that I thought most of the middle bit was desert too. I thought that rain forest only existed along the Amazon. We went on a river trip in Kribi and for some reason I never imagined the sky in a rainforest would be overcast like an English wet afternoon the only difference being it is hot and humid. In short, until I read the guidebook before coming I didn’t realize that there is a whole load of pristine rainforest in Cameroon as well as Congo and shedloads of animal and plant conservation going on. I had no conception of what rainforest looked and felt like because it looks and feels different from on TV.

 

In Kribi we stayed in a dilapidated, but charming hotel in a room literally 10 metres from the beach and the sea and you could hear the Atlantic waves crashing to the shore as you lay in bed which I loved. I like to be near the sea at least once a year. There was only us and another couple there and we just meandered, ate fish with our fingers down by the port which is protocol here and tried out restaurants. One day, because they don’t do veg here, we bought French beans and carrots at the market and the restaurant owner cooked them for us with our fish, rice and plaintain (which if you don’t know, is a cross between a banana and a chip).

 

Kribi is south of Douala and we then moved north of Douala to Limbe in the foothills of Mount Cameroon and where the sands are volcanic and black. We visited a rare primates sanctuary because they are still killing for bush meat here, the botanical gardens and Buea in the foothills of Mount Cameroon which is just a shanty town mess and makes you appreciate the importance of town planning and even that maybe shopping malls are not such a bad alternative. The idea that small shops provide character and diversification just doesn’t work here. There are just hundreds of little shops some literally just containers that all sell exactly the same things and more often than not, not very nice quality things. After 2 nights in a hotel that had definitely seen better days with a swimming pool with green water, we investigated and moved a couple of hundred yards down the coast to a bird watchers hotel. Here they only had 2 bedrooms, but it was obviously the watering hole of choice for every white young person/volunteer in Limbe because the restaurant/ verandah was packed every night even when we had amazing thunder and lightening and such bad storms that the electricity went off here too.

 

Just out from the hotel smack in the bay of Cameroon’s resort spot is an oil exploration platform that has been there 8 months, makes a constant noise and apparently is not African owned. I don’t know who does own it. At least the pipeline just off Kribi that comes down from Chad is well out at sea. You can just about make out the oil tankers on the horizon.

 

People (when I think about it, mainly taxi drivers and hotel staff) go on and on at me about security and personal safety until you could become paranoid. FP said it took him some adjusting and I do understand. The environs sometimes look so grim and shabby it’s like something out of a crime film, but if you can assume that material poverty isn’t inevitably linked to crime and greet people as they always greet you it feels safer. I think if I felt people were so untrustworthy it would be untenable for me to be here, but I don’t think that. I’ll wait and see when I get something stolen how I feel, but it’s the same as when J2 and I were in Cape Town. They don’t think white people should walk anywhere.

Ironically after I wrote this a young white woman who worked at the WWF office next door to the hotel had her throat slit in the office the day after we arrived. They think it was someone she knew. Ummm – salutary.

 

My holiday is nearly over. I miss the north. I don’t like the humidity down here because the mozzies are out with a vengeance and I am bitten ragged. Whereas I may get 6 bites a day up north I am counting 30 plus itchy lumps here and I swell up and scratch so my arms and legs are very scabby. It’s also more expensive. I will miss the range of food though and I will miss FP. I didn’t get him on the back of a moto this time, but we did share taxis and little mini buses.

 

My computer has an infestation of tiny ants and I am killing them as they travel across the screen.