Kribi - Part 2 or... Shiny Shiny All the Time Most Handsome Boy Demonkiller

This is the part where my vacation takes a turn for the fancy.

A few months ago in Bertoua, we had a few security problems (no permanent damage to anyone), but our Safety and Security Coordinator decided that it might be good if the volunteers in the East met the Governor. I missed out on it, but they had dinner a few times and apparently made a very favorable impression - such a good impression that he offered us the use of his beach house in Kribi.

"Beach house" might be a bit misleading..."Governor's mansion" might be more appropriate. There were 5 or 6 bedrooms all with their own a/c units and their own bathrooms. There were leather sofas, a balcony, a tower with an art museum, two kitchens and what amounted to a private beach.

It was paradise. We were a two-minute walk from the beach and the only other people who used it were fishermen. The water was clear and the beach was clean. I feel relaxed just thinking about it.

One night we even got to enjoy poisson braise caught at our own beach! I split a weird flounder-y looking fish with another girl. Delicious!

We went to the Lobe falls on our last afternoon. It's one of the few places in the world where freshwater falls go into saltwater. It was pretty tourist-y (and by that I mean the beers were expensive and there were people there selling jewelry, etc. The roads were still bad and poorly marked and there was no information anywhere).

The Beasts from the East

We left Kribi after a few days and headed to Limbe via Douala. Douala is easily my least favorite place in Cameroon. This includes Bafia, where I was constantly devoured by moumoutes. Douala is like every negative stereotype of New York plus 100% humidity and temperatures in the 90s all the time. It's noisy and dirty and smelly and the people are also noisy and dirty and smelly. I would be happy to never go back to Douala ever.

We hired a private car to take the five of us to Limbe, where we met up with a few more people at Arne's Cafe in the Limbe Wildlife Centre. I had a chocolate banana MILKSHAKE for lunch! It was magical. There was real ice and real dairy in it! Almost as good as Powell's.

We went to the botanical gardens our next day there and managed to get so lost tramping around next to a river that we apparently left the botanical gardens and may have climbed a fence to get back in... I felt very lucky to be wearing a caba, instead of something limiting my movements (I also felt very lucky to not get stuck on top and then have friends take pictures of me before offering to help. coughMattandQuinncough). The botanical gardens were lovely and we finished that trek off with drinks at a hotel bar overlooking the ocean - black sand beaches, volcanic rock, mist-covered mountains...and an oil rig. If you closed your left eye, the view was perfect.

Limbe Botanical Gardens - photo courtesy of Sarah Keene

The next day was my birthday - the big 25! We decided to take it easy on ourselves and went out to a resort called Seme Beach outside of town. Seme Beach is the Zephyrhills of Cameroon. It also boasts untouched black sand beaches, really nice lounge chairs, life guards, a saltwater pool, ice, and showers.

We spent a lot of time floating, exfoliating and being adults. We definitely didn't get into mud fights or paint our faces with mud and pretend it was war paint or make mud facial hair to have people guess who it was...

Now onto the epic bus ride! We arrived at the bus depot a bit before 8, waited in line for some time to get tickets. We got our tickets, hugged everyone goodbye, and loaded our stuff onto the bus. The bus was already almost full, but the driver wasn't there and the bus wasn't on, so we knew that departure wasn't imminent. Cameroonians were still getting on and off all the time, so we knew we weren't in a hurry...BUT the ticket guy had said it was leaving now.*

We hadn't eaten breakfast and we were planning on the good old-fashioned spaghetti omelette with mayo, but the bus was leaving! We raced to a boutique, bought some Creamz4Fun! (they taste like those elf cookies), some roasted peanuts and some plantain chips off a kid's head and got our seats...and proceeded to wait for an hour and a half.

This is a pretty normal travel experience here, but the thing is that you have to remember Murphy's Law. The first time you decide that you have plenty of time and you need to head to the latrine for a while - that will be the time that the bus leaves. The woman sitting next to Sarah had to run to catch the bus for the very same reason.

We had our refreshments - now for the entertainment! Back to Douala! On our way, we stopped and picked up 10ish people. They were standing in the aisles or sitting on little stools they'd brought with them. This got a lot of people's panties in a twist. We were on a VIP bus, which is supposed to mean A/C, tv and no stopping. You pay about 1000CFA more, but you get there hours before the other options and here we were stopping! There was an angry buzz in the air and it reached a dull roar, when we stopped before a checkpoint to kick off all the aisle people, passed through the checkpoint and then waited for those people to find motos to bring them back to the bus. A lady called the agence.

We stopped in Douala at their bus yard to refuel and then had to head to the agence itself to talk to the bossman. Our driver stopped at the agence for a millisecond and then we were off! ...or stuck in Douala's notorious traffic. We ended up having to circle back to the agence and drive around town with the boss for a while. Our driver was publicly fired right there in Douala, but drove us all the way to Yaounde.

At the last checkpoint before Yaounde, we stopped and picked up one person - a salesman by the name of Shiny Shiny All the Time Most Handsome Boy Demonkiller. He sold various products - toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, bath oils and mentholatum (I think it's like tiger balm). which he started pushing as a muscle cream and ended up pushing as a cream that would make you cry a lot for cry-die's (funerals).

Shiny Shiny, etc. found out we were American and told us all about his plans to get an American visa and find an American wife to cook for him all the time. He (of course) asked us if we were married. She and I are both married, but our husbands live in the US. When we explained that we were living apart, he exclaimed, "But who is cooking for him?!" We explained that sometimes men cook and that if he wants to marry an American he had better learn. He did not believe us, but he took notes for the book he's writing on love and relationships.

Sarah and I also spent a good amount of time being suspected of being spies. A woman sitting behind us shushed someone who was complaining about the aisle people, because "there are ears everywhere....like the FBI." We had someone who was very subtly turned around in his seat to listen to our conversation. He was anglophone, so to have a private conversation, we had to pretend to be auctioneers. It was vastly entertaining, but I think I might have to introduce some people to the "ob" language to pass the time.



*Cultural note: Time does not flow the same way here as it does in the U.S. of A. When someone says "J'arrive!" (I'm arriving!), they could be at your door, but the more likely scenario is that they are making their lunch, have to eat it, clean the dishes, clean their house and their shoes, find a moto and come over. "J'arrive!" usually means "You will wait for half an hour!" It's to the point that I usually tell someone that I am already at the meeting place, when I haven't left my house yet, so I only wait for 10 minutes instead of 30.