Lung-bursters and drunkards: Walking into Cameroon
Crossing into Cameroon proved challenging. Aside from the fact that no-one could provide an accurate approximation of travelling time or distance to the border, the road was terrible – really terrible. When unpaved roads in tropical countries aren't graded to level out the bumps and ensure surface water runs into ditches at the side, heavy rain soon destroys them. Crevasse-deep gullies form between football-sized rocks and the way ahead ends up looking more like a dry mountain river-bed than a road. Such has been the story for much of the past week.
A small river at the bottom of a steep palm-forested valley provided the demarcation between Nigeria and Cameroon. This came 40km, or a day's journey from Gembu, where my passport had been stamped out of Nigeria. Up until this point I'd just about been able to cope with the steep gradients and bone-numbing tracks without descending from the bike and pushing. Entering Cameroon was another matter.
It is hard to believe any vehicle other than a tank or 4x4 wishing to break its suspension and chassis would chose to take the road to Nwa, the first large settlement in Cameroon with an immigration post. The fact that I had arrived here 2 days after my passport had been stamped out of Nigeria escaped the attention of the three officers sitting on the verandah and sharing a 5-litre jerry-can of palm wine.
“Bonjour Monsieur. Bienvenue a Cameroun.” bellowed one as he raised his gourd and took a swig. I paused to catch my breath after another lung-bursting climb and wondered if I'd now crossed into Francophone Cameroon. “Is this the French-speaking part of Cameroon” I replied. “Ah you're an anglophone” chirped another. “No, this is north-west Cameroon and we speak English here. This other man is from Doula".
Before arriving in Cameroon I had been a little confused as to where the boundaries between the English and French-speaking part of Cameroon lay. What was once a German-administered colony was later divided by Britain and France following WWI, although the majority of the country is francophone.
The French-speaking official finished his gourd of palm-wine, poured himself another then took it along with my passport inside his office. “Donnez moi 2000CFA. It is for my boss”.
I wanted to ask what it was about francophone officials in Africa that made them so much more demanding and less polite than their anglophone counterparts. But it would have been lost on this drunk, just as the whole thing seemed escape Hiromu's attention that we were each being asked to pay a $4 bribe.
We retrieved our passports without opening our wallets and continued into Nwa, which was having its market-day. There was nothing remarkable on sale; the usual wooden-stall or empty raffia-mat on the ground with a spread of cooking essentials: maggi stock cubes, sugar, small red onions, tinned tomato paste, re-cycled bottles filled with palm oil. More interesting was the fact that surrounding the market square were a number of small shops filled with people drinking palm-wine. Both men and women.
I had read somewhere that more alcohol is consumed in Cameroon than any other Africa nation. The small town of Nwa, and many others I passed in the days to follow, would certainly live up to this theory. I don't mean to exaggerate, having barely been in the country a week, but it's hard to find a sober Cameroonian; half the population appears to be continually drunk.
Lets take Jackson for example, who called himself the living 'Michael Jackson' and stumbled out of a lively bar on a Sunday afternoon to wave me down. We had now left behind the lung-bursting ascents and joined the grassfields, or 'ring-road' area of Cameroon, which is noted for its scenery. How the Lonely Planet can describe the section of road we were on as 'decent' I don't know. Perhaps the author had also travelled the same road from Nigeria to Nwa and was being 'relative' in his/her description. It was comparably horrendous. Not horrendous of the 20% gradient and herculean boulder-type, but horrendous in that a 6” layer of powered dust provided a cushioning over the bumps. Not so bad if there is no traffic on the road. But it only takes one vehicle, of which there is an increasing number as you head south from the town of Ndu, to raise up a thick cloud of red-brown particles, which then slowly descend to fill and cover every surface around. The tea-plantations and slopes of eucalyptus trees would look a whole lot more scenic if they weren't covered in this film of red-dust. And a touring cyclist could much more appreciate his mountainous surroundings if he weren't blinking, rubbing his eyes and spitting out mouthfuls of the stuff every time a vehicle went past.
"What you are seeing is a reflection of the roads in your country" is what I told Jackson, who was laughing at my appearance and as merry as one could be before losing his legs. Why I was asking this drunkard for a safe place to sleep I'm not sure. A minute after propping up the bike at the top of yet another climb and waiting for Hiromu, I was entering a dark-filled room thick with the heady sweet smell of palm-wine. A fat woman was standing behind a table, on which an assortment of different sized bottles waited to be filled from a huge plastic jerry-can.
“Try our delicious wine” shouted Jackson as he rocked back and forth from across the bar. So I did. And it was good. Fresh tasting and sweet. “How much to fill this 1-litre bottle?” I asked, returning with the spare from my front-rack. “One hundred francs” replied the fat woman. At £0.15 that's about as cheap as alcohol gets I thought.
When Hiromu showed up I'd already arranged to pitch our tents on the school grounds, which Jackson miraculously managed to walk us to, before bidding us a good night and no doubt returning for more palm-wine.
On another evening we met a chap called Felix. He introduced himself as an environmental officer, was dressed in shirt and trousers and had that professional look and manner of speaking that led me to believe he was a man who might help us. The sun was setting again through the harmattan haze and we wanted permission from an authority to camp next to the school or some other such open and neutral place.
“No, that is not permissible. It is not in our custom to allow a foreigner to do that. You will sleep in a room” ,said Felix in a tone of sincerity and authority. It wasn't until we had sat down in a nearby bar and he ordered me a beer and Hiromu a coke that I realised Felix was drunk. I was annoyed with myself and apologised to Hiromu, who like me was also thinking of his stomache, where he could wash the film of dust from his body and lay his head to rest. Felix had done a good job of hiding his drunkenness through an ability to speak fluently and articulately. “Why do Cameroonians drink so much”? I asked. “Because we are suffering". Fare enough I thought. Same reason many people drink the world over.
Felix really had no idea where we would sleep. He was fifty years old and lived by himself in a shoe-box sized room. We found the school a few hours later and slept peacefully, returning into the village for breakfast the following morning (fufu and huckleberry leaf, which is much like spinach) to be joined by Felix. It was 8am and he was taking a 650ml bottle of Guinness, suggesting we join him as there was a big hill ahead and it would provide us with energy. We left him as he started his second bottle and the chop-shop started to fill with other regulars taking their morning beer.
A sign across the road saying 'end of tarmac', which to us read 'start of tarmac' as we were travelling the other way, came as a huge relief later in the day. Our clothes, bags and bikes were now caked in dust and I was looking forward to doing more than the 40-50km per day we'd been struggling to make since leaving Gembu. But the Cameroonian Ministry of road construction or whatever has an interesting approach to tarring the country's roads. It does so in patches, so just as one gets used to rolling smoothly without the bumps and dust the tarmac disappears again, returns several kilometres later then stops again. And so on. One might call it a drunkards approach to road construction. I can just imagine the tarmac-crew finishing a stretch, then stopping for lunch and needing to drive 10km to the next town selling beer or palm wine, from which they will continue tarring in the afternoon, or much more likely the next day, week or month.
Having slept in our tents every night since leaving Gembu we took a room in a palace one evening. It is the first time I have ever slept in a Ppalace. This one belonged to the Lamido of Sagba, a Lamido being the name given to a Muslim chief in Cameroon. His Christian counterparts are called Fons. Being a Muslim it was a relief to speak with someone sober for once. One of his 'errand-boys' had found us in the village and suggested we could ask the Lamido to sleep in his palace. To sleep in a palace. Now who can say they have done that?
The Lamido – 'Elhadji Maouda:N.W.P Holder of night', as his business card on which a picture of him sitting on a throne looking like Santa Claus with a white shawl round his neck and face read, showed us to our room. A healthy-looking horse lay grazing outside on a grass slope and I wondered as the Lamido opened the door to the room if I were looking in on its stable. But the ceiling would have been too low. On tip-toes my head touched the dusty wooden timbers. “Um...It's perfect” I said as the errand boy Suleiman did a fine job of raising the inch-thick layer of dust from the floor by attempting to sweep it out with a palm-frond brush.
The following day, yesterday, we climbed again then descended towards the town of Bamenda, where I write this from now. Hiromu took off on his bike this morning headed for Yaounde. It is some 450-500km away. I suggested he take a rest day like me, having travelled continuously for the last 14 days, but he has a package to collect that is being re-sent from Japan (it arrived in Yaounde a few weeks ago and was sent back). I too need to go to Yaounde for onward visa applications and a school talk I had originally thought I'd give before the close of term. Both can wait for the New Year - I'm off to enjoy my last taste of anglophone Africa in west Africa on the coast at Limbe. I won't make it for Christmas Day, but I doubt it will be hard to find someone to share a drink with along the way. Happy Christmas to you all.
