Manymanymanythings. More than I can write

My netbook will most likely not be received today. Some nonsense about not giving the ambassador's contact information out to random twenty year old girls. Very silly.

My last real post was, what? Two months ago? Something like that. I think I had been here for three days. So, I’ve been here for longer than that now. J’ai vie encore (I’m still alive). Many things have happened, and not happened, and surprised me, and been unsurprising. Technology generally hates me. My laptop puttered out the day I moved in with my host family, and my camera battery also decided not to work. But it’s ok, many, many other people took pictures which I will borrow/steal/take and you, well, those of you who care, will be able to see pictures of me and others and what we saw and where we were. I am going to attempt a general overview. It will sort of be in attempted chronological order.

Sidenote: I just finished reading Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and I think his writing style is awesome and hence may somewhat influence my own.

So, Kribi. Kribi is tropical paradise. Every picture you’ve ever seen with the white sand beaches and blue water and palm trees and wooden canoe like things (those are actually called pirogues, fyi), it has all of that. The water is warm, like bathtub warm, and the people are nice, although I won’t lie and say I actually talked to that many of them. I swam, a lot. One of the days the group was bused out to some mindblowingly picturesque waterfalls where some young boys took us out in pirogues and we took pictures of the waterfalls and then we came back and climbed on them a bit and looked at broken shrimp traps (pointed out by Julio, our awesome bus driver). There were several stalls where touristy items were sold, and I ended up buying some earrings and a little sculpture and some painter guy asked me to marry him, but I told him I was already married, I think, my French was really bad then. I also talked to some German tourists in German, which was nice because German is so much easier than French. There was more swimming later, and then bed, and then getting up early and walking on the beach, the beautiful beach. I made friends with a young boy who worked at a nearby hotel. He walked with me for a while and I attempted to converse with him in my incredibly broken French. There was more swimming maybe? Oh, and my flip flops got stolen. I still haven’t bought new ones and consequentially have been wearing sneakers around and have a super impressive sock tan.

Then there was some Yaounde. I should post my creative writing piece. It has lots about Yaounde. But it is kind of sad. Disregard that, I was probably in a bad mood. I will post it later. It is currently on the other computer and I have no way to get it onto the one that has internet.

Let’s see. The next trip then was to the Anglophone region which is in the west, to Limbe and Buea. There was another beach here, Semme beach. And a pool, and pool games, which I was surprisingly good at and may have accidentally injured someone (sorry Ashley!). We visited a painter named Max who is amazingly talented, I was blown away, and I’m not really much of a visual art person, well, accept that I’m a dancer, but that’s different. We went to visit a mangrove swamp and then the military got unhappy with us and wanted to take away our cameras but it was fine after Mr Teku and Prof. Ngwa talked to them. I’m not really sure what was so impressive about the mangrove, but the part where some random guy thought we were smuggling Nigerians into the country was all varieties of hilarious. Then there was some more beach, and we sat on some horses while they walked around and paid way too much money to do it.

More Yaounde.

The last trip was quite recently, last week in fact. We went to the North. The North is far, and also broad, and extreme (the region is, after all, called the Extreme North). To get there is a two day affair, as is getting back. Day one is Camrail, which, if you buy the most expensive tickets for 25000 CFA (about $50) you get a nice little recycled bed made out of an old seat turned upside down and suspended from the ceiling with seatbelts (surprisingly comfortable). If you get the cheaper seats, which are always overbooked and have way more people to a seat than is possible, so people are sitting in the aisle and in between cars, then you have no bed, and, sometimes, no seat either. Day two is public bus, which is probably still way out of the price range of the average Cameroonian. After seven hours of bus, which is, thankfully, not overbooked, and fourteen hours of train, we arrive in Maroua, the capital of the Extreme North. It is not too hot, but it is dry, very dry. Jean-Luc meets us. He is our tour guide for the week. He makes the connections, knows what’s what. He introduces us to Robert, driver of the Mokolo express, the 13-seater bus which will drive our fifteen person group around for the next week. We are taken to a lovely hotel in two shifts, as us and our luggage will not all fit into the Mokolo express at the same time. We lounge around the hotel for a bit, take showers (it feels so good to be clean!) and eat a delicious dinner. The next day is going to the market and buying things and coming back and getting more money and buying more things. Everyone is nice. No one ‘la blanche’ es me. It is fantastic. People do address me as nasara, which is the same as ‘la blanche’ but in Fulfulde, the trade language which is a mix of Arabic, Wolof, Fulani, and also probably some other languages. Fulfulde is widely spoken in this area, also in Nigeria I think, but am not positive. Jean-Luc teaches me select words in Fulfulde. Jam= ca va (Jean-Luc doesn’t speak English, or rather, his English is approximately as good as my French and since it’s his country, we communicate in French, which is not his native language, but is not mine either, and he is infinitely better at it, so maybe it is sort of fair). Response to Jam= Jam core doo may. Osoko= merci. Osoko djur=merci beaucoup. A vendor teaches me another word. Kata. I gather that it means frugal. I’m pretty sure I still pay more than the average Cameroonian, but this is fair. I also have more money than the average Cameroonian. Much, much more. It is mindboggling. I am rich, and it is hard to understand. Poor rich girl. I’m such a cliché. Anyway. I buy lots at the market. I spend most of the money that I brought.

The next day is Waza. Safari time. We stay in little cement houses with conical roofs which are surprisingly comfortable, but we are lucky, it is about ten degrees cooler than it was last year. Oh, did I mention that the roads here are not paved? No, I did not. Mokolo Express also has limited to no suspension. The result=bruises. I have so much respect for paved roads now. I should start an asphalt worshipping cult. Anyway, after shoving our stuff into the little houses and wolfing down some mangos (deeee lish) we hop back into (slash on top of—yes, five people at a time are allowed to sit on top!) the Mokolo express and Robert drives us around the park. We see giraffes, many giraffes, some birds of various sizes, a lot of antelope and gazelle type things, a very lion-king like watering hole with giraffes, birds, and gazelle/antelope. As we are heading back and have switched off the people on top of the bus, Robert stops. We look. I can’t see anything. Robert gets out of the mokolo express and talks to the people on top “You see the lions?” “Yeah! Yeah, we see them!” ( I don’t see them, but I am not on top) “Well get down!” Everyone gets down and is inside of the bus as we chase the lions (three cubs and a mom) off the road. I don’t really thing that this seems like a particularly good idea, but it turns out to be fine, and it is very cool. Lions. In the wild. We follow them for about ten minutes before heading back to the cement houses and then out to dinner. In the morning I get up super early and watch the sun rise over the savannah. It is not especially colorful, but the shapes that the trees make are very beautiful. (I also watch some stars before that. I’ve never seen so many stars. They’re stunning, blanketing the sky.) Then there is some more Safari. We see a lot of giraffes, including two babies, who are adorable and run in front of the mokolo express. After mini Safari, we surrender all of our luggage to Robert and Jean-Luc who adhere it to the top of the bus with ropes and a tarp. We drive back to Maroua. More shopping, some dinner. Will be continued at a later date, I am now tired of writing.