Steamy and smiling

Keith and I are digesting our crocodile and boa meat dinner. It is very hot and humid, but we are in great company.

 

We are in Yaounde after taking a three-hour bus ride here, made interesting by a travelling salesman on the bus providing us with a promotion show selling a magical potion promising to cure everything from bum itch, bad breath to erectile dysfunction.

 

Tonight we have big plans to drink some boxed wine and eat cheese and enjoy the sounds of Africa. 

When's the next bus?

Click here to read about

Keith and Debbie in Cameroon

 

love ~ life ~ art

www.dpdphoto.blogspot.com

Enough waiting already

Thanks so much for your good wishes, emails and goodies. They have helped us survive this waiting game in New York.

Keith and I are off. We have packed (in order of importance) our tickets, medications, camera equipment and just a bit of toiletries and extra clothing. It's about a 7 flight to Brussels, then another 7 hour flight to Cameroon, so we will arrive around this time tomorrow.

Until then ....

When’s the Next Bus?

When’s the next bus…. Now that is a really good question to ask yourself before you are waiting at the bus station. We spent the day roaming around New York looking at the window displays and people watching. We didn’t really have any concrete plans, just some general ideas as to where Macy’s and a few other notable stores with windows displays were located.

Mid afternoon we were starting to get tired and we head to the Port Authority Bus station to head back to New Jersey and we arrive at the bus platform 7 minutes after the bus is scheduled to leave. Unfortunately because it is Christmas, the bus schedule is on holiday hours which means that the next bus was in 2 hours time.

The funny thing (strange, not ha ha) was that we knew that it was a holiday schedule and we had a bus schedule with us but we did not bring it out of the fanny pack until seven minutes after the bus that we wanted to be on had left. Oops!


Keith’s unpublished entry from Sunday …
So we arrived here in New Jersey this afternoon and we have been taking it easy. The ride was a bit stressful, as the driving was in the fog for the last part. We watched a movie this afternoon and then braved the local store to pick up a few things to hold us over, orange juice, milk, cereal, and the Simpson’s Movie. I forgot the milk and went back into the store to get it while Deb waited and of course being the impulse shopper that I am I picked up the movie that was in the aisle next to the check out. I am sure that we’ll enjoy it tomorrow.

Right now we are watching some local TV programs and there was an advertisement for the Roy Jones Jr. fight, which takes place on January 19th. We will be back then and I am a big fan, so I got excited. I came right over to the laptop to check out the ticket prices. For the nosebleed sections way, way up in the rafters of Madison Square Gardens, the cheapest seats can be had for only $139. Of course I would love to be able to get the ring side seats but unfortunately I do not have a spare $21, 177 to get a seat. I guess I will have to wait until it gets replayed on the sports channel in a couple of months or maybe I’ll meet Donald Trump while we are here and we’ll be become instant friends and he’ll insist that we accompany him to the fight… and the dream continues.

In the Big Apple's Apple store

The Big Apple's famous fashion stores - Saks, Bergdorf Goodmand, Macy's, etc - have incredible Christmas window displays. Keith and I are on a walking tour to see them all, with a little stop in The Apple Store. There are hundreds of people here on the internet and playing games on Apple computers. 

Merry, merry Christmas! 

Christmas vacation

Yesterday, Lana (in Cameroon) and I talked on the phone to finalize things.

She said she is able to buy everything she needs in Cameroon. But she asked us to bring reading glasses - you know, the ones you can buy at any dollar store, the +1 or +1.5 magnification ones. They're pretty expensive in Cameroon and so cheap here, so we picked up a bagful at Dollarama.

She's also looking forward to a much-needed Christmas vacation, as she's been busy teaching 400 students. One of her classes has 200 students in it!

First leg down

We are just outside New York City, after driving down this morning to complete the first leg of our trip. We will spend a few days here, thanks to my generous aunt who has lent us her apartment, and then fly out of JFK to Doula, Cameroon on Dec. 26.


My entire family celebrated Christmas last night - full dinner, the reading of the Christmas story, gifts under the tree for the grandkids. It was really nice we were able to get together before we left.


Not sure yet how Keith and I will spend Christmas Day, but it could include heading into New York City for the day and / or a homemade taco dinner. That's my kind of Christmas!

Learning the lay of the land

Ever the journalist, I have been picking up bits and pieces about Cameroon. Today I came across a site about Kamtok, a pidgin English or creole language spoken in Cameroon. I love how languages can merge, evolve and stretch until only the barest resemblance to the original language remains. Check it out here.

The site also gives the briefest overview of the country:

Cameroon has quite a small population (c. 15.5 million) for its size (475,440 square kilometres), but almost half of its people are under 14, so the population is likely to rise by between 2.5% and 3% per annum.

Cameroon has large stretches of fertile land, producing good quality cocoa, coffee, tea and bananas. It also has substantial deposits of oil and bauxite.

The country shares borders with Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and it has a 400 kilometre coastline on the Bight of Biafra. Because of its position at the "hinge of Africa" and because of its geographical and ethnic diversity, Cameroon has often been referred to as "Africa in miniature".

No one is certain exactly how many languages are spoken in Cameroon but government publications suggest 200, which can be subdivided into perhaps 25 major groups. The official languages are French and English with Arabic also having high prestige.

Education is prized and at least 60% of the population is literate. The percentage is much higher in urban areas and lower among older rural women. All education is through the medium of either English or French and all young people are expected to be bilingual in the countries official languages. Approximately 50% of the population continues to follow their animist traditional religions, while 33% are Christian and 17% Muslim.

Internet access

We are not sure how much access we will have to the internet. To be honest, we are not sure about a lot of things. That's part of the adventure.

While cruising the internet, I happened across a blog written by an American woman living in Cameroon. We've been corresponding and it turns out she knows Lana! Small, small world. Reading her posts have given us a real insight into how things work over there.

She writes:
"Everyone who can has more than one cellphone. You sit down in a bar and on the table are beer bottles and a pile of mobile phones.Why? So that you can still be in touch when one of the networks inevitably breaks down. I bought my second SIM card within two months of arriving here in Cameroon. MTN, my first network, was virtually out of commission for an entire month.
Here's another great one -- for about 36 hours up until about an hour ago I couldn't get on the Internet. Why? There was a fault on *the* satellite that provides Internet access to Cameroon (and I bet several other countries as well). One satellite for the entire country. It had a problem, we grind to a halt."

Why Cameroon Pt. II

Deb asked me the other day what I wanted to get out of this trip and I thought about it for a bit and I said I want another pin in my world map. This map is only in my head right now as my old one got lost during one of my many moves. I knew that I had one when I came to this city in 91 but I have lived in a dozen different places since then.

The map was a poster sized and it was kept with my poster of Sid Vicious. Those two posters traveled with me to all of the sites that I worked at in Saudi Arabia. There were little red dots all over North America where I had either worked, visited or lived including the sites in the Arctic that I worked at. There were also little red dots for the dozen or so countries that I have visited.

I have grown up a bit since then and I think I have outgrown the poster of Sid (but I still have the Sex Pistols CDs). Maybe now is time to get a new world map. This trip just may be the start of a new round of traveling for me and my beautiful wife.

I need to get some pins too.

Why Cameroon?

The easy answer is, of course, why not? What’s to stop us? The two-day travel to get there? The prohibitive costs? Not speaking the language? Snake bites? Malaria? Cerebral meningitis? Yellow fever? Bah!

We’ll be going to visit a good friend of mine from high school. Lana is one of the most interesting people I know, a real people person, able to cultivate genuine, long-lasting friendships with just about every person she meets. Not content with living the good life in Toronto working for a large software company, she decided to drop everything and travel around the world for a year. Six months later, she was still in Australia, not far from where she had started. She had made so many new friends she didn’t want to leave. Did I mention she’s a people person?

Fast forward six years later and she has worked and lived in Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and a few other countries I am sure I am forgetting. And now Cameroon.

She’s volunteering for an NGO for two years, teaching at a secondary school in a village in the remote Far North province.

Keith and I plan to spend some time with her at her home, travel a bit with her and then travel a bit on our own. We have a month, but things in Africa move slooooowly, so hopefully that will be enough time for us to experience some culture, enjoy the scenery and come back with fabulous photos and stories to share with friends and family.

Change in weather

We've had an incredible amount of snow in this part of Canada recently, and there is more to come. On Sunday morning, the chairs and table in our backyard had piles of snow on them. By early afternoon, it was a limitless snowscape with a few bumps reminding us where our chairs and table were buried underneath.

But soon! - http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/5day.shtml?world=1147

Packing rehearsal

Keith and I went over everything we need to bring on this trip - clothes, bathing suits, medication, first aid kit, footwear, camera equipment - and laid it all out on the living room floor. And then we brought out the boxing gloves.

I threw a pair of zip-off pants and a toothbrush into my bag and declared myself officially packed. "Look at all this extra room!" I crowed. "Lots of room for souvenirs!"

Keith, the consummate boy scout, prefers to over-prepare. His backpack is double the size of mine, containing everything he thinks we could possibly need, including two first aid kits. Imagine! Two? Why would you bring even a bandaid when a banana leaf and some sticky spit would do the job?

We all know that before the end of this trip, I will be sneaking into his pack to "borrow" a few items.

Who's worried about pickpocketers?

Yikes!

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/1999/08/11/cameroon990811.html

Here's the full story:
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/21/the-strangest-disaster-of-the-20th-century/

Please, feel free to strip-search

Because Cameroon is primarily a French-speaking country, I am taking a French course this fall & winter. Actually, I take a French course just about every winter, but the upcoming trip is a good excuse to not miss a year. So, every week, language training takes over for three hours online, and three in the classroom.

Keith and I have plans to spend most of our time in English-speaking areas (formerly British Cameroon), but brushing up on la francais is not a bad idea, because I use the word “plan” pretty loosely here. We may just find ourselves in some French-speaking parts of the country.

This current French course has been very relevant as all lessons are travel-related. We started out on the road, in our car, then we were promoted to planes and trains. This week, we are working our way through the customs portion of our online lessons. Because my French is good enough to get by in a stumbly, poor-use-of grammar way, I’ve been pleased to learn relevant and grammatically correct phrasing for use during interactions with customs officials, such as:

“Pourquoi ne fouillez-vous pas les autres?” (“Why aren’t you searching other people?”)

“Ai-je l’air d’avoir quelque chose a declarer?” (“Do I seem like I have something to declare?”)

And, “Vous etes sure de ne pas vouloir inspecter mes poches?” (“Are you sure you don’t want to inspect my pockets?”)

Yes, those are some of the phrases I learned this week. Grammatically correct or not, I really can’t picture myself saying these things to a Cameroonian customs officer. When I swagger up to the customs counter, I plan to proceed directly to, “I would like to be strip-searched, please.”

I’ll ask my French teacher how to say that.

Visas in hand

Yesterday Keith and I braved the winter weather to drive downtown in a snowstorm, back home, back downtown and back home again. All for a cute little stamp in our passport. We now have official permission to be in Cameroon from Dec. 27 until sometime in March.

Yes, we picked a winter storm to run some errands for our trip. Slip-sliding around the city to visit the Cameroonian High Commission, doctor's offices, pharmacies... throwing down hundreds of dollars on visa applications and malaria medication.

Today I would like to hole up in my basement and not spend a cent.