Wazaaaaaaaa

Last week, Keith and I spent a day in Waza National Park.

 

It was an interesting ride to the park, about 2 hours from the city we were staying in. Our guide, Hamadou, was very informative. There were cyclists all along the route with gas cans loading down their bikes. He told us they all get together, strap their bikes and gas cans to the top of a van and drive 90 km to Nigeria every evening. There, they fill up with cheap gas and cycle back (90km!) all night so they can then sell the gas in Cameroon. As we left the park that evening, we saw the vans and cyclists heading back out to Nigeria. (Now that we are in Limbe, we have discovered the same thing goes on here, but being on the ocean, the journey is done by boat).

 

So, Waza! It's a difficult time of year to see elephants and lions because we are just entering the hot season, when they congregate at water holes. So, we were unable to find any. But we found lots of giraffes! Lots and lots of families of giraffes. They are so gangly and watched us as much as we watched them. We also watched warthogs watering at a pond, lots of weird antelopes and deer-like creatures (we had never heard of a kob, for example), and lots of very large cranes. Those suckers were as tall as my waist and not skinny, either. Keith says their wing spanned about 6ft. We will show you video!

 

Although we didn't see lions or elephants, we saw tracks. Does that count? The elephant tracks were pretty dry which made for a very bumpy ride. Imagine a herd of elephants walking over mud or clay, then the earth drying their tracks. That's what we drove over. The lion's paw print we saw was as large as Keith's hand span.

 

Yesterday we went to Limbe's wildlife centre, a small primate zoo just around the corner from our hotel. It's really well-run and well-maintained, housing gorillas, chimpanzees, drills, madrills, monkeys, baboons and some other animals. I liked watching the chimps check each other's eyes and teeth very carefully. One used a stick to drag leaves from the other side of the electric fence. The baby drills were about 7 inches tall and so mischevious. Drills are native to Cameroon and are an endangered species.

 

We also saw the four gorillas which were brought back to Cameroon from South Africa at the

end of November. They are quarantined for three months, so right now they are living in a separate cage with a big "Welcome back to Cameroon!" banner over their home.