There’s a [now expired] urgent travel advisory on the U.S. State Dept. web site regarding Kenya. Seems that crime is totally out of control in Nairobi. So maybe I won’t even live long enough to worry about getting sick or taken hostage!

But there’s good news too. When I get to Cameroon, I’ll be the guest of my friend Rob at the U.S. Embassy. Rob looks after America’s business in the city of Douala. I’m sort of a guest of the Embassy. That is probably good, right?

And when I get back to Kenya then I’ll be the guest of my friend Iris at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy. She’s been there for about 35 years. Iris doesn’t have status as a diplomat but she sure has lots of experience with Africa’s ways.

I am in good hands in Africa! And as an added bonus, Iris has arranged a driver and a hotel for me during my overnight in Nairobi. Somebody is at the Nairobi airport holding a sign with my name.

It’s an overnight flight to London so there won’t be anything to see. But London-Nairobi is an all-day flight. I’ll get to see the Alps and the Sahara Desert from the air from my window seat! So I must try to sleep on the way to Heathrow.

Swiss Alps : January 17, 2007

Lightening doesn’t strike twice

My 747 is filled to the rafters with a very diverse set of passengers.

We flew over top of some unremarkable English and French clouds earlier but now we’re in the Alps. Oh! This view of the mountains is fantastic! And it comes complete with scattered picturesque mountain villages. At some point, these become the Italian Alps, which are just as good. Only I can’t help thinking that probably there ought to be more snow here in January. Global warming?

On out over the Mediterranean. There’s still too much cloud cover to fully appreciate the famous shoreline. Rome is a little ways off to our left. I’m looking right and we pass Malta. I sure do appreciate these GPS locater displays. How else would I know with confidence that I’m looking down at Libya? Sudan is next. Creepy country. By now the sun is setting and there isn’t really anything at all to see. But now I can say that I’ve sort of been to Sudan. Yikes!

The sunset is a fiery red in the direction of what my GPS display informs me are the Darfur Mountains. Hell on Earth is just a little ways over in that direction. 

[NOTE: Little did I know.. my diplomat friend gets posted next to Korea but then next after that he gets assigned to creepy Sudan! American civilians are not allowed to visit war-torn Sudan so this is as close as I’ll ever get.]

In back of the hotel / restaurant is dense foliage. That’s where the birds are. It’s very nice. And right inside the city, too! There’s a bar here that looks out onto it all. This hotel is a very comfortable place.

On the way back to my room there is a lizard walking along the wall. Fine, just as long as there are no snakes!

I think I should probably just stay in the hotel all day and catch up on little bits of work, in between naps. I wish they would hurry up and turn on the Internet!!! And I’m expecting calls from both Iris and Rob. I feel like another nap now.

She is down in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean today. She’s much closer to Somalia than me and all is quiet. I’m to be comforted knowing that the Somali Muslims are not causing very much trouble anyplace in Kenya and I am unlikely to be murdered on CNN. I’m not actually worried about that, just amused that my friends are fighting over how to divide my travel insurance payout when I’m dead.

Iris says she only wants to inherit this journal, which is fine. Iris also reports that there being an international conference going on this weekend in Nairobi, the police will have deployed extra undercover police. This causes the criminals to back off for a few days and so I will probably make it out of the country safely.

And Iris urges me to get to the airport in plenty of time because Kenya Airways is notorious for deliberately overbooking. Nairobi traffic at 5pm is likewise notorious and if I’m late then I’ll be out of luck.

So, first I call Pauline. The operator must place this call for me so I do it from the lobby. I ask her to come at 4:30 instead of 5:00 and she agrees …I’m pretty sure. It’s difficult to understand her clearly. Then I call the airline and they tell me I need to be there not two hours early but three hours early. So now I need to call Pauline again. I ask the nice lady at the hotel lobby to please talk to her, figuring they’ll speak in Swahili or something and it will go more easily. But they speak English.

Only now they’re abruptly disconnected. The clerk says, “Pauline hung up on me! I wonder why she did that.” I laugh and say, “Well, it’s a cell phone. I think she was just cut off. This happens to me all the time in Las Vegas and I’m not surprised there, so I’m sure not surprised here.” Pauline calls back, and gets cut off again. The clerk insists, “She hung up again.” Whatever.

Maybe I’ll just take the hotel’s own taxi – but somebody needs to tell Pauline not to come in that case. She waited for me 45 minutes at the airport last night. I’d rather go with Pauline. Three hours early for a flight is just ridiculous.

At lunch I’m seated near a couple that’s in a room across the hall from me. He looks Dutch. She looks Kenyan. I imagine him to be a retired mercenary or hit-man on the run from Interpol, and she is his sex slave. Something rough about them both, and not quite right. And some exceptionally well-dressed Kenyan men – either businessmen or government officials; and probably corrupt in either case. Maybe this is an underworld hangout …or maybe I’m just influenced by the Jeffrey Archer novel I’m reading at lunch.

I end up taking a hotel cab to the airport, after my hotel clerk finally is successfully able to speak to Pauline. I notice there are no stoplights, and barely any discernable order to the movement of vehicles and pedestrians. Seems to me that stoplights would help matters but my driver seems to think this is fine the way it is. He points out the national capitol building on our left and the very nice Uhuru Park on our right. He tells me that ‘uhuru’ means ‘freedom’ in Swahili.

At the airport, Kenya Airways annoys me further by requiring me to check both my suitcase and my duffle bag. Up to now, I at least had a few things in the duffle bag in case of any mishap (lost or stolen luggage). Now I’ve got nothing but my laptop.

…I digress.

I can’t find a sign displaying gate assignments so about an hour before the flight I ask at the Kenya Airways counter for my departure gate. Gate 4. At Gate 4 they’re actually leaving to Zanzibar and Dar Es Salaam and I’m told that I belong at Gate 9. At Gate 9 I need to do the whole metal detector thing in order to enter the waiting area. I guess they’re not very confident about being able to secure the airport as a whole so they do each set of passengers as they board.

Only as soon as I’m inside secure waiting area, they announce that the flight will now depart Gate 4 after all. Sigh. When I go back to Las Vegas, maybe I should wear metal-free slippers, and do without my belt, and give away all my coins to beggars. I’m getting tired of dealing with metal detectors.

Douala, Cameroon : January 19, 2007

First in Line VIP

I normally don’t stand up until the movement of traffic in the aisle has allowed me to actually begin to move but I realize this is an exceptional situation because I’m in the very front of the economy class and the business class in front is near empty and most of these people are not getting off here. So I can be first!

Leading all the other passengers, I walk down the ramp to the tarmac and I’ve already got a bad feeling. It’s dark and dingy and very un-airport-like. I’m directed to walk under an overhang and up some steps into a building that looks like a long-abandoned dilapidated warehouse which only days earlier has been restored to any semblance of usefulness. This place is an extraordinary mess! I wish I could take pictures but (1) somebody might think that I’m a terrorist plotting to blow it up, which is hilarious, and (2) besides the place is much too dark for picture-taking.

Unexpectedly, Rob has sent his regular driver for me. I’ve heard about him. Rob relies on him a lot. I forget his name but he’s holding a sign with my name printed on it. (And here, just by the way, I am the one and only passenger greeted by such a sign!) He takes my passport and goes to speak to the officers at the head of the passport control, and poof I’m special again and we are passed through to the (horrible looking) luggage area …where both my bags soon appear!!

Customs opens the larger of the two bags and looks inside for not quite one entire second and then we’re let outside into Cameroon. Bags are locked in the car and we go back. By this point I’m a little confused but it turns out Rob has arrived someplace else in the airport and we’re all going to meet up with the visa officer. Normally, you’re supposed to get your $100 Cameroonian visa before arrival into the country but it’s possible to get one issued at the airport under certain circumstances. Besides, the visa-issuing officer here turns out to be a friend of Rob. And Rob’s driver frequently greets officials here like they’re his best friends. Members of the U.S. Foreign Service are strictly forbidden to engage in bribery but there is no law against them being very, very friendly with the people who are in a position to make your job either easy or difficult. Everything goes easily and I get my visa stamped into my passport.

Rob takes me to his house, which is not very far. On the way, I notice that the highway is of surprisingly good quality. The house is in a wealthy neighborhood. Rob has told me that this is one of the most expensive cities in the world, for ‘ex-pats’ – Number 25 in the world. I don’t know if anybody understands the reason why it’s so expensive. Rob mentions how much the U.S. government pays annually to rent this house… but I’m reluctant to repeat the amount here. Douala is the commercial capital of the country and the largest city, and Rob is the only American Embassy official posted here.

As when I visited Rob in Haiti, there is a gate and a guard. He honks and the guard looks out and lets us in. The house is very big. and the backyard and pool are enormous. Rob has official parties here for a couple of hundred people at a time so it’s a good thing it’s big. My room is at the back. There are metal grates on all the windows and my bedroom door is of steel which I am advised to bolt shut at night. There is a mosquito net over my bed. Rob suggests that there is not really any reason to begin taking anti-malaria pills until after I get my first mosquito bite.

Traffic is better than usual, they tell me, and it hardly ever comes to a complete stop. There is a lot of commerce going on beside the road, and when traffic slows a lot of it spills out into the road, with young people waving all sorts of things available for sale. We buy some bags of nuts and some bananas. Both are excellent – tree ripened bananas are a lot better than those you get in an American grocery store (which are always picked green).

I’m horrified by the slabs of beef – or perhaps more likely Bush Meat – hanging in the open near the side of the road. Cameroonians seem to have very little appreciation for the problems caused by germs. Rob mentions that we’re passing an area that was recently hit by a bad outbreak of Cholera, with hundreds dead. And right away, there is a river. You mean there is cholera in that river right there? Yes. If not now, then recently.

[NOTE: Below, this will turn out to be my favorite photo from Cameroon – and on the very first day! Of course, that’s not counting anything to do with Angu Walters which turns out to be life-changing for us all. This dreamy photo captures something about Cameroon, that proverbial “1000 words”]

The people insist on believing that if only water is clear then it can’t cause them any problems. And they ridicule anybody who says differently as being “too white.”

Sounds like the root of their problem may be education. We pass lots of children in their school uniforms. I comment that these kids would not make it in Haiti, where the school children dress astoundingly well. No Haitian parent would allow these children out of the house dressed like this. (Every other thing in their lives is horrible but Haitians always dress well for school.) And we pass a school which looks to me like a poorly-maintained barnyard. I must try to get a picture of one of these schools.

Leaving the city, we enter a sparsely populated jungle. There are some beautiful views here. I notice a lot of logging trucks. They each carry just three or four thick trunks. I’m sure they’re extremely valuable rainforest hardwood. Probably coming from the Central African Republic, Rob says. In Cameroon, logging is very restricted and that explains why the rainforest is looking good here, at least from this highway. No problem of deforestation – which has pretty well destroyed Haiti among other places. The logs are being taken to the big port at Douala.

It’s a dangerous road and we frequently see signs indicating “3 morts ici” or even “27 morts ici.” It’s only the one winding lane in each direction most places. Rob says it was supposed to be built as a much safer divided highway, with two lanes in each direction but when it was opened then everybody was surprised to find that half of it was missing. Government ministers stole the other half of this most important highway in the country, and so crippled the economy for years to come.

 Yaoundé, Cameroon : January 19, 2007

Arriving in the Capital City

All along the way from Douala we have passed a big blue bus about every half hour. Rob is thrilled by each and every one of them. The busses are made in China and operated by an American company. Each bus has a stewardess who serves snacks and drinks, and the buses leave every hour on the hour regardless of whether they’re full or not. Passengers are even required to wear seat belts. Besides improving links between the commercial and political capitals of Cameroon, they’re a significant step forward here toward a more orderly society.

(Haiti has no busses, not even any cabs. Public transportation is handled solely by a bizarre system of privately owned pickup trucks with passenger seating in the back, and this poor system is among a large number of reasons why that economy never develops.) This new bus system is of world-class quality and Rob is excited for me to see the bus station in Yaoundé. It’s on the edge of the city, as busses are not allowed in the city center, which seems to us like a mistake.

We make our way to the U.S. Embassy passing the French Embassy, which is very plain, though big. The Canadian Embassy is so little that I barely notice it even when it’s pointed out to me.

The French Embassy in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Below. It doesn’t look anything like a typical embassy:

Douala, Cameroon : January 20, 2007

A Night in Havana

After dinner we go out to a local restaurant / bar / bakery called Havana. It would be considered a classy place anywhere, and especially here. The manager is a Lebanese friend of Rob’s. Conversation seems to keep coming back around to the trouble with Cameroonians. Rob likes them well enough but not nearly as well as he liked Haitians. And we all laugh at stories of how poorly treated the customers used to be under the previous management in this place. Rob claims that one time he came in and sat down and the waitress just sat there staring at him angrily in the apparent hope that her open hostility would compel him to leave and she wouldn’t have to do any work.

This conversation was prompted in part by our observations after asking our waitress for an Amarula with Kahlua. First, she makes clear her disapproval of my order (presumably simply because she never heard of it before); then when I offer an apology for my poor French she agrees that it’s poor with rather impolite promptness and certainty; then she comes back and tells me they are out of both Amarula and Kahlua. Her manager jumps in at this point and tells her that’s plain wrong and she should not be so lazy and just go and get the bottles from the back if they don’t have any more in front. Eventually, she comes back with a small glass of Amarula, which is about close enough. All of this behavior is regarded as 100% typical of Cameroonians’ assorted character flaws.

Add to that, they don’t like white people. Any white people. Rob says if he wants a good price for something he always sends his maid. Her price is a lot better. (Her name is Marie Claire. Every time I hear her name I think of a pastry named Mare.) Rob tells one story of buying something. The maid was with him and she objected that she knew the real price to be much lower. That’s when owner made clear that he would prefer not to sell the item to a white person at all, felt he was compromising his principles, that selling to whites is degrading. So it’s all much more deeply weird than just trying to charge as much as it’s believed that the customer can afford to pay.

I get to bed at about midnight – and without one single nap today. I’m completely in the right time zone!

Southwest Province, Cameroon : January 21, 2007

A Day at the Beach

The beach is close by, in the direction of Nigeria. And they speak English over there, unlike here in the Littoral province.

Cameroon is officially bilingual. The president doesn’t speak a word of English and there are large regions of this small country where he has never bothered to visit. In polite terms, he is considered to be ‘aloof’ by certain ‘restive’ elements of the population. Particularly the English-speaking elements. The Southwest Province had the opportunity at one time to be joined with Nigeria. They would have preferred independence. Instead, they got piled in over here with the French.

[This whole English vs. French thing became far worse in later years and is referred to as the Anglophone Crisis.]

I had no idea what a rubber plantation would look like. Turns out, the trees are quite narrow. Each tree has a small cup attached, and that’s what collects the sap – much like maple syrup.

Each of the banana bunches has a blue bag with lots of holes tied around. Somehow, this improves the quality of the banana but I don’t know how exactly. Its run by the Del Monte company. Their quality standards are very high and very specific.

Children get to come and collect the sub-standard bananas. Rob said there was a minor scandal hereabouts, allegations of child labor, but there was nothing to it. Busy-body do-gooders. Del Monte pays their workers well and if children come onto their property and take away the left-over bananas to benefit their families then it’s no fault of the company’s.

The dust in the air is real bad for picture-taking today (not so good for my throat, either). So Mount Cameroon is hard to see. It’s a surprise when the road makes an abrupt detour at the point where the last lava flow ended in 1999. The 4th photo before is from Wikipedia just so you (and me!) can see what it really looks like. Recall, pretty soon I’ll be at Mt Kenya, Africa’s second highest mountain.

It’s getting late and we absolutely must return to Douala before dark. It’s not safe to drive at night… err, well, it’s never actually safe to drive here. But it’s markedly less safe to drive in the dark. And it’s against the embassy’s policy to drive outside of the city after dark.

However, we do have time for a quick stop at a café in another absolutely beautiful place. Really unbelievable.

We cross a stream over a bridge and ahead we can see affordable beachside vacation cabins. At the end of the short road is a little café teetering at the edge of a vertical cliff. The view is spectacular.

Douala, Cameroon : January 22, 2007

Chillin’

Rob went to work and I spent my day catching up on my own work, and catching up this journal. Only two things happened. A lot of kids came over from the American School to practice swimming. They came in two or three shifts. It was so noisy here!

Then Rob took me to lunch at a swanky Chinese restaurant. The Chinese owner is a good friend of Rob’s. She ran up and kissed him – not those fancy French cheek kisses – but smack on the lips. He’s sure she’s not just after a visa, she’s been to the USA before. She told me she was not very impressed by Texas.

Here are somephotos of this big house, and the neighborhood. Best neighborhood in Douala. Foreign service officers are provided free housing. The more difficult the country is to live in (and difficult to draw officials) the better the housing.

Here are many more photos that I took up to this point. You can click on the first photo to enlage it and then jump from one large photo to the next.