Our first trip in Cameroon

 We finally got a chance to travel a little and see some more of the country!  We got a full week off for Easter so we took advantage!

Travel in Cameroon is definitely a challenge.  Remember back when there was no internet and you had to figure things out by calling?  Well, Cameroon is still living in that time period.  Except you can add that Cameroonians seem to not like answering the phone much.  Christophe called a few hotels at least 20 times over a few days before someone answered and took our reservation!

Transportation is another adventure here.  In Tanzania, you always knew if you wanted a decent bus, you could go to the one good agency and buy a ticket.  Well, for some reason, that bus line doesn't exist here.  In fact, they don't even have the terrible bus line that you could go to!  No, to go to a certain city, you need to know someone who has gone to that city and can tell you which bus line goes there.  Every bus line in Cameroon goes on exactly one route, and they all leave from their own agency, so there is no central bus stop to go buy tickets from.  We lucked out that a colleague was able to recommend a bus line, and with only a little drama, we then had bus tickets.

I could go on and on: travel here is just absolutely insane.  You have to keep reminding yourself that no one is actually trying to sabotage tourism; it just ends up that way.  Our buses were stopped maybe 20–40 times over the week for various checks, and once we were pulled off the bus for what we assumed was nothing but police looking for a bribe.  We found a museum where three tickets would be more than the minimum monthly salary here and meals where it would take about 4 to hit the monthly minimum wage.  A guide for the day would easily be two months minimum wage.  Despite a ridiculous amount of effort to find things that theoretically existed, we never did manage to find a tourist information office.  And it wasn't just tourist information that didn't exist.  Most restaurants and tourist sites were closed and/or non-existent when you actually showed up. In the hotels, we had electricity about 80-90% of the time but running water only about 1/3 of the time.

I could keep complaining about the difficulties, but in reality, we had a great time.  It is sad that it is beautiful and interesting here, but for various reasons (some mentioned above...) there is virtually no tourism industry and no one gets to see this country.

We visited Dschang first (Which is pronounced nothing like it is written.  They blame the Germans for this pronunciation/spelling, but I'm not buying it).  We were warned it was freezing there and told to pack lots of sweaters and jackets.  I'm really glad we took this advice with a grain of salt because it was slightly less hot, but still never cool enough to put on even a long sleeved shirt... 

Dschang has an absolutely amazing 'museum of civilizations'. First it went through the history of Cameroon. The thing that really stood out to us was the violence of the war for independence. It was a bit of a guerilla war and, as is common in situations like that, the response involved harming a lot of innocents who happened to be in the way. We had heard the war here was bad, but this was the first time we learned more details. The modern part of the museum was broken down into the 4 main tribal/regional groups and explained the basics of the cultures. Cameroon has more than 240 tribes so it's incredibly diverse, but there are similarities and the museum gave us a great summary in starting to understand the differences across the country. 

The next step was Foumban. We chose this city because we have friends there! Unfortunately, they had a lot of work so we were a bit limited in time together, but we made the most of it. We got to visit their site (they have adorable piglets!), hang out in their favorite bar (I suspect not a typical Dubai bar) and meet some of the locals. We did feel a bit old when Cameroonians assumed that our friends were our children!  It was wonderful to see them!

Foumban was the home of a ridiculous museum. Ridiculous in terms of cost, but also the strangest looking museum you can imagine. We were perfectly happy to pay the reduced fee just to enter the courtyard and take photos of the spider/snake building! Foumban is also a great art center, so we spent lots of time exploring the little ateliers and talking with artists. Of course as volunteers, we couldn't really afford most of it, but it was fascinating anyway. And I loved seeing that parts of the culture have been preserved there. In Yaoundé (the capital), it sometimes feels like there are no longer any traditions at all, but they are alive and well in West Cameroon! We even heard local languages (which my students had told me none of them speak).  

After Foumban, we did a tour with our friends and got to see some chefferies and some sacred sites. The chefferies are fascinating. It's essentially a tribal chief, but they have been integrated as the lowest levels of the Cameroonian government so they serve a political role, but also a role preserving the traditions of each tribe. The chefferies are absolutely gorgeous, with carvings and paintings everywhere. The ones we visited also had museums, so we were able to learn more about how they functioned. (Some things we loved like the secret societies that preserve the traditional ceremonies, and others we were a little more concerned with like the potential chiefs that are killed because they haven't proved their virility with enough kids).

Overall, we were so glad we took the time and traveled. We managed to get a little time to read and relax and enjoy a bit of calm outside the big city.  And we also saw some things that we definitely hadn't experienced before in Cameroon. We are already discussing where we want to go next!