In this trip, we (ie Ramesh and I) were visiting two countries -- Cameroun and Niger, both in West Africa. As usual, connectivity between Dubai and these places is a problem and on the penultimate day, we ended up flying Air France all the way and transitting Paris three times and Casablanca once. Out of this extended journey, the silver lining seemed to be an overnight halt (forced) at Paris, which would enable us to see a bit of the city.
I'd left Muscat on the evening of the 3rd, changing at Dubai to a flight for Paris (and being joined by Ramesh there). We landed at Paris airport at 6.00 am and caught a 10.00 am flight to Douala, the commercial capital of Cameroun. Although we saw on the net before leaving that Paris was running fairly cold at 7 degC, we were in no way prepared for the freezing temperatures in the AF flights themselves - these goras must be really cold-blooded! I still had a jacket on, but Ramesh had to contend with the thin shawls handed out in-flight.
Since I had just turned vegeterian, I was wondering what sort of fare the AVML on flight would dish up. They turned out to be quite decent, with rice, koobs and curries for the main meals and pri-bhaji for breakfast. International flights have tuned in now to the idiosynchracies of Indians, I'm sure.
We landed at Douala at 6.00 pm and were met at the airport by a local customer. We had already planned to proceed straightaway to Yaounde, the capital of Cameroun. The customer advised us to undertake this 3-1/2 hour journey by bus instead of by private taxi as the roads were not totally safe. There is no state-run public transport system and we availaed of the services of 'Guaranti' to take us to Yaounde. We slept most of the way, were met by another customer at Yaounde around 10.00 pm and were promptly taken to a Chinese dinner. We were looking quite like scallawags after 24 hours of travel and a day's growth of beard, but courtesy has to be followed! We finally checked in to Hotel Mont Febe (situated on a hill with beautiful greenery all around) at midnight.
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At first sight, Cameroun seemed to be very green, with lots of fruit trees. The view from the road of the surrounding countryside, with small houses and bunches of banana and palm-trees, was very reminiscent of the countryside of Bengal and Tamil Nadu! It's a huge country; population must be over 50 million. Having been a French colony at one time, French is the common language, although English is fairly well-understood. Most of the population is Christian, so the anticipation of Christmas is in the air and the austerities of Ramadan are observed privately by the Muslim citizens.
On the morning of the 5th, we left straightaway for Bafoussam, another town a 3-hour drive away. We spent the day there, visiting the market, and returned again at 9.00 pm. At 9.30 pm, a customer landed up on schedule and we went for dinner -- at the same Chinese joint! The day, in fact the touring till now, had been pretty tiring, although the drive to Bafoussam was very nice, through rolling greenlands and jungle stretches, all a-blossom with winter flowers. We had a hearty dinner, having had a lunch of only cake, juice and groundnuts. Our customer was feeling a little limited in hospitality, as he was not being able to ply us with liquor or load us with tasty non-veg dishes, but ultimately he and his wife more than made up the deficit in food intake.
Overall I found Camerounians very friendly and not with any hang-ups at all. Unlike other African countries where auto spare markets would be serious stretches of road doing intense business in spares, here in Yaounde and Bafoussam, auto shops would jostle among beer-bars, or the occasional 'Casino Royale', or be rapping pistons with music-system repair shops booming out ragge. A lot of bustling activity without loitering. Bubbles of 'Coiffeur' shops, even open-air, with ladies changing their hairstyles from Unspeakable-1 to Mind-zapping-3 with intense concentration! The men are jolly folks, some well-educated and qualified. We met a middle-aged man nursing a beer in a shop who, on hearing that we lived in a sheikdom, held forth for ten minutes on the evils of absolutism and how the tendency has dissolved in Britain to a benevolent system now. He compared the despotism of African governments to fiefdoms of yore and said that personal ill-wills were now being equated to the illness of the state, which was not justified. "Govt falls," he said, "but the State? The State lives on....The State is but the house, which the governing bodies come and occupy for some time, and go again ..... just as your body is just the house, which your soul occupies for some time and again goes forth --". At that point we left. Cameroun was too far a distance to travel to and listen to beer-slurred Vedanta!
Today we went around the Yaounde market which occupied us fully from 9.00 am to 6.00 pm. This is a break for writing this journal entry. We are of course expecting a customer to come and take us to dinner - hopefully not at the same Chinese place!
PS - Well, we finally went to an Italian place. Restaurants and nightclubs are very popular at Yaounde and people boogie till dawn at weekends. We declined the offer of nightclubs boogiing and had legume soup and veg pizza at L'Atlantic. Their pizza was bit of an effort actually. It was practically topping on a chapati, so thin was the crust. One whole piece, you are expected to cut it with knife and fork and eat. Very dissatisfying, eating pizza like this. May be authentic Italian, for all we know.
Overall I found Camerounians very friendly and not with any hang-ups at all. Unlike other African countries where auto spare markets would be serious stretches of road doing intense business in spares, here in Yaounde and Bafoussam, auto shops would jostle among beer-bars, or the occasional 'Casino Royale', or be rapping pistons with music-system repair shops booming out ragge. A lot of bustling activity without loitering. Bubbles of 'Coiffeur' shops, even open-air, with ladies changing their hairstyles from Unspeakable-1 to Mind-zapping-3 with intense concentration! The men are jolly folks, some well-educated and qualified. We met a middle-aged man nursing a beer in a shop who, on hearing that we lived in a sheikdom, held forth for ten minutes on the evils of absolutism and how the tendency has dissolved in Britain to a benevolent system now. He compared the despotism of African governments to fiefdoms of yore and said that personal ill-wills were now being equated to the illness of the state, which was not justified. "Govt falls," he said, "but the State? The State lives on....The State is but the house, which the governing bodies come and occupy for some time, and go again ..... just as your body is just the house, which your soul occupies for some time and again goes forth --". At that point we left. Cameroun was too far a distance to travel to and listen to beer-slurred Vedanta!
Today we went around the Yaounde market which occupied us fully from 9.00 am to 6.00 pm. This is a break for writing this journal entry. We are of course expecting a customer to come and take us to dinner - hopefully not at the same Chinese place!
PS - Well, we finally went to an Italian place. Restaurants and nightclubs are very popular at Yaounde and people boogie till dawn at weekends. We declined the offer of nightclubs boogiing and had legume soup and veg pizza at L'Atlantic. Their pizza was bit of an effort actually. It was practically topping on a chapati, so thin was the crust. One whole piece, you are expected to cut it with knife and fork and eat. Very dissatisfying, eating pizza like this. May be authentic Italian, for all we know.
Douala: 6.12.2001
Today we left Youande in the morning and travelled by bus again back to Douala, reaching around 1.30 pm.
Cameroun countryside is indeed beautiful. It's not a flatland and very often our bus was travelling on single-track roads between fairly steep embankments, with tall grasses and shrubs leaning in to form overhangs. We crossed a few small rivers that feed this fertile land. When we had gone to Youande, we had crossed a big river called the Uri. People here are fairly well-fed and not unhappy with the president who has been ruling now for the last 20 years or so.
However, for a land so rich in timber, we could also see signs of systematic denudation by French companies who seem to have taken large concessions on land. Long trailers laden with timber would often block our bus and nearer to Douala we could see large patches of hillside bereft of vegetation. At this rate, in another 20 years or so, the ground will be bare.
We had left Youande in the morning in a bit of hurry on two counts. Firstly, Hotel Mont Febe was hosting some African country's summit that very day and senior officials from various countries were expected. All the roads leading up to the hotel were festooned with flags and we wanted to push off before all the roads started to get blocked. This happends to me regularly on tours - once in Mauritius and again in Arusha. Secondly, we had seen a news flash on CNN in the morning that Air France ATC staff had started a 36-hour strike. This had the potential to disrupt schedules and since we were scheduled to fly to Paris next night with a connection to Niamey, all our plans had a high chance of being jeopardised. Anyway, we finally caught the bus straightaway without checking with AF, as we thought that AF Douala may have updated news later in the day.
The bus journey by 'Guarantee Express', like earlier, was around 3 hours, and being by day, was quite enjoyable. In terms of maintenance and looks, it was more or less like 'Pallavan Transport' buses of Chennai. "Only the people are different", said Ramesh. The tickets had our names and the suitcases were stowed in the hold with luggage tags whose counterfoils were stapled to our tickets! Ultimately the bus was full-up and a lady with stocks of eatables and drinkables (a sort of Guarantee air-hostess) also boarded the bus and travelled all the way in order to provide necessary nourishment, although at a cost. Somewhere in the middle of the journey, a travelling salesman selling some red-coloured herbal concoction in bottles also boarded. First he distributed some printed material so that people could follow his pitch and then he held the captive audience spell-bound with a one-hour discourse on the hopelessness of their lives without this divine tomato ketchup and how having dollops of it regularly will clean up their bowels and their souls. So successful was he that his stock was practically sold out by the time he had answered all queries at the end of his presentation.
The travellers on the bus were, surprisingly, mostly single. I think safety-wise this mode of transport ranks high and a lot of single ladies were also travelling. Camerounian ladies are very dress and figure-concious. Dresses are uniformly bright and cut to style, with mini-skirts quite popular amongst teenagers. I think that with most African females, the ability to attract physically is a major source of security for them and their dress and behaviour is strongly oriented towards this. On the other hand, when going around the auto spare shops, we found women managing or helping in the running of business in a large number of places. Possibly they have a good head for business, but have this irritating propensity of suddenly turning coy and giggly in the middle of business discussions. Unless they sort out this schizophrenia, women's lib will take a long time to evolve in this country.
We checked with the AF office at Douala and were told that flights should be normal by tomorrow evening. Incidentally, Ramesh, my co-traveller, has a terrible track-record of things going wrong on tour. Either flights would get cancelled, or they would leave without him, or his luggage would go to another country, or he would not be allowed entry. He had already warned me before departure, but I had assured him of a stock of good-luck with me. This AF scare seemed to be Ramesh's 'devil' trying to gain an upper hand, and if things revert to normal, it may be my good-luck doing its bit. We'll see tomorrow.
We had lunch at a roadside restaurant. The first important French word I had learnt on this trip was 'legume' meaning vegeterian. "Only legume in sandwich, understand?" we'd tell the waitress sternly. Their sandwich turned out to be a footlong bread, longitudinally sliced and filled with mayonnaise and tomato/onion mixture. This, washed down with guava juice, was indeed a simple and nice meal. We had been met at the bus stand by a couple of employees of a customer, and their lunch was a sumptuous fish-and-rice affair, washed down with cold beer. Luckily they were sitting at another table.
We visited the spare parts market in the rest of the afternoon. Although Douala seemed to have a fair number of goras, we still stuck out like a sore thumb in this uniformly African environment. But in terms of security, Douala is cake-walk compared to Lagos or Nairobi.
Speaking of Lagos, the business of Cameroun is well-dominated by Nigerians, a lot of them having settled here 20-30 years earlier. Nigerians have a very strong head for business. The locals are comparatively easygoing and find it difficult on the ethical front to deal with Nigerian aggression.
Our customer, a group of three, landed up at 8.30 pm to take us to dinner - Italian again! Chinese or Italian: the cuisine here seemed to be split on a chopping block. Scanning expertly through the Italian menu (ie looking for words I knew) I settled on a 'Sphagetti Neopolitaine', which was noodles with tomato sauce.
It is a fact that this tour did wonders for my appreciation of food. On the one hand we were always eating light, so we were always quite hungry at mealtimes. Moreover, the choice of simple veg dishes made me identify and appreciate flavours and sensations I had never bothered to feel earlier. When having the 'sandwich' for lunch, the crunch of the freshly-cut onions in the mayonnaise was very satisfying. The tomato-sauce mix in the sphagetti would otherwise have passed my tongue unappreciated. But being the only condiment on the background of plain pasta, I could clearly make out its components of garlic and onion paste and a dash of something like Worcestershire sauce. It is true that enjoyment is purely a matter of expectation and of being totally aware of the sensations passing through the system at that point of time.
After some ice-cream at a parlour, we were driving back to the hotel (it was around 11.00 pm) when our driver suddenly stopped the car. I realised that it was one of those police checks where they verify identity cards and passports. I also realised that I had forgotten to carry my passport with me.
I was the last person to be asked. As soon as the policeman (MP) realised that I had no passport, he opened the door near me, told me to get down and walked me to a police van parked nearby. One of the three loacls also descended from the car and stayed with me. The others zipped back to the hotel to fetch my passport.
It was quite a dark road, although with traffic. After a while the MP asked me to get inside the van. His patience was running out, maybe with me not at all reaching for my wallet, and he prepared to take me to the police station. Stephen, the local guy standing outside, requested him to wait a little longer and told the others on mobile to hurry up. After another couple of minutes, in spite of my earnest mental discussions with him, the MP drove off with me, leaving Stephen, my only link with the local world here, out on the road. My only worry was whether these guys would know which particulat police station I would be taken to. I guess the MP told Stephen.
The police station was a barren affair, with a counter under a staircase. The other policeman on duty was asking me in broken English why I was brought here and started to write my name laboriously on a scrap of paper, maybe his idea of a booking form. Finally I wrote it for him. In the meanwhile some superior officer in local costume was passing by and asked me whether I had entered the country legally! As if many people would smuggle their way into this paradise! At that moment my passport arrived and was duly scrutinised (considerably helped by me) for the validity of my visa. The policeman on duty then wanted to see my 'Immunisation Card'! I ask you! That was also at the hotel and I had to convince him that the immigration authorities at the airport would not have let me in if I had not been carrying the card at the airport. All this in broken English and pantomime, mind you! At this point they apparently decided enough was enough (or maybe some money changed hands on the road outside) and they let me go.
Ramesh was waiting outside with the others, quite worried. Actually, harassment in a case like this can go to any extent, including a night in jail. But throughout the incident my tension-level was fairly low. Worried, yes - whether the others would know my whereabouts, whether they would be able to locate my passport in their haste, whether I'll get into some complication from which they will find it difficult to extricate me, etc. But definitely I was able to face the situation with much more equinamity than earlier and at no point did the policemen seem scary. I would like to lay the credit at the door of the kriya that I was doing regularly.
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