Disco Inferno

In one day, Guy, Elvis and two of Elvis’ friends, Patrick and Fredi, I did a rather grueling circuit across the southwest of Cameroon. As well as seeing the boats loaded for Nigeria in Idenau, we also stopped at a place where the 2000 eruption of mount Cameroon destroyed a large swath of farmland and roads, and visited a ~50 person fishing village named Dibunscha. These destinations were reached after the long drive from Douala to Buea to Limbe, so in short, it was a long day of travel.
However, it was also my last night in Cameroon and Guy was set on making it a good one. So after checking into a hotel in Buea, which turned out to be another Hotel Sans Eau, we were going out to the local disco. We’d be joined by his friends Lucy and Jeannine. I was a little self conscious, knowing we were going to a disco. I had no idea how developed or fancy things could get, after all, we were in a pretty small town in the middle of Africa, but I didn’t like the idea of going to a club in my backpacker clothes. When I travel, I take lightweight, compact, fast-drying clothes and chant in my head a little mantra a la The Fresh Prince in Parents Just Don’t Understand: “You see the world to learn, not for a fashion show.”
There wasn’t enough time for me to procure any nicer threads, so in my hiking boots, zip-off pants, and nicest REI buttondown, I was heading to a disco.
We spent a couple hours in Jeannine’s apartment before leaving, listening to more Cameroonian music. There was so much of it that I liked, though Guy and his friends seemed to be set on a genre that all had a very similar beat, almost akin to the Bo Diddley Beat, and with vocals that sounded like aggressive shouting, similar to Dancehall Reggae. It was beginning to sound all the same to me. I longed for some Makossa, and to get to some air conditioning if it was to be had, or a beer at the very least.
On the way out that night, I was introduced to Guy’s girlfriend, Olivie. I’d heard she existed, but found it hard to believe, the way Guy followed every woman with a significant backside, crotch first. He’d often make the shape of an hourglass with his hands, but his eyes out and say “I liiiike!” Every town we visited, he was busy collecting phone numbers and attempting to make plans later in the night which never came to fruition. But I had to respect the guy’s persistence and unflagging enthusiasm.
Olivie was incredibly cute and friendly, though one of the first things she said to me was “Guy doesn’t want to go with me anymore!” It seemed a crime, and I offered my condolences. So Olivie walked off, and we got in a cab to go find Elvis.

Elvis and the boys in Idenau

Elvis was posted at a bar with the other guys, and two new girls. Both college age, far younger than any of the men present.
“You know what I love, Adam?” Elvis asked. I knew the answer. “Women! They make me so happy! Even if I can’t fuck!” Elvis made a gesture with his fist and forearm. I assumed he meant because he was married, but I was pretty certain that it hadn’t held him back in the past. I concurred, of course, and we slapped hands, did the Cameroon handshake, and Elvis carried on in a torrent of belly laughter.
Together, with the two new girls, the whole posse headed down the road to a bar. ”Here you will see how the African woman dance!” Elvis shouted.
We approached a bar with a sign that read Zanzibar and had a chalkboard propped up in the dirt parking lot which said in French that there were people from Cote d’Ivoire present that night. Walking in, there were 6 lone men at tables and one hefty woman in a white tank top lip synching to an African song on a stage illuminated by one bare bulb.
Beers were procured, and Guy took me outside.
“Oh Adam, I wish I could be you!”
“Why is that?”
“I have big problems tonight. I want to, you know, with Jeannine or maybe Lucy, but because you wished Olivie could be with me, now she will be here!”
I had no intent to salt his game… I was just offering my condolences! Guy said he was worried about having to balance the conversations, and was worried if one of the other girls tried to kiss him in front of Olivie. I told him that I would help keep the other girls chatting so that it wouldn’t happen. It’s tough juggling language, conversational niceties, and some other guy’s fraternization!
It turned out that the dancing at Zanzibar was to be watched rather than participated in. Our group made up the bulk of the audience, and the women lip synching got progressively more suggestive as the night went on. One woman in a white Chinglish tanktop and short, high-waisted white shorts was the clearly most skilled dancer. Over the course of her songs, she abandoned the mic and incorporated some kind of combination of typical African dance as well as some incredibly suggestive moves like a stipper would perform.
The crowd went wild, with the women in our crowd doing the majority of the whooping and hollering, and of course, endless enthusiasm from Elvis.
“Oh my god! Man, can you believe this?! I love it! Look buttocks!! I love buttocks!!”
The dancer took to the floor of the stage and thrust her hips as if there were an invisible man below her. Jeannine jumped up and tucked a small bill in her shorts. Elvis and I did the handshake.
Everyone seemed to ignore it when, after her last song, the dancer caught a heel on the tattered red carpet on the stage and completely landed on her ass.
When Olivie arrived, she sat next to me and we chatted. I remember looking over as the big-bellied waitress, dressed in tight pink jeans with the belt undone to give her some breathing room, and a missed belt loop in back laughed when she received an ass-grab from one of Elvis’ friends. Seeing my shock, Olivie asked, “Not like your country?” No, not at all.
Guy seemed to spend the evening nervously loping around the room, avoiding all of the girls, and sucking on a small box of wine.
As it turned out, the performance at Zanzibar was a bit like a striptease, though without the stripping, and the girl in white came over to tell me she loved me before standing upright and immediately slamming my forehead so hard with her pubic bone that I saw stars and my glasses were knocked someplace behind me. After a short and incredibly rough performance, she returned to her friends and left me to pick up my pieces. I felt like a truck hit me and just kept going.
But apparently Zanzibar was just a bar and after that we were to go to Jupiter, the local dance club. Outside, the scene was just an African version of the same thing one might see at a western disco. Men looking tough, women looking sexy, moto taxis swarming around, tables with beers on them visible in the outdoor courtyard.
Guy’s nerves and consumtion of his box of wine had put him in a state I hadn’t seen before. At the door, the ladies were ushered through without cover; it was Thursday night, ladies night. Guy argued that since he had brought a handful of hot girls he shouldn’t have to pay eihter. My impression being that Guy hasn’t really refined the art of negotiation, the response wasn’t what he wanted. And when he tried to just walk in, he was forcefully pushed to the ground by the bouncer. I made myself scarce. I didn’t need to be the one Blanche (white) in the club that was associated with the one clown getting beaten by the doorman.
In the end, the girls smoothed things over and I happily handed over the 12,000 CFA ($24) required to get us both in. Not a lot of money to me, but a ton of money to someone in Cameroon.

Guy sleeping off his hangover the next day

Stepping through the hallway, the first thing I noticed was the heat. I was sweating in the night air outside, but a wet heat was radiating down the hallway. People moved past, exiting the club, completely drenched.
Inside was nothing like I ever expected. It was a club like any other, although less deced out in terms of decorations, televisions, and lighting gear than most I have seen. The bar offered less than 5 choices for hard alchohol, though it appeared that most people had empty hands. Who could afford a 2000 CFA drink after such a cover charge? The crowd was one black blob, all moving in unison. As we joined it, suddenly it was as if everything I’d experienced in Cameron suddenly made sense.
The enthusiasm and dance moves that I had seen Guy perform or on the music videos on TV were exactly what everyone was doing. Guy and Elvis’s incessant and blatant sexuality was everywhere: the grinding was more carnal than I have ever experienced and strangers danced with strangers in ways that would make most people blush. That community that I had seen in the taxis and on the streets continued in the club. While it seems back home in Seattle, people rarely dance with strangers, anything was fair game in Buea.
I thought that I’d sweat with the Africans in the cars and buses, but that was just the warm up. In this room where the temperature must have been a heavily saturated 100 degrees, the crowd was one enormous wet mass, all sliding against each other, throbbing to the beat.
The music that was getting to me in Jeannine’s apartment suddenly made sense. It all had that same beat because it was club music. The tunes were expertly DJed, never missing a beat as they segued from one tune to the next. The crowd whooped and sang along with every song and bumped hips or did a pelvis thrust in time with the moves that the performers did on the music videos.
One of the bits of Pidgin I had picked up was what I thought a little poem that Elvis taught me, but turned out to be the lyrics to one of the songs. I got a great reaction from the crowd when the one Blanche was able to sing along
“Boby na ma ting!
Boby na ma chop!”
“Breasts are my thing, breasts are my food!” All the girls played a game of grab-tit to the beat of the music.
And finally the fashion. Perhaps it is just because things different to us look cooler, but looking around the disco that night, I could nto get over the fashion. Every person looked straight out of some music video, some film, some… something. And it was just the little flourishes that did it: a newsboy hat here, a wide collar, a cloth tied around a waist, a pair of sunglasses, a sweater vest, a turtleneck, a gold chain. Everyone looked different, individual. No copycat goombahs with the open collar button down shirt and the same haircut. Everyone looked impeccable, and the tiny handful of name brands visible were all certainly fakes.
As we carried on toward sunrise, I wondered whether my clothes, which I wished I could have replaced for that night, looked potentially interesting and different to them. Maybe because I was different, I looked cool. It was hard for me to believe, but the feeling I got from the people at the club that night was that it didn’t matter. I was one of them for a little while, sweating, sliding, laughing with one big mass of humanity.

Relaxing the last morning in Buea

I Go Chop Your Dollar

A clando car in Kumba

When Guy and I checked in at the Kanton Hotel in Kumba, I saw that the previous guest in the register was listed as Mr. Elvis. Having written witty or obnoxious things in foreign hotel registers myself, I joked with the steel-faced desk girl about how she had very elite and deceased guests. She failed to see the humor.
And the joke was on me, when we emerged from the hotel to be greeted by someone that recognized Guy.
“Hello! That was easy!” shouted a rotund, shaved bald man in a striped shirt as he shook hands with Guy. “My name’s Elvis,” he said, extending a thick hand to me.
It turns out that another one of those phone calls had been made and Guy had another connection in this town and he had just begun to look for us. Elvis was living in Kumba for his job, while his wife and child lived in another city. As we walked the town, full of the energy I got from my cold shower, I soaked in Elvis’ infectious enthusiasm as well. With this guy, everything was huge, from his belly to his laugh to his voice to his words.
“Can you believe this town?! There is so much damn dirt! How much do you love Obama? He is so god-damned the best!” Elvis shouted through the cloudy air.
Elvis loved the world and I loved Elvis for it.
“You know what makes me happy?” Elvis shouted to me while Guy went on one of his countless little chases after a solo girl.
“What’s that?”
“Girls! Man, I just love to see them, they make me happy!”
“Hah, yeah, me too! I think that’s something we all enjoy, though maybe no one does as much as our friend Guy here!”
“Man, I just love them! You know what I love the most?! Buttocks! Man, just like that! I love them!” We slapped a high five and then shook hands Cameroonian style, snapping our middle fingers together after the shake.
“You know what we have a problem with here in Kumba? Overpopulation—of churches! We just have so many god-damned churches!”
“I had noticed that!”
Guy howled with laughter.
“You wouldn’t believe it! They are everywhere! You see, it is a business, mostly coming from Nigeria, and I think it is just a scam really. You can’t substitute for hard work, and praying all the time for something to happen to your life will never get you anything. I see people they just give all their money to the church and what does it get them? The priests all drive nice cars and the people are still hungry and frustrated. What is the point?!”
At that moment, a cacophony could be heard down the street.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Hah, a church of course!” We walked over and peered through the windows, watching a packed hall full of revelers led by a woman shouting over a screechy music track. The entire crowd was on their feet, clapping, singing, dancing.
“Can you believe it?! Incredible!” Elvis screamed, slapping me another high five.
“And they are all from Nigeria, eh?” I asked. “You know, my itinerary skips Nigeria completely because whenever anyone hears the word ‘Nigeria’ in America, they think of that email scam.”
“Oh, 419 scams! Yeah, they are all about that! Say, have you learned any Pidgin yet?”
“No, not really. I know that chop is food or to eat, and that’s about it.”
“Oh you got to learn this, it will blow your mind! You won’t believe it!”
So Elvis taught me the lyrics to the song I Go Chop Your Dollar. They go like this:

I don’ suffah no be small
Upon say I get sense
Povaty no good a all, no
Na I’m make I join this bizniss
419 na jus a game
You are da loosah, I da winnah!

Roughly translated, the singer is saying that he has suffered and turned to 419 scams as a way to make money. It’s just a game in his mind and he wins by stealing your money!
That night, Elvis taught me a handful of useful Pidgin words and phrases. Nigeria remained a topic of conversation. Being just a short drive from Kumba, Nigeria is a big trading partner and Kumba is a big trade hub in the process.
“Oh man, you know what you got to see? These cars in Kumba, you won’t even believe them! They will blow your mind! They import normal old cars from Europe and then they put extra large shocks under them, and use stacked up parts of old tires to make them very tall. They call them ‘clando’ and they pack eight people inside and then they can take anything on top or on back! They can carry up to 400 liters of oil!”
“No! I have to see that!”
“You got to see that, you won’t believe it! Incredible!”
And Elvis was right, he took me to the clando park a couple days later, and the cars were just as incredible as he described. Empty, the cars were so jacked up that the rear end was several inches taller than the front. Loaded down, the cars rode nearly level. The shocks gave them the smoothest ride available on the rough rural roads, as well as enabled the capacity needed for large hauls.

Elvis also took me to a tiny seaside town named Idenau at the end of my stay in Cameroon where people load up enormous wooden boats with more cargo than one could imagine. They put two engines on the back and two on the sides, weighted so the nose of the boat is far in the air, and they cruise off to Nigeria with more goods. It wasn’t clear how regulated the commerce was with Nigeria, but considering how dey chop me dollah, I no trust dem fatha den I tro dem.

Boy in front of boats at Idenau

Trade Up For A Thicker Skin

For a long time, Cameroon felt like an endless string of frustrations with tiny moments of pleasure. I tend to expect a certain degree of freedom in my travels. At the very least, I hope to lose track of time, allowing days and hours to become inconsequential, my awakening in the morning or movement from one place to another based solely on my own whims and bounded only by train or plane schedules. I expect to be able to move freely within a country or a city, seeing what interests me. If I see something interesting in how a woman prepares food at her sidewalk stall, I might sit and watch for half an hour. I have also been fortunate enough to visit places in the past where the locals were either ambivalent or enthusiastic photo subjects. And so far, Cameroon moved counter to all of my expectations.
With Guy, I moved on his schedule. He would tell me he’d wake me at 8 and would wake me at 7. After we’d grab a meal, he would just lead me places, introduce me to people, or do things without being able to explain what we were doing. It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to see his friend Jeannine’s apartment, or that I wasn’t excited for the opportunity, but I was simply taken there for durations that long outlasted my comprehension of French, and I knew that asking what we would do next or even making a suggestion might not receive a response. I had to learn to just go with the flow and take advantage of the moments that actually interested me. I had to act quickly to catch the things that interested me, and I did my best to point out to Guy the beauty and fascination that could be found in things that were surely mundane to him having lived in Cameroon his entire life.
Some moments happened so quickly that a camera couldn’t even capture them. A boy running across the street, his sandals so full of Kumba’s dirt that each of his steps left little clouds of dust to fade in the setting sunlight. A goat standing proudly atop a bus tearing past us down the road. A lizard standing guard over a roadside table offering pineapples and papaya. A dog chasing a hen. A man kicking back inside an enormous tire, with sunglasses on and his hands laced behind his head, just too cool to be contended with.
Sometimes I could point out to Guy the humor or intrigue in things he took for granted. The shoe sellers who put one on their head to draw attention to their wares. The boys selling bags of water, chanting “l’eau, l’eau, l’eau!”. How children write in the dirt on cars “lavez moi”, wash me, just like they do in America.
The most frustrating thing of all was the lack of freedom for me to photograph whatever I wanted. I fully recognize that I have no right to go poking my camera lens at anyone in the world. If someone doesn’t want me to, that is definitely their prerogative. I have just been spoiled by so many people in so many countries who just don’t care, are flattered for the attention, or are amazed at the concept of a digital camera. For some reason, a significant percentage of Cameroonians hate a camera and anything that comes with it, but it was never easy to predict who.
One afternoon, Guy and I passed a shop with hundreds of mirrors set up for sale outside it. I showed Guy how we could align ourselves with them and take a cool self portrait. We stood, just so, smiled, and—
“Hey! No!” the shop owner shouted.
“One can’t take a photo of the mirrors?” Guy asked in French.
“No, na ma bizness!” no, that is my business, the man shouted back in Pidgin. It just didn’t seem to make sense that we couldn’t take a photo of his wares which were already on display for the whole world to see. And as we stepped away, discouraged, the woman selling short phone calls on her mobile phone in front of the mirror shop waved us over and asked me to take a photo of her on her phone. There just wasn’t any predicting the reaction, and when it was negative, it was ugly.
I was feeling particularly down the day we were to travel to Kumba. We’d spent the first half of the day visiting people and places in Buya that didn’t interest me in the least and in the afternoon we finally went through the arduous process of finding a mini bus that would take us to Kumba.
I don’t quantify a lot of things when I travel. I don’t want to know how hot it is – I just know it is damn hot. I don’t want to know how long the bus ride is – it’s going to be long and painful. And the ride to Kumba was just that. There were 16 people crammed into the four-row bus, and I was sitting on the gap between the misaligned jumper seat and the main bench. We didn’t have seatbelts, but didn’t need them: we were packed in so tightly that I am certain if the bus had flipped, we’d still be stuck in there, our collective tension keeping us in place. I was squeezed in next to an incredibly large and sweaty man who spoke with a booming voice right into my ear because he was talking with the man sitting behind me. We were jostled for hours, along the road that was nearly all loose red dirt and “under construction”. The ride was everything I might expect: long, hot, painful, sweaty, dirty, loud.

Kumba has a bit of a dirt problem

When we arrived in Kumba, red with dirt, Guy was clearly beat. But strangely I felt energized. When we found Hotel Kanton, I was excited because it looked just like all of the hotels we stayed in on the road in China. The shower was cold, but it was about the most sensational shower I have ever received. I had earned that cold shower. And after that cold shower, I bounded into Guy’s room and told him to get his shoes on because we were going to take Kumba by storm.
That right there is one of the reasons I choose trips like this. At home a cold shower would piss me off, but when something as simple as a cold shower could make my day and could give me a new lease on life, I know that I have been granted some perspective that is so easy to lose in our lives of comfort back home.
That evening, as the darkness confined Kumba’s significant dust problem to the headlights of passing cars and motorcycles, I led us through the town with renewed energy. And when we sat down for some Gi-Gi Co-Cos just a few feet from the dirt road, I just soaked up that filth and revelled in it. I breathed in that red dirt as if it were clean Seattle air. I was riding on some much-welcomed perspective that night.


Over time, there were breakthroughs on my feeling of a lack of freedom in Cameroon. I noticed that when strangers would chat with us, Guy would sometimes claim to be a French tourist. Somehow this granted him a little more leeway, being fluent, feigning ignorance, and being black. I bought Guy some sunglasses at a market, and he began to look even more the part. He sometimes took to carrying my day bag, to complete the look. Guy began to take leads from me when I was interested in something, learning about things he had probably seen a million times without thinking about. He joined me in feigning ignorance at what a clutch looked like in order to get a closer look at an auto shop, and asked questions on how a sandal is made from an old tire.
Guy even began to take a hand at my camera, learning a new skill for himself and offering more protection from the fury of any angry photography subjects.

Transmission Boy


Guy and I had another trying day of travel, heading from Kumba his mother’s home in Nkongsamba. The day started with arriving at a bus station at sunrise. After being directed to another station, we waited there for a couple hours, in the intensifying heat, only to team up with a local woman who suggested we might make faster progress on a train. The three of us went to a train station and waited another few hours in the heat, dodging surly station police, only to slowly realize that the train was never going to come.
The news of the train never coming was continually being relayed by the motorcycle drivers waiting outside the train station. We didn’t believe them because they had an obvious interest in lying to us. I remember one of these drivers had orange eyelashes yet black hair, which Guy immediately pointed out. I cringed, thinking this was probably something the boy was a bit self-conscious of, looking so different from other people. As the hours passed, we finally took the motorcycle drivers’ advice and Guy and I boarded one driver’s bike together, my backpack and camera bag in tow.
I was a little concerned about travelling down those hellish dirt roads with such a burdened bike. I at least had the foresight to grab my respirator mask from my pack before we left and Guy bought one as we left the station. Rather than hop on the main road, the driver drove straight for the jungle across from the train station. There emerged a thin yellow footpath completely surrounded by green on all sides. When bikes or farmers came from the opposite direction, we slowed and leaned into the greenery to let them pass, the branches whipping my bare legs.
We emerged from the jungle and rode a sealed road for a while, only to be stopped by a cop holding a long piece of twine attached to a nail board. As it turned out, the driver had blown past the same cop earlier in the day, and was now having to pay for his transgression. Meanwhile another driver argued with the cops declaring that he would not sign a ticket declaring him a “suspect“ when he didn’t feel he had done anything suspicious. While we cooked in the sun for over an hour, waiting for the inevitable bribes to be handed over, I saw a weakly-inflated ball roll into my field of vision. Two children wanted to engage me in a couple minutes of football while we waited.
Fines paid and back on the road, the driver apparently decided that roads were not the best place for him to be. At the next rail crossing, the driver turned alongside the tracks and began to drive on the chunky gravel alongside them. For a few miles, we tore along the tracks on a trail no wider than 8 inches, sharp gravel below us, metal rail ties to our left, and sharp metal stakes protruding from the ground every few feet on our right. Guy’s repeated cries of “doucement!” to travel gently were rarely heeded. And when the rails ended, we dove right into a loose dirt road that suddenly explained the orange eyelashes of the motorcycle driver. I closed my eyes and thanked my foresight for the dust mask for many gruelling miles. And when we finally got to the next town, we had to trudge in the heat for another couple hours before finally finding a jam-packed mini bus with a motorcycle strapped to the top, among the other luggage, and marked with a sticker reading “Deliver Me” on the back.
The bus did deliver us, after another few gruelling hours of dirt roads though miles upon miles of banana farms. When we finally arrived at Guy’s mother’s house, painted orange ourselves, and began to be eaten by mosquitoes while we consumed a coconut, Guy passionately relayed the day’s stories to his family.
“Jamais! Jamais Kumba a Nkongsamba!” he declared, vowing never to make the journey again.
I had to lead by example again, showing the stamina to shake the whole thing off, and amazed that I could handle what someone raised in these conditions could not. But then again, I only learned how to handle that by experiencing it on multiple occasions. I explained that I had endured 8,000 kilometres of that in China as an example, and that I wasn’t so tough before that trip.
We cleaned up and met up with Guy’s friends in town that night and put back a few beers, singing and dancing on the sidewalk. Guy was visibly tired, and I was too, but I think he got the concept and maybe over time he too could shake off a day like that. In any case, his next trip to Nkongsamba by train or bus will be a welcome relief, and I won't be quite as impatient the next time a Mariners game slows my evening commute. That night, the shower sure was refreshing and the beer sure was tasty…

If You’ll Be My Bodyguard, I Can Be Your Long Lost Pal

I first met Guy at the family’s home in Douala. He was younger-looking and soft-spoken, with a faint mustache. Guy tilted back in his chair and loped around the house with a bit of an egotistical air, so I assumed he was a teenager. When word got around that I’d been robbed at the airport and near Limbe, phone calls were made and friends and family were called upon to ensure that I was protected from further troubles while I was in Cameroon.
This was never explained to me, I just started seeing the pattern. Over the first few days, I was given a local’s phone number and met them when I got to town, and handed off from one person to the next as other commitments came up.
Guy showed up again as I was leaving for Buya and when I thought he was seeing me off to the bus to the next town, he got in and rode along. From that point on, we were partners.
At first I thought this was great; I was in no hurry to be taken advantage of again, and I was a bit nervous based on my initial experiences in Cameroon. Guy spoke enough English and I spoke enough French to get the point across, and it was nice to let someone else do the negotiations with cab and bus drivers, to ask directions, and to explain the things I was seeing in the marketplace.
Within a day, though, the presence of my partner started to eat at me. I had learned a valuable lesson on my motorcycle trip across China: it can be fun to have someone do all the question-asking and negotiating for you, but a big part of the fun is the adrenaline rush of not knowing whether I’d gotten on the correct bus, or the moment where the few words I know in the local language suddenly click and I am able to string together enough to communicate myself perfectly. It was nice to have the protection, but I also felt I was being robbed of part of the experience.
Another lesson I learned on the China trip is that it is fun to travel with companions. Traveling alone, it is difficult to share the humor and internal commentary on the things I see every day. With my companions in China, we made up names and phrases to describe the things we saw, and the inside jokes still rattle around in my head and bring a smile to my face from time to time. Sitting at dinner our second day together, I looked across the table at Guy and we suddenly ran out of things to talk about. We’d hit the boundaries of our shared language and experience and suddenly my partner seemed even more of a burden. Over the course of the day, my frustration had increased as I noticed that Guy tended to mumble whenever he had something critical to explain or ask of me. It was probably due to a lack of confidence in the language, and a habit he just wasn’t aware of. In any case, continually asking him to speak up or use different French words was quickly getting on my nerves.
I was wondering how long this would last, and knowing that Guy was out of work until April, I had surmised that he intended to travel with me for the rest of my trip. I would be footing the bills for all of his hotels, transportation, food, mobile phone minutes, and so on. And Cameroon is anything but an inexpensive country to visit. Hotels firmly at the low end of third world standards can still cost $30 or more per person per night, mosquitoes or cockroaches included. So I was paying a high cost for my protection in Cameroon. In the past, I’d chosen my own travel partners; this one chose me, and there would be no easy way of declining his assistance.
I turned to my camera and started reviewing the photos I’d taken over the previous days. After a couple minutes, Guy slid over beside me and watched the slide show as well. When I got to a photo of some food I had eaten during a few hours alone in Douala, he started cracking up.
“You know what that is?” Guy asked me in French.
“Yeah, suya! I love suya!” Suya is meat slowly barbequed over a fire, chopped into small chunks, spiced with cumin and chili pepper powder and served with slices of onion. Apparently the idea of taking a photo of the man who prepared my food was too much for Guy. He laughed hysterically.

Suya for sale in Douala

“Suya, suya!”
“I love it! Maybe we can have it tomorrow!” I suggested. This sent Guy off even further.
“Papa Suya!” he exclaimed, pointing at me and giving me a new nickname.
“Papa Suya!” I hollered back.
“Wik-wik-wik, Papa Suya!” Guy said, imitating scratching the name across a turntable.
The chorus from Run DMC’s song, Papa Crazy appeared in my head, and I started freestyling, changing the lyrics to describe Papa Suya and how much he loved suya. It’s a simple song and I was able to span some English and some French in the process. When I rhymed suya with Buea, a rhyme that was dying to be made, it sent us both into laughing fits.
Later that night, we both ordered some drinks. I grabbed a “33” Export beer, the pride of Cameroon, and he ordered a Guiness Stout and a Coke. I know this is going to sound like blasphemy, and it is in a way, but in Cameroon Coke and Guinness are mixed together. I’d never heard of such a thing. Guy gave me a sip. The tastes actually seemed to be made for each other, though still not what I would really want to do to a Guinness.
“It’s good…” I said in French, before explaining that my friends back home would think this was crazy.
“I love it!” Guy crooned, imitating my love declaration for suya.
“What’s it called?”
“Gi-Gi Co-Co!” Pronounced with a hard G and a long E, just like Guy’s name.
“Papa Gi-Gi Co-Co!” I declared.
So, names declared and applied to each other, Papa Suya and Papa Gi-Gi Co-Co had our first inside jokes together. Maybe we would find a bond between us after all.

Guy, Jeannine, and Lucy, Buya's "Top Model"

It’s Good To Be King?

My travel companion, Guy, and I eventually made it to the mostly Muslim town of Foumban. There, we stayed at what I deemed Hotel Sans Eau (Hotel Without Water) and were awakened every morning to the Muslim call to prayer. It had been a few years since I’d experienced that dawn ritual, and it served to remind me that, in addition to one god and 5 daily prayers, the Muslims seem to be steadfast believers in addressing the community through overblown and distorted PA systems.
In Foumban, Guy introduced me to Jean-Daniel, another friend of my Swiss-Congolese friend Jessica. JD was a genuine and soft-spoken man who lived in Douala but was in Foumban because his father just died from Meningitis. Over Cokes and beers that night, JD took moments to stare pensively into space and then engage me in conversation.
“It is time for me to make a change, Adam. I lost my mother before, now my father. I am finishing school for Communications, and things are to be very difficult.”
“How much longer until you finish school?”
“One more year. But with my father gone, I now have to care for my entire family. My brother and sister, they are still younger than I am and I must pay for their school. I need to make a change, and I do not know what to do. I am sad that Jessica was unable to bring me a camera,” JD sighed. “I wanted to take photos of my father, but now I have lost both of my parents. It is too late.”
As JD described his situation, and outlined the odds stacked against him, particularly the odds of finding a job in Cameroon after finishing college, my heart sank. Guy had finished school as an electrician a few years previous, but he is unable to find consistent work as an electrician, so he chauffeurs for a government employee when he is in town, and finds odd work in-between. Not the most hopeful of situations.
JD was so clearly intelligent, genuine, and sensitive that my mind raced for ways to help him. As I suggested he spruce up his resume so I could see if there were any possibilities at my company’s offices in France, he was very appreciative.
I felt bad though, as we talked about the abundance of jobs and the quality of life in the US. I felt guilty and as I often do when I talk with people in developing countries, I under-exaggerated our money and opportunities. It made me feel guilty thinking about the opportunities that are everywhere around me, and that it wasn’t JD’s fault that he was born into a much more difficult environment. These are the cards we’re dealt.

Evening Football, Foumban

The next evening, JD took Guy and I to the Royal Palace in Foumban. The palace is the home of a man who is at the latter end of a dynasty that has existed in Foumban since 1394. JD told the story of men leaving tribes and double-crossing other tribes in order to establish what is now Foumban, and passing down the role of Sultan of the Bamoun people from one generation to the next. The palace was enormous, and was encircled by several large buildings which housed the Sultan’s countless wives.
“So how does the Sultan decide when he wants another wife? Do women come to him?” I asked.
“No, he simply goes into the market or has his men speak to the woman. She comes by force,” JD explained.
JD took me to a larger-than-life bronze bust of the Sultan, who simply appeared to be a fat man with ugly glasses and military jacket.
“Want to take a photo?” JD asked.
I didn’t. I felt nothing but disgust. In my mind, I cursed the man whose image I was looking at. He was no better than the rest of the Bamoun people. There were people scraping together meager existences just outside his palace while he lived a life of privilege and had the power to acquire women by coercion, against their will.
The Sultan was just a man, lucky to have been born into his situation. As far as I could tell, no effort or work was required for him to obtain his position and his luxuries. His countless cars, his opulent home, and his opportunities were available to him simply by his birth. It wasn’t exactly the same, but I silently wondered whether JD ever thought the same of me.

Munching a carrot, Nkongsamba

A Girl Gets Her Hair Cut in China…

…and the effects are felt across the world.
During my first day in Douala I noticed a Qingqi motorcycle, the Chinese brand that I rode with my friends in China in 2006. Now keen to see what other brands were represented in Cameroon, I started to keep track. Indeed, there were quite a few Qingqi K50s (as well as a knock-off, a Qyngqi), and looking around the city, the motorcycles read like any city in China: Sanlin, Lifan, Kymco, and Nanfang being the most common.
Many bikes are modified or given fake nameplates, including a couple Wonda bikes, whose font looks just like that of Honda.

Waiting for passengers, Foumban

The Chinese connection didn’t end there. As I explored the markets of Douala, Kumba, and Nkongsamba, it was obvious where most of the goods were coming from. Truckloads of brightly colored plastic sandals are for sale in the markets. A Chinese specialty. Soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, tissues, shoes, luggage, fans, televisions, VCD players, speakers, plastic chairs, and of course the ubiquitous knockoff football jerseys and name brand clothing, all made in China. A handful of “Chinglish” shirts seem to have made the journey as well, which seem to be worn with as much pride and innocent ignorance as they are in China.
I’ve been stunned by the seemingly infinite patterns, colors, and styles that Cameroonian women wear in their hair. The braids alone are woven into countless intricate and physics-defying styles that I have never seen imitated on the streets in America or on television. As my Congolese-Swiss friend Jessica later explained, the hair artists seem to forget how to create some of these styles when they leave Africa. Braids are just part of the picture, however. Woven into the braids, or woven into normal hair, are countless other styles of hair. Some of them seem to be made from plastic, but others are so downright convincing that it seems perfectly plausible that the funky flip the woman on the bus is sporting is her natural hair. In the marker, it was apparent how this all works.
Sure enough, in the markets, I've seen shops with large varieties of packaged hair extensions for sale. Looking at the packaging, the more expensive offerings are labeled with the assurance that they are 100% human hair. And all of the packages are labeled as Made In China.
It only stands to reason. With 1.6 billions heads of stick-straight, black hair, it seems a natural industry to take the longer clippings, style them as needed, and sell them to the thriving market in Africa.
The forced community of more than a dozen Cameroonians sharing a single mini van to get from one city to the next leads to some fascinating conversations. On the trip from Limbe to Buea (pronounced Boo-Yah!) a cop at a routine traffic stop took a particular interest in my passport. He never asked for the expected bribe, but took quite a bit of time paging through the booklet and examining every page, despite the protests of the crowd on the bus.
“Please, we beg of you to allow us to leave, we’ll be late!” shouted one woman. The cop finally returned the passport and as soon as the van door closed, the entire crowd got into a heated discussion about what had happened. Every person had something to say and offered it up to the rest of the bus. Some spoke in Pidgin, some spoke in English, some in French, and others in their local dialects. Two men carried on long after the others, mainly in English, discussing Cameroon’s corrupt government and police force, and centering the debate on whether “this is inevitable or whether we have done this to ourselves”. The men seemed to agree on their own country’s poor leadership in creating a difficult living situation despite a country rife with natural resources such as rubber, pineapples, bananas, timber and their port.
Engaging me, the man asked why I was in Cameroon.
“Well, just to see it, really.”
“And so you came to swallow some dust with us!”
It was true: we were on an abhorrent road, pitted every few feet and filled with loose, red dirt. With most of the windows open to add some moving air to the tightly packed bodies which were sweating all over each other, the dirt breezed right through the vehicle and stuck to the wet surfaces of our skin. The man explained that the road was under construction, based on new innovations the Cameroonians were trying to adopt based on work they'd seen by outside companies that had recently done major road construction in Cameroon. Where were those companies from? China, naturally.

Roads wreak havoc on cars

It turns out that Chinese road construction crews were contracted in to create high quality roads. Rather than employ local resources, they brought their own men, trucks, tools, and materials. “They even brought their own tar,” he explained.
It was unfortunate that the deal was arranged that way. I would guess that the Chinese knew their efficiency would be reduced by having to employ or mentor the locals, though it would have benefited the Cameroonians better if they had. As it happened, the man explained to me that only a few Cameroonians were able to learn the Chinese methods of road construction, and that they were to pass it on to the local crews for future work.
Later, in Kumba, I met a man named Elvis who explained to me the relationship of the Cameroonians and the Chinese.
“Well to be honest with you, they help us, but I really do not like their policies. They come to do fishing near the port in Limbe. In the past, we had small boats and all the fish we needed. Now they come with huge boats and there aren’t enough fish remaining for people to eat anymore. The prices are now huge, imagine paying 2000 CFA ($4) for a fish! How can someone feed their family?!”
Once again, it was apparent that Chinese efficiency has both positive and negative effects. For the benefit of Cameroon, and for the world at large, I can only hope that sustainable relationships are developed that have positive impacts down the road. In the meantime, in case you needed a reminder about whose millennium this is fixing to be, once again it is China that is cashing in at the moment.

The Grand Pecking Order

As I flew the final leg of my two days' worth of flights to arrive in Douala I met a half-Swiss, half-Congolese girl named Jessica who had previously lived in Cameroon and was willing to give me a few pointers on changing money and decent hotels. In the end, she suggested I check in to the same hotel as she, and introduced me to her local friend Julio who had picked her up.
As I caught my first glimpses of Cameroon through the windows of the taxi—work crews exercising along the road in the day’s first light—I was invited to Julio’s family's house in Douala. Their home was just around the corner from the hotel, a humble one-story cement structure tucked behind the overall din of downtown Douala. As we arrived, Julio's Mama jumped up from the ground where she had been hunched over a bowl, squeezing the moisture out of a white putty I later learned was starch for pressing clothes. The family was ecstatic to see their friend Jessica and were very welcoming to me, offering snacks and a local hibiscus and juice drink called folera right away. I struggled to resurrect the remains of the French that has rotted away in my brain for the past 15 years, and got my first tastes of the dizzyingly fast transitions between comprehension and seemingly gibberish as the family traversed English, French, their local dialect, and pidgin.
After a lunch of omelettes and baguettes with tea, Julio, Jessica and I left to get cash and my bearings. Stopping by the hotel on the way, I discovered that the crooks working the baggage at Royal Air Maroc had relieved my backpack of my small digital camera, my Chinese cell phone, and 3 Clif bars. Not the best way to start a trip and I had really been looking forward to getting audio and video on this trip. Getting over it, I was taken on as the adopted tag-along and invited back to join the family for beers that night. I had heard that Mama was particularly fond of Amstel.
When we arrived at the house, Mama had changed out of her loose, bright green patterned dress and into a black, better-fitting one. She'd put on a wig and lipstick and was clearly ready for a night on the town.
So the whole entourage walked to the bar about 10 feet from their front door, down the same alley, and took a seat at a table made from a giant wire spool, under a thatched roof, lit by one bare green bulb, illuminating the dusty football posters and Guinness ads that adorned the walls. A barrage of makossa music and the latest local hits such as Seka Seka and Don't Matter surrounded my jet-lagged and drunken head. Jessica and an extended array of family and friends gathered around. Mama and I tipped back Amstels as she declared that Amstel stands for “Aime-moi si tu es libre." Love me if you are free. Occasionally, the joyous Cameroonian music would overtake Mama and she would stand, clapping the first three beats of a measure and leading the rest of the gathering crowd in loud “eh-eh-eh”s on the polyrhythm. Just like that, I had arrived in Cameroon.

Having been taken under the family's wing, I was in their care for my first couple days. I had a few hours here and there to explore the city on my own and shoot some photos and venture into the cuisine. Douala struck me as a little tamer than I expected for a bustling West African capitol. The smells weren’t as pungent, the heat not quite as oppressive, and the noise not nearly as assaulting as I have come to expect from my travel destinations.
Douala, and indeed all of what I have seen of Cameroon is incredibly musical. Local and regional music is heard everywhere; the uplifting and lilting guitar lines that have always entranced me from Paul Simon’s Graceland are brought to the fore in Makossa music. Seemingly every shop, every taxi, every restaurant has music playing and as opposed to so many people in the world, the Cameroonians generally seem to have a grasp on what a reasonable volume level should be.
With music playing everywhere, I've seen perfectly sane people take to dancing on street corners or in shops. It still impresses me that people constantly just decide to sing along, whether walking down the street or hopping in a cab. This too is just one of the many forms of community and shared experience that I have seen here. For example: taxis are always shared, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. One simply puts their finger in the air or makes a kissing sound and a cab will pull over. The desired destination and price is suggested and the driver honks his agreement. A moment later another passenger joins in, two in the front seat and three in the back. It is customary that a new passenger greets everyone in the car with a “bon jour” or “hello”. As I was later explained, if one doesn’t offer verbal greetings upon crossing any stranger, people think that the person is upset or doesn’t like the people they didn’t greet. This is vastly different from anything I have experienced before, and takes a lot for me to get used to, coming from the impersonal and individualistic West.
Aside from greetings and singing, the forced community of having to touch strangers while sharing taxis and buses seems to create a unity and solidarity that I have never seen elsewhere. I have heard multiple Cameroonians mention their "African solidarity" which I believe comes from these shared experiences. In China, where I have seen their indifference to injury or even death of their fellow countrymen, I wonder whether they'd be more prone to caring about one another if they had such intimacy together.
The reactions I get as a tourist in Cameroon are totally different from most places I have visited as well. There are moments of immense interest in my presence and astounding hospitality once I get into a conversation with a stranger, but as I walk down the street, I seem to be viewed with indifference or even suspicion. I’m still learning to read the local body language, but it is really discomforting to not have my smiles returned when we make eye contact. It’s not the unbridled wonder I got from Tibetans or the oppressive attention from Ethiopians, but is taking some getting used to.

Down Beach, Limbe


When I arrived in my second town, Limbe, a friend of the Douala family, Guy, had phoned ahead to have his friend Babi to meet me there. Babi took me to the nicest hotel in the town, implying it was the only suitable option for a foreigner, and took me around to the beach for fresh braised fish, poisson braise, eaten by hand with the black sand between our toes.
In the morning, I was actually a bit relieved to have a couple hours without an escort, so I decided to walk north from my hotel to shoot some photos. I walked along a rural road surrounded by plantain trees and with the ocean crashing along the shore below.
About 30 minutes away from my hotel and only about 3 photos in, I was called over to someone's front stoop.
After an initial first few questions about my origin and reason for visiting Cameroon, things went awry.
“So you is just walking around snaffing (snapping photos) in dis village?”
“Yeah, more or less,” I said. I didn't see any reason to lie.
“You can not jus do dis. The chief may get very angry.”
I'd heard about chiefs. I had read that it was generally polite to check in with them upon arrival. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to find one yet, since Babi had taken me around Limbe.
“Oh, then let me meet him then!”
Mobile phones were punched, loud talking in another language. I heard the word blanche, French for white.
As we walked down the street, one of the men filled me in. “Our chief is dead, and we not appoint a new one yet, but you meet da Chairman.”
We crossed the street and on the wooden front porch of another small home, I was directed to sit down, across from an older man with yellowed eyes and a plaid shirt sitting on a wooden chair;
“Dis de Chairman.”
I removed my sunglasses and greeted him with deference. I was excited at the opportunity to forge a bond with a person of stature.
“So ah hear you snaffing in (the name of his village, apparently no longer Limbe). Dis is not OK. You cannot jus do dis."
"I'm sorry, I didn't know that it wasn't OK. I have come to talk with you and make sure that it is OK for me to look around your village."
"No, you can not. Are you a journalist?"
"No, photography is just a hobby."
"Who you show them to?"
"My family, and friends who are not able to be here to see the beauty of Cameroon."
"No, you make money from them. You then send photos of naked children to your home and they think we are poor and naked!”
I assured him that was not my goal; that I am so much of a shutterbug that I end up covering all aspects of a place I visit and that I have no interest in making a place appear poorer than it is. After a fair amount of discussion led by the Chairman about the relative wealth Americans compared to Cameroonians, the Chairman laid down the law. He told me that my appearing in his village and “snaffing” was a crime in his eyes, that I could make money from my photos and that he needed to be compensated. He asked for CFA50000, about $100.
“Your choice; I will hold you here until you pay." The Chairman sat back in his chair and stared off down the road that ran through his little kingdom.
I protested, I negotiated, but I really had no leg to stand on; I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to properly deal with a Chairman. In the end I handed over the equivalent of $50, was treated to a nice cold Coke by his cohorts, and was invited to take all the photos I wanted. I wanted none. And I had to meet Babi in mere minutes.
When we met, he was distraught, and as we talked with more people, it was estimated that the Chairman was probably nothing more than a man on a chair. I'd been fleeced. With that story and the camera story plying the, mobile phone lines, friends and relatives of the people I met in Douala have accompanied me at every turn since; striving to ensure that I get a safe and positive impression of their country. They are doing a great job. So, counter to my past travel habits, I've been traveling in a pair or group the entire time and will do so for the duration of Cameroon. I've learned a few things about dealing with chiefs and men who sit on chairs, which I hope to not need in the next countries. In a moment, I'll be taken to a place where passenger cars are loaded up with unimaginable amounts of cargo to be driven to Nigeria. That’s right up my alley and I can’t wait!

Diving into a lake near Kumba (not naked)

Where Are You Going?

It's a question I have been asked with the emphasis on each of those words, and usually followed by "and why?".
Right now, it's 4:30 in the morning, 15 minutes before Linda is taking me to the airport and I still have a handful of things to prepare before I go. I don't have a lot of time to explore the why question right now. For now, the where:
- 2/10 Fly Seattle to London
- 2/11 Fly London to Yaounde Cameroon
- 2/22 Fly Yaounde to Cotonou Benin
- Travel overland through Benin, Togo, & Ghana
- 3/24 Fly Accra Ghana to Freetown Sierra Leone
- 4/4 Fly Freetown to London
- 4/10 Fly London to Seattle
And to be quite honest, that's about all I know. The rest I will figure out once I am on the ground.
Generally, when I list off my destinations, the "where" portion of the question is repeated. Most of the people I know don't know of these countries, couldn't point them out on a map, and have no idea what happens on a daily basis in these places. Not too long ago, I couldn't either, so the first part of the "why" might be so that I can learn about these places. And if you're following along, you will too.
Take a look at the map below, and I'm going to get back to getting ready to go there.

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