SAFARI Time!
07 Apr 2010 2 Comments
in Cameroon
I have never been to a Zoo. I don’t know why but its just something I haven’t managed to accomplish in my 25 years. I have of course seen a few animals in cages here and there (Harrison park comes to mind), and certainly aquariums but never the African Lion Safari or Mexico city Zoo. Nada.
Africa may feel at times like a zoo but really its just chaotic and they keep their zoo’s au naturel conveniently stuffed way up in the extreme north of Cameroon!
(There may be other places on the continent with animals but I haven’t been to them yet so I can’t be sure).
After a lengthy celebration of my 1/4 of a century existence I decided to put an end to my limited zoo-like animal experience and get myself up to the Waza Nation Park aka SAFARI TIME! Some friends and I rented a great 4×4 with no shocks, a leak in the gas tank and a weak tire to carry us on our African Adventure tour extraordinaire!
We planned to arrive at dusk to see the animals before bedtime but like most things in Cameroon we arrived about two hours too late and it was already dark. So we shacked up in some funky bukaroos (round huts with a straw hat finish) that cost about $5/person (amenities not included…except at the other huts where we had to sneak over to). Luckily we were all tired beyond belief after two nights of birthday festivities so we happily feasted on our resource cooking recipe which included baguette, vache qui rit (cheese like substance), mushy avocado, tuna a la onion and most importantly Piment (spicy salsa that makes food tolerable). To wash it down we had elegant metal cups filled with Vin Chaud (Mulled wine…its that hot here).
We got up bright and early and realized we had stayed at the foot of a beautiful rock face with an incredible view of the landscape. As we sat eating mangoes and more vache qui rit we spotted a family of wart hogs walking along the cliff near us. This sparked us into action and we forgot about the fact there was no coffee to be had.
We hired a driver in Maroua, a familiar face to the volunteers and he should have been our guide but we hired a guide anyways as is the protocol. He was in fact just an old man who smelled terrible but knew the park really well. I started asking him some questions and discovered that he had very little information to give me; apparently his job was to sit up straight and shift his gaze quickly from side to side in order to spot animals for us. Ceri another volunteer spotted them before him almost every time.
One thing the guide could tell me was that the park is 170 000 hectares (I don’t really know what a hectare compares to but it sounds big) We spent about 5 hours in the park driving around looking for animals and we were not disappointed. Within the first minute of entering the park we spotted Giraffes! They are truly amazing, larger than life and so elegant
We saw loads of other animals but none nearly as impressive as the Giraffes! Often there are elephants to be seen but since they like to stomp around they had stomped off towards Chad…We got to see many different birds (all impressive but I can hardly remember their names since they were all told to me in French or Fulfulde), Antelope and their brothers (Damalisse maybe). A mongoose, warthogs and loads of monkeys!
At around 11 the hot African sun reached the middle of the sky and our guide did well to inform us that this would cause loads of animals to seek water. Surprisingly in the very desert like climate there were a few watering holes and so we came to one in order to wait for the animals to come to us. Our guide kindly let us know that we were being rather stupid to sit at water’s edge because we were scaring off any animals that maybe wanted to come. So we took refuge under the shade of a tree a ways up the bank and waited. It was a spectacular scene that unfolded slowly slowly. It felt like watching the discovery channel where a huge herd of antelope approached and took every precaution to watch for lions. They would slowly go down to the water and drink a few at a time while the others looked out. All of a sudden two crazy monkeys ran flailing and jumping into the crowd and basically started to stir shit up. The antelopes were all spooked thinking it was a lion but soon realized it was only monkey business and they started to push and shove a bit. It was great because the monkeys did get bullied out of the way but soon came back with their big brother and they once again scared the shit out of the antelopes!
The pictures do not do the place justice and unfortunately my camera battery died so there is no photographic evidence of the trip back to Maroua which left us with a flat tire that all 7 of us couldn’t fix without the help of 2 huge muscle men biker dudes who stopped to help us (they were coming from London en route to CapeTown)! Once that was fixed we carried on toward Maroua and eventually ran out of gas (which I hate to say I told them all so it would happen)! Although I admit that it was the best running out of gas scenario imaginable since it happened on a long downhill stretch, everyone just went silent and we rode for a good 5km right to a little gas stop.
Amazing!
Climate of Extremes
06 Apr 2010 4 Comments
in Cameroon
Climate of Extremes
The Extreme North of Cameroon deserves its name; nothing about this place is insignificant or inconsequential. The weather is harsh beyond belief and it is the polar opposite of the weather I grew up with. Here there are three seasons that are drastically different;
The rainy season starts around June and lasts until September or so and brings torrential downpours that can flood whole villages and render roads impassable.
The ‘cold’ season (which a Canadian might call summer) is somewhere around December and brings lots of dust and a cool breeze. During that time I got to put on the only sweatshirt I brought once or twice.
The rest of the year is called the hot season which starts around February March and lasts until the rain quenches the desert thirst.
Many people warned me about the hot season and would tell me horror stories about having to read lying down to avoid dripping sweat onto the page, or having no work because people can’t do anything but sleep during the day.I tended to listen to these warnings secretly hoping they were exaggerations but certainly felt a slight queasiness in my stomach thinking about it. Although it must be said that the dust everyone talked about in the cold season didn’t really materialize so I did remain somewhat sceptical.
To my dismay, in the last week of February that queasiness turned into an extreme fever, headache, dizziness, and body aches just as the sun decided to make its unabashed and forewarned appearance. After six months of living in the extreme north I had hardly any sickness to speak of, a sore throat at worst, but with this onset of ailment, thus began my collection of tropical diseases.
I have been dutifully taking Doxycyclin every evening since arriving here and always sleep with a bug net but nevertheless I wound up at the Bogo hospital to take a malaria test which proved positive.
The Bogo hospital it must be said is a hideous place, not to be visited by anyone with a weak immune system.
The malaria test is a finger prick and nothing more but I have only ever had the Red Cross prick my finger before and was uneasy when the nifty pen like needle was not produced…the lab technician (or so he claims to be) came at my index with just the head of a large needle and stabbed it right in. After his back woods experiment on my blood came back he informed me that I had malaria. I was never seen by a Dr. except to be prescribed an antimalarial and some Paracetamol, the pharmacist who seemed to have just come back from the market handed me a drug that wasn’t prescribed to me along with the P-mol and said that’s all they had.
Here most people will not even see a Dr.; they will self-diagnose and buy strange drugs from a vendor in the market-neither of them seems to know what they are. I once saw a man selling chewing gum to people claiming it was for headaches. They will also turn to traditional methods which usually involve Neem leaves, smoke, and lime juice depending on the ailment. A lot of people trust the traditional methods more because the hospitals here, although they use ‘modern’ or western medicine are not properly staffed or equipped and generally let people down.
Luckily for me the drug they gave me was by fluke the best one on the market but still it was intense; an 8 pill a day treatment for 3 days left me extremely distressed and finally caused me to vomit on the 2nd night. My support network had nearly all travelled for work reasons so I found myself alone in the village with only my Cameroonian ‘guide’ Djawe (a moto taxi man by trade) who came to my rescue. I had to work very hard to convince him to take me to the hospital at night because he claimed we would not find a Dr there, and besides, he said, God would take care of me. Being a bit of a sceptic I insisted we go, and we did in fact find a Dr but I’m still quite sure he’s not even qualified to shovel manure since without even examining me he tried to give me all kinds of injections and whatever medication he spotted on his pitiful shelf. I left with some antibiotics I had no intention of taking and felt that I had dodged a bullet by arguing my way out of his treatments.
The next morning I called in VSO to send a car and take me to a hospital in Maroua. I found a friend there and brought her along for support. I was beyond happy when the Dr actually took my vitals and sent me for tests. With a few days rest I started to feel much better and found out from the tests that the malaria was gone! To my chagrin they also told me I had amoebas and the flu. I had to then spend the next week taking a drug called flagyl which made me so high and sick it felt as though I was taking magic mushrooms for breakfast. All throughout this hideous experience I found out that these awful tropical illnesses were not even half as bad as their cures
From one extreme to the next I have made it through this past month feeling very weak and ridiculously overheated. The temperature is making it up to 48 degrees and is so stifling until one day the light changed and it seemed as though a storm had rolled in. I was in a meeting in Maroua when it started and had to travel back to Bogo that night; the moto taxi man said it was a sand storm. I looked around and found nearly everyone wearing surgical face masks or Arab scarves wrapped around their faces, it reminded me of the swine flu outbreak last year in Mexico. I arrived at home that night exhausted and still recovering from my illnesses to the impossibly extreme layer of dust covering my entire house. I had to spend a few nights nearly suffocating in all the poussière until I could find a free moment to clean everything. The only good thing about the dust was that it temporarily stopped the extreme heat…
The dust has lifted and the heat is back, I’m feeling better but still working on cleaning out the stomach and am still suffering from an ear infection so it seems as though it will not end! I have now become very familiar with the hospital in Maroua but am still shocked and appalled by the methods they use to take blood samples (has anyone ever given blood from a vein in their hand?!)
