Week 15 - Feb. 17th - 23rd
day 99 - day in Limbe
day 100 - Limbe to Edea to bush-camp
day 101 - bush-camp to Kribi
day 102 - Kribi to bush-camp
day 103 - bush-camp to Edea to Yaounde
day 104 - day in Yaounde
day 105 - day in Yaounde
Week 16 - Feb. 24th - Mar. 2nd
day 106 - day in Yaounde
day 107 - day in Yaounde
day 108 - day in Yaounde
day 109 - day in Yaounde
day 110 - Yaounde to Ebolowa to bush-camp
day 111 - bush-camp to Oyem to bush-camp
day 112 - bush-camp to Equator to Lope NP
Week 17 - Mar. 3rd - 9th
day 113 - day in Lope NP
day 114 - day in Lope NP - game drives
day 115 - Lope NP to Kolou-Motoutou to bush-camp (near Kolou)
day 116 - Kolou-Motoutou to bush-camp
day 117 - bush-camp back to Kolou-Motoutou back to Lope NP
day 118 - Lope NP to Lambarene to bush-camp
day 119 - bush-camp to Gabon/Congo border
Bastards! They stole my bag! In Stellenbosch, South Africa! The broke into the bloody hostel through the iron bars guarding the front gate and then made off with my bag which had everything in it! My computer, one of my cameras, my mp3 player, headphones, adapters, hard drive, my camera charger for the camera that didn't get stolen (thank god) and all my memory cards! Had my primary camera with all the photos on it been stolen I would not be typing this right now. I would be sitting in an lunatic asylum in a straight jacket trying to gnaw my own limbs off while cackling insanely and barking at anything that moved, pausing only to drool on my shoes for a few seconds and perhaps occasionally contemplating, during my brief moments of lucidity, what it would be like to remove the arm of the burglar and use it to beat him to death. But the silver lining to this horrible crime is that my main camera wasn't in my bag at the time and that my passport, credit card or any money was not stolen.There is also a hideous irony to this particular blog entry. First of all we're still in Cameroon at the moment. I'm getting way ahead of myself right now. But all of my notes were on the laptop at the time which is why I'm forced to start over again the process of writing all the entries between Limbe, where we last left off, and Cape Town, where I am now, typing this on a computer that is not mine. But the aforementioned hideous irony is that the blog entry that was meant to take this place, the entry that was on the laptop ready to be uploaded to the internet started with the following line:
"My luck is going to run out sooner or later!"
Unbelievable! I was referring to the number of times that I had left something valuable behind and had it returned to me, either by scrupulously honest locals or fellow African Trailers. The latest incident, which I was referring to, was the quite egregiously stupid mistake of accidentally leaving my wallet (with credit-card and all) behind in a small supermarket then leaving to spend some time on the internet. During the time it took me to run back to the store in hysterics I must have taken several days off of my life expectancy because of the stress and the near heart attack levels of panic, only to find out to my delight that the checkout lady had kept the wallet to one side and not taken anything from it! That last blog entry rough draft had also mentioned something about having nine lives and being on my thirteenth, or something to that effect, and so it was with a certain sense of poetic justice that fate caught up with me, bent me over and gave me a damn good and extremely painful rogering.At first I started playing the blame game in my head. After all I had expected my bag to be taken because of my own negligence, such as leaving it behind and NOT having it returned by an honest local. This time my bag was next to my bed in the hostel, but the room door was left unlocked, not by me but by drunken roommates returning after a long nights partying. Or perhaps I felt annoyed at Martin who saw the intruder, sat up in bed, saw the intruder run off and then went back to sleep without raising the alarm. But eventually I was forced to come to terms with the situation and at least acknowledge that it could have been much worse. And there are others who have lost far more than me on this trip which we shall come to in good time. But right now lets take a step back in time to Limbe in Cameroon. And don't forget, I'm relying on memory now since I don't have my notes to jog my memory!
So last time I reported in we had just finished Mount Cameroon and we had one more day in Limbe to recuperate from our hike and explore the town. Other than spending some time leaving wallets behind in supermarkets and surfing the internet I also spent some time at the wonderful Limbe Primate Sanctuary. This wasn't a zoo but a place where monkeys, apes, gorillas, mandrills and chimps are rescued, whether from being illegal pets or saved from poachers. Each species is given a huge enclosure to live in and the staff, mostly volunteer workers, help out with cleaning, feeding and interacting with the animals. In was certainly a guilt free place to visit, unlike zoos where I always feel a little bit sorry for the animals no matter how well they're kept. The next day we left Limbe and headed south down the coast in the direction of a small resort town called KribiNot malaria, sadly
Kribi was very nice. At least I heard it was nice from the others but I wasn't really in a position to enjoy it. At first when we arrived I had thought that I was just suffering from lack of sleep but when I went for a long lie down in my room, lucky we were at a place that had cheap rooms, I began to realise that this wasn't just fatigue. At first I suspected flu but when I later realised that my head was spinning incredibly violently and I could barely move it was starting to become obvious it was something worse. I began to feel a bizarre crushing sensation, like an overwhelming force was pressing me down onto my bed as my head began to spin more and more. Eventually someone found me on the floor, unable to stand, move, speak or see and so it was at that point it was decided that perhaps a trip to the hospital might be in order. Hilariously the only vehicle available to convey me there was a motorbike and we all agreed that if I took a trip on that then I'd be falling off within seconds. So three of us had to go, the driver, me in the middle and driver Gav at the back making sure I didn't fall off. It was probably quite an amusing sight though it is actually quite common to see up to 6 people on a motorbike in Africa. Eventually we reached the hospital and the nurses and doctors were all certain, based on the symptoms, that I had malaria. But they couldn't actually do the proper blood test to confirm it since the lab had already closed for the day. But they were so sure that they gave me the malaria medication and told me to come back the next day for the test. I was delighted of course, I was the first person on Gav and Summer's truck to get Malaria, a new record. I staggered around boasting to everyone, including the Oasis truck who had just arrived, about my achievement. So I was naturally rather devastated when I was told the next morning in hospital that I didn't actually have malaria. Not only that but they couldn't even figure out what I did have so I was robbed of the satisfaction of telling people what it was I had caught. Oh well; maybe I'll be the first ever Af-Trailer to get ebola or rabies or something like that.
After a couple of days I had almost fully recovered from...whatever the hell it was...and we found ourselves in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, in less than favourable circumstances. During a bush-camp on the side of the road Miyumi had unfortunately had her bag stolen by some ruthless scumbag in the middle of the night. They had grabbed it right from inside her tent and it contained almost everything valuable that she owned, including money, her camera, her computer and worst of all her passport. Looking back from my little incident in Stellenbosch I should count myself lucky that I didn't lose any money, my main camera or my passport. And only someone as cheerful as Miyumi could still be smiling and laughing barely hours after the theft, if it was me I would have cried myself to sleep for a month! But then Miyumi is the happiest person I've ever met. After obtaining a police report we were on the road again and we soon found ourselves in Yaounde.The breakup begins
when we reached Yaounde we had a full truck but we would be leaving with considerably less when it was time to depart a week later. We arrived and found a place to camp, a field outside an old hostel which was run by a Swiss man who would have been far happier if his hostel didn't actually have to bother with guests. We knew that we would be stuck here for a while since we had to get two of the hardest to obtain visas of the trip, the DRC and Gabon, so we took some time to familiarise ourselves with the capital we would be spending a week in (again). Annoyingly enough the most expensive visa from the entire trip was for the country that most people wouldn't ever want to visit: the DRC. The Gabon visa also took an unnecessarily long time to process. It was during our time in Yaounde that the process of desertion began. First of all Miyumi managed to obtain a new passport from the Japanese embassy but since all her visas for the upcoming countries had been lost with it she couldn't continue. So Miyumi decided to fly off to South Africa and have her own little holiday there while we slogged on through the remaining West African countries. Dan and Katey also accompanied her so we were already down by three. Then Kev decided he didn't want to go though Angola and the Congos so he decided to chicken out and fly to Spain until we made it to Namibia. Finally Lena left for Victoria Falls to get in some whitewater rafting since we were told that the river would be un-raftable by the time the truck got there. Since Lena is a rafting instructor and since the Zambezi is reputed to have some of the best rafting in the world we could hardly be surprised at her decision. So when we left Yaounde for the Gabonese border our truck was considerably lighter that when we arrived.
The formation of the West African Mustache Club
After leaving Cameroon and arriving in Gabon we soon began to realise that there wouldn't be much to do during the upcoming weeks as we transited the countries between Cameroon and Namibia. We still had Lope National Park to look forward to but after that it would really just be driving for most of the day. Followed by more driving all day, repeat ad nauseum. So to pass the time we all decided to grow mustaches! Well, all of us except for Hisashi. And the women of course. The only other people exempt from the club were Jeremy and Martin who already had enormous beards that made them look like cavemen. We even managed to convince Chris H to grow one, albeit reluctantly at first. Summer had also promised that our wonderfully absurd 'tache photos would actually make it into a calendar that we would be able to obtain after the trip. So we would all get to be in a calendar, wonderful. Well those of us with mustaches anyway.At this point, when we had all decided that watching facial hair would be the best way to pass the time, we had just left Lope National Park in Gabon. Lope NP was a relatively new place and clearly hadn't caught on to the fact that tourists are actually a good source of income. Nobody needed to learn this lesson more that the receptionist cum bartender who helped run the camp-site we were staying in. She was quite possibly the most sour faced, miserable, surly, grumpy woman in all of Africa. Even more grumpy than the bloke behind the counter in the patisserie in Yaounde who actually complained when I gave him the EXACT CHANGE for what I had just bought! She was clearly another one of those employees who would like working in a tourist resort much more if she didn't have to deal with a single tourist. During our time in Lope we joined a couple of game drives, one in the morning and one in the late afternoon. Admittedly not much was actually spotted during these drives but we knew that far bigger and better parks awaited us on the east side of Africa so it didn't really matter.
Lost in the Gabonese Jungle
When we left Lope NP our intrepid driver Gav had decided to take the 'scenic' route (in other words the long way), a path that took us through some extremely dodgy roads, though still none as bad as the logging road. As we bode farewell to our misanthropic host at the camp-site Sean yelled out a few 'encouraging' remarks suck as 'you should bloody try smiling sometimes' and other taunts that were similar in nature. I'm sure she didn't pay any attention and next year she'll likely still be moping around and scowling at the next African Trails truck that passes through. We continued down our scenic route, heading south east towards the Congo border. At one point we ended up being stuck in the mud and had to wait for a bulldozer to come and pull us out, not the last time something like this would happen either. At first we spent several hours trying to dig ourselves out but we were just digging ourselves deeper. Eventually we had to admit defeat and look to outside help in order to make it through. It wasn't until later that we were told we had to turn back as the road ahead was completely impassable, not really something we wanted to hear as we had just successfully been hoisted out of the mud hole mere hours before. At first we learned that local knowledge was not always all its cracked up to be, one guy told us that we could reach our destination through another side road that was 'a really good road'. Evidently it might be classified as a good hiking trail but when we tried to get the truck through we realised that we had to go back the way we came and take the normal route south-west out of Lope NP. To accomplish this we needed to rise from our tents and leave at six in the morning and then drive all day without stopping until long after it was dark. This pattern would have to be repeated for the next few days as we made up for lost time. Eventually we reached the Congolese border and after a relatively pain free crossing we found ourselves camped in muddy grounds just under a cellphone tower and watching one of the most spectacular sunsets of the trip yet.We're in the Congo now. Here's where the adventure really begins!
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