Dave is…
On an overnight bus to Bamenda.
Know what’s crazier than a bike in the rain? Doing it with an open umbrella. Steph steps it up.
Eddie Vedder – Society
Bamenda, the other major English speaking city, is the capitol of the other English speaking province, the North West. Built in a valley surrounded by dramatic hills it is the center of Cameroon’s traditional arts. And that is why Alexa and Steph and I are going: shopping. We run up tonight, come back Sunday so the one day we have is just to shop. An unusual concept for me but the promise of vast selection and significantly reduced pricing has kept me from indulging in any of the amazing African art I have encountered thus far, so I need this trip.
It’s unfortunate that we have so little time cause there is plenty of cool sounding stuff to do there. Witch doctors, some sort of traditional polygamist village outside of town and the ancient Bali Fon palace. Still none of us felt acceptable missing any work, and while I will have some time between the conclusion of my internship and my return to the states, the other girls don’t. That leaves only two weekends and next week is the GCI end of summer celebration and the last one falls the days before their flight so it was now or never.
We had originally planned on trying to hire a car and going up after work. A car would cut a couple hours off the 6.5 trip and make it feasible to show up in Bamenda late at night cause we could’ve gone straight to a hotel. But we were slow throwing it together and with petrol prices as they are despite some discussion with McDaniel we just couldn’t make it work. And the only buses run either in the morning or overnight. Which made the overnight really the only option. We couldn’t take Friday off and not only does the overnight save us the cost of a night in a hotel but keeps us from arriving in Bamenda after dark.
Roasted fish in the market. Man they smell like death.
You see all we have heard about this week is how dangerous and crime filled Bamenda is. Imagine all the warnings and looks of horror we’ve gotten from Peace Corp volunteers and people when we said we live in Kumba, then double them and have them come from Cameroonian locals and that’s the kind of reaction we’ve received. McD, who even came around to see us off at the bus station, told us that while he has no problem walking around Douala at even 1am he is off the streets by 8pm in Bamenda. Yeah so if the people of a town that’s too hardcore for the Peace Corps and has a neighborhood better known as Baghdad mention Bamenda in fear than its gotta be like Mogadishu in ‘92 right? Awesome.
We were lucky in the bus at least; the overnighter is a conventional bus with assigned individual seats. Thank god, I really can’t imagine the normal Mondial bus with 5-6 people per 4 person row on the overnight. Sleeping like sardines.
When we bought our tickets after work and asked what time the bus leaves the guy said, “Seven thirty, come at eight.” So we showed up at 8pm. The bus didn’t begin loading till 830, people didn’t start loading till 930 and we didn’t leave till 10:30 because some damn Bible thumper was walking up and down the aisles trying to lead people in prayer and sell a few pamphlets.
The bus oddly had three seats on the left of the aisle and two on the right. We were set up near the back and wisely fearing for the person sitting bitch in a three seat row we opted for the right side. This unfortunately left an odd man out who’d have to sit next to a random. Didn’t seem that awful in theory cept the random who sat next to Steph was a sick lady. We had seen her waiting to board, shaking to the point of convulsion, coughing and generally looking like she was in a Cameroonian adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. The way she explained it to Steph (who is notorious for being willing to listen and talk to people at a length that would have the rest of us puncturing our eardrums) she has been sick for some time but her husband refused to take her to the hospital and now he was taking her to a doctor in Bamenda. We aren’t sure why he’d make her suffer through this ride instead of taking her to the local hospital but our theory is: witchdoctor.
So this trip was already ratcheting up its story potential before we left Kumba’s Mondial bus park and wound our way up the road through Fiango and on out of town. I had never been out of town this direction before, this will be the deepest any of us have been into Cameroon and the drive starts out beautifully. A narrow road winds through huge rubber plantations with beautiful trees and streams all bathed in and brilliantly illuminated by a gorgeous full moon. It was cool and misty and awesome, specially accompanied by appropriate music even despite the violent bouncing of a full size bus on a potholed dirt path.
Beef on the hoof…on the main road outside the office.
Of course it couldn’t last and it didn’t. And about fifteen minutes out of town the music came on. Not just music but Makossa music being blasted at ear splitting levels. The kind of levels that I normally associate with those morons in the early 90s Honda Civics with the airfoils and neon lights and the huge trunk speakers blaring a bass loud enough to shake every other car that shares a stoplight with them.
It turns out that Cameroonians have a completely different conception of how to ride an overnight bus. Whereas we were thinking some IPod, some reading by flashlight followed by whatever bits of sleep could be snatched on an ancient bus they seem to think it’s a rare opportunity to hang out all night. In addition to the blasting Makossa there apparently are a number of rest stops planned and every food vendor encountered were hawking caffeinated items. Hell the row across from us had a kid in it doing the “sit on the mother’s lap and he rides for free” thing which in reality consisted of him standing up in his mother’s narrow legroom. He would stand for almost the entire ride. That was the shocking thing too. There were a ton of kids on the bus. I wouldn’t take a small child on an overnight bus if my marriage depending on it.
So we kind of bunkered down. I gave up on trying to hear nighttime atmospheric music and read a little before trying to curl up with my head bouncing off the window. I had mixed success, getting at best that odd sort of semi sleep in-between various knocks. I stayed in that Zen zone till around 1:30 when we got to the “rest stop”.
The rest stop was the side of the road. Not just any side of the road but the most desolate, detached from anything resembling civilization side of the road in the middle of nowhere. It was just a long straight flat stretch surrounded by fields and jungles on all sides, but it was hopping. Hell there must have been a half dozen of these mega buses either already pulled over or pulling in before we pulled out, not to mention a number of the bush buses, a bunch of big trucks carrying beer and I dunno what all else and random cars.
The milling crowd was being harangued on all sides by the usual fleet of toll booth and checkpoint vendors selling coco nuts, peanuts, candy, meat sticks, random things wrapped in banana leaves and fruits. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. AT ONE THIRTY IN THE MORNING. WHERE DID THESE PEOPLE COME FROM? HOW DID THEY DECIDE TO DO IT ALL HERE? I mean this shit blew my mind. Does this go on all night or do all the buses on the various overnight routes (pretty much all going to or coming from Bamenda from places like Kumba, Douala, Yaoundé and Buea) coordinate to arrive at this random ass mile marker around the same time? If that’s the case these vendors really haul their asses up for an hour or two in the middle of each night? Do they live nearby then?
No seriously, what is going on? I am just so damn confused. These questions occupied me long after the rest stop ended.
But eventually I ended up drifting back into the overnight bus quasi nap, doing my best to avoid a stiff neck and trying to ignore my fellow passengers and their music. When the bus pulled into the Bamenda bus park a little before 5am they were singing along to some variation of Jesus Loves Me This I Know.
I am pretty sure he doesn’t love me.
Cow hooves and tails for sale in the market. Yum, but look better than the big rolls of cow hide also for sale for consumption.
Misc Notes:
• Really strange dream last night. There was an immense amount of build up but it really centered on me being in a very stylized version of New York City where all the buildings were gorgeous glass skyscrapers along a river far more beautiful than either the Hudson or the East. I was staying in some insanely fancy hotel which I believe was a Hilton cept it was a huge glass skyscraper too, right in the heart of town. I was there on some sort of business trip and me and my anonymous coworkers just got back to the hotel and were standing on the third floor lounge/deck when we see fireworks in the distance between skyscrapers, out over the river. Cept they weren’t fireworks they were terrorist bombs going off about halfway up the skyscrapers. And as we watched more and more skyscrapers exploded about a third or halfway up and fell like trees. We stood there watching this wave of explosions come towards us in the dark when several stories above us our hotel exploded. Then despite the fact that the explosion seemed to happen above us we were still caught up in it and the floor titled as the building went over and I was hurtling down with bodies and debris as the building fell, thinking how good it was that I was only on the third floor and so wouldn’t have as far to go. Not pleasant.
• Really quiet day in the office. Samba, Hannah, Arwin and Kate were all in Buea at the Convocation of English Speaking Journalists. Samba used to head it up and the girls went along to see the keynote speech by the American ambassador and to sit in on some workshops. There was little going on anyway other than the girls doing their last minute prep for Monday’s first workshop.
• The one big disaster today was blog related. The office computers here are pretty virus filled and one managed to hop on my flash drive and wipe a lot of it. In the process of cleaning it and reformatting it I improperly backed up my blog file (inexplicably cause I was very careful in backing it up on my computer) and lost all the work I had done on it in the last several days. This meant I lost three days worth of prewritten posts as well as all my notes (when I can’t write up the day I put down a graph or so worth of notes and reminders to ensure that I don’t lose any of the anecdotes that give WDI its colorful style.) So I had to spend a large part of the day rewriting and piecing together what I did this week. Sigh. As if photo problems, lack of internet access and the normal writing demands didn’t already have me way behind.
I guess I shouldn’t worry about it too much; blog readership has plummeted in recent weeks. Up through May I was running a record high average of almost 100 readers a day (A small number I know but a huge audience for someone like me) and I continued to see lower but still strong readership through most of June, including a couple big spikes early in the month. But since about a week or so before my trip to Yaoundé there has been a sharp decline and now I am averaging less than half of my previous levels. Dunno if it’s my inconsistency, length or the just the usual lethargy of the summer but I feel like Pearl Jam during that run of albums in the late 90s. Not necessarily inferior material but only really appealing to the hardcore fan base.