Parlez-vous anglais? Yes!??! Woohoo!!!

(written by: Michael)

So less than a week after our brush with death, we decided to embark again to the other beach town, Limbe. Andre once again insisted that we take a driver and one of his vehicles instead of taking the bus. We were a little concerned about this, based on our last experience, but were assured that the buses were not safe and that we would be using his personal driver who would be very careful. So off we went!

The greatest thing about Limbe, is that it is within Anglophone Cameroon. Before leaving for Africa, we read that, much like confused Canada, parts of Cameroon speak English and parts speak French. Based solely on AGA's emails stating we didn't need French for the project, we assumed that everybody would be able to speak at least basic English. Boy were we wrong. It is impossible to get by here with only English. Luckily for us, Vijay speaks a fair amount of French (this, by the way, is a complete coincidence, the rest of were unaware he possessed that skill until we arrived). Thanks to him, we have been able to order food, talk to taxi drivers, and convince the people at the laundromat that it doesn’t matter how clean our clothes will be, we are not paying $70. Despite this, Joel and I have become quite tired of never understanding what is going on, so hooray for Limbe.

Because we also planned to climb Mt. Cameroon (the tallest peak in west Africa at 4100m) over the weekend, we left first thing Friday morning. Of course, any of you that know Joel and myself will understand that "first thing in the morning" is equivalent to noon. Arriving in Limbe around 2PM, I was very excited to be able to deal with the hotel staff directly. Their English was still not completely fluent, but after 3 weeks of complete confusion and asking Vijay 10,000 times "what's going on?" it was perfect. We checked into our room and then decided to walk around. We had not eaten yet so we headed for the fish market hoping to get food as good as last week. Instead we came away with average fish, overpriced shrimp, and DVDs that are only in French.

This probably needs a bit of explanation. Andre's house is very nice, but is in the burbs, so in the evenings, with crappy internet access, there is nothing to do. We have passed the time forcing Vijay to play card games with us (which he does very reluctantly). So when Victor, the local street DVD salesman at the fish market offered us our choice of hundreds of movies, we decided to purchase a few. Though I negotiated him down to half his original price, I found out later that this was still about 3 times too expensive. Oh well. After purchasing the DVDs, Joel noticed that some of them, including Lost and Prison Break, said on the label that they were in French. So I called Victor back over to trade for other DVDs. He assured me that they have both English and French and even promised that if they didn’t work, we could come back the next day and he would exchange them. Though I knew we would not be there the next day and that we had no computer with us to try them (we were not willing to risk our last working computer so we left it at Andre's), we were convinced. We were wrong. They are only in French and they don’t even have the English subtitles promised on the labels. Guess they will make nice presents for some of our French speaking friends…

So back to Limbe. After our lunch, we decided to head to the beach. Following the advice of our trusty Lonely Planet book, we found a moto-taxi (this is a guy with a motorcycle and you ride behind him, aka, riding bitch) and asked for a ride to Mile 8. To our surprise, his price was 1000 CFA per person, 10 times what Lonely Planet said it would be. We tried to negotiate and he was having none of it. I had encountered similar situations in my travels throughout Asia so I decided to walk away, hoping he would call us back. Well, this ain't Asia. Apparently he would prefer to lose a sale than give the correct price, go figure. So we decided to stop an actual taxi. We thought it would be 500 a person but he wanted to charge double. After speaking with 2 other taxis, we decided to eat the difference ($3) and get going. I rode shotgun so I asked the driver, after promising that we would pay 3000 no matter what, what the correct price should be. The only thing he would tell me is that on the way back, don’t pay more than 500 per person, but he insisted his price to the beach was correct.

After lunch, we took a taxi to the beach but were surprised to learn that some dude wanted to charge us 1500 CFA to enter. There was an official sign and everything, so I think that entrance was owned by a hotel. Anyway, less than 50 meters away (that’s right, I work in metric units now) there was a free entrance, we just had to cross some shallow water. So we went that way and walked along the beach (through the hotel owned part), which was pretty cool because the sand was completely black. In our mind, we kept thinking it should be muddy, but it wasn’t. We took turns swimming and riding the waves, which was awesome, and that was most likely the cleanest we had been in a month (cold showers do not a clean boy make). Then we decided to head for the Lava Flow. In 1999 there was a large eruption of Mt. Cameroon and the flow can still be seen all the way to the ocean. A random guy on the beach suggested it would be better to take a taxi than walk because it was getting late and there were "bandits." So we walked back to the road and talked to the first taxi, offering 500 CFA per person for the short trip. He said he wanted 1000 so we started walking. To our surprise, he let us walk about 5 minutes and then chased us down, offering the ride for 500. Good thing too, because the Lava Flow was several miles away. Arriving at the flow, some other guy wanted us to go into his house. We were quite reluctant but he showed us an official looking paper that had entrance fees. I was very excited to see a student discount only to be informed that this is only for Cameroonians. Oh well. We climbed around the flow for about 30 min and then decided to head back to town.

This time we caught a shared taxi and the price was correct, but Vijay and I had to share the front seat and Joel squeezed in the back with3 Cameroonians. The taxi drivers name was Devine and he was very excited to talk about nightclubs with us and wanted to meet up with us later. He told us about Limbe Palace and then dropped us off at our destination. We headed out for drinks and dinner. The place that we ended up going to was fairly good, except Joel was cravin some fry's and instead they brought us rice. We had a few beers (very large and highly potent ones) and than headed for the club around midnight. Some lovely young ladies were waiting outside and instantly tried to convince us to enter. They were not happy about Vijay or my flip flops but eventually got over it once we agreed to buy a bottle of Absolut. Vijay was smart enough to insist that we check out the place first, and after seeing it was totally empty, we decided to head elsewhere. We were assured that the reserved tag on every table was a sign of things to come but since we were waking up at 6 to climb a mountain, we decided not to take the chance. We headed to the bar near our hotel and the young ladies were nice enough to come with us. At the bar, we ran into Devine, so we sat down for a few drinks. The girls were unconvinced that we would return to the club, so after some pissy banter, they returned to their club. We had one more beer and than decided to call it a night. Devine was a bit disappointed that we weren't going to party with him, but he gave us his number and we headed for the hotel. All in all, a good day along the black sands of Limbe.