Saturday, 21 May 2011

Journey to Say Goodbye

A good PCV friend will be finishing her service in a few weeks, thus, I wanted to say goodbye and see her youth business club before she left Cameroon. And the journey to say goodbye begins…

At 7AM, the VIP car agency (Le Car) that I wanted to take said that the next car would not leave until 9:30AM. Thus, I jumped in a yellow taxi to another agency called Centrale Voyages. Luck would have it that they have their own VIP bus leaving at 7:30AM and for 6.000CFA (~$12US), I would receive my own seat (a luxury in itself!), curtains on the windows, reading lights, a chocolate pastry, and a cold drink!

After three and a half hours of luxury cruising, I arrived in the city of Douala where I took a motobike to a friend of a friend’s workplace. From there, the friend of a friend and I jumped in a private car and he helped take me to Carrefour Roundpont to find a big sharebus taxivan. It took about two and a half hours to head off to the next transfer point as there was an incident…

The man sitting next to me wanted to exit early; however, the driver wanted to go to the normal stop. The man next to me became angry, leaned out the window, and threw the van’s spare tire into the road. The driver realized what had happened a few moments later and stopped the car…and then the man and driver argued for about half an hour solving nothing.

When we finally arrived in Loum, I was advised out of the van into a small, private car (I would normally think that this is sketchy, but here in Cameroon, c’est la vie). After about half an hour or so of sharing the front passenger seat, we arrive in Manjo at 2PM! Seven hours of driving done to travel 220 miles - phew!

So happy to finally reach Manjo!

Found the waterfall!

Gorgeous!

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