Neglecting Cameroon
Sometimes other life stuff has to come first.
CAMEROON
Poor old Cameroon.
We rather neglected this large, beautiful and diverse country. It wasn’t deliberate; it was a victim of timing, circumstances, visa deadlines, work commitments, some family issues at home, and possibly a brief dose of weariness.
We enjoyed some glorious scenery but the nearly three weeks we spent there felt somewhat dominated by the views of a mechanic’s yard, the streets of the capital Yaounde, and the inside of an apartment building.
We’re at peace with the fact that in long-term travel sometimes you’re not in the mood to be a ‘visitor’, or must prioritise other life stuff. We can’t see and do everything, and we don’t try.
In the first few days in Cameroon, what we mostly saw was more dust.
We’d collected a few tonnes of it, it seemed, on the rough crossing from Nigeria and that continued in the two days it took us to drive 200km from Banyo to Foumban.
It’s exciting to bounce through the wilds for a spell, and this overlanding life would be hell of a boring without it, but we do like to mix the rough with the smooth. By now, we were so over the bumps and dust. There were moments when we felt quite annoyed at them. In our rich countries we really take paved roads for granted. Imagine what it’s like to live and breathe alongside these routes, as so many people do. It takes forever to get anywhere. Fine orange powder constantly fills the air. Houses, crops, vehicles, laundry, people, animals – all caked. In the rainy season, dust is exchanged for a sticky mudfest.
In fact, who are we to declare that tarmac is ever boring?
We were finding everything so calm and gentle after Nigeria. People waved joyfully then went on their way. No one was yelling or trying to stop us. The driving was less reckless. The little changes you observe when you cross a border – nothing more than an artificial line on a map, after all – never cease to amaze us.
We were back into French-speaking territory, although it’s complicated and a source of conflict in Cameroon – two regions are Anglophile and more than 250 indigenous languages are also spoken. Anyhoo, politics aside, suddenly we could buy French-style baguettes again! Some days, these silly things seem to matter.
When we stopped for breakfast on day two, Jeremy noticed a leak from the diesel filter. It seemed the clumsy guys who changed it in Nigeria had cracked the edge of the bowl and turned it to the back so it wasn’t visible. We got a quick fix at a fuel station and added it to the list of things to sort out.
Inside and out, Ivy looked like she’d paid a visit to Trump’s tanning salon. Our hair was stiff with dust, everything had a gritty texture and whenever we sat on the sofa, a puff of orange took to the air, hanging in the sunlight before re-settling on everything.
Have I whined enough already about how poorly sealed wonky old Ivy is? This wasn’t helped by a truck driver mangling our back doors in Sierra Leone. The lingering damage has worsened again, and you can see daylight through the gap in the doors. So, it’s not very challenging for Mr Dust Particle. He just breezes right in. After driving the bad roads we have to spend at least half-an-hour cleaning up when we camp for the night, just so we can use the bed.
It doesn’t always drive you mad; dust and dirt becomes normalised for long periods of time and we’d been in the zone for weeks. But I was starting to crack and fantasise about gleaming surfaces and non-rust-coloured fingernails. My head was running through all the cleaning we had to do to get back to some semblance of order.
But this was all, literally, superficial. Dust schmust. We were heading for the capital Yaoundé and what really mattered was getting a mechanic to do a thorough health check for smoky old Ivy.
After the town of Magba the roads turned to tarmac. We were so happy, whizzing along and enjoying the gorgeous scenery without having to constantly scan for bumps and dips. At a police checkpoint, we told the officer we had come from Banyo and he said “wow”.
The issue with crossing the border into Cameroon at Banyo is that it’s so remote you can’t do the normal things like get your passport stamped or buy vehicle insurance. We had to drive without insurance until we reached the historic town of Foumban.
We neglected the town’s ancient culture and focused on getting cash and the insurance. The company’s office was pretty rough – as we tentatively climbed the crumbling stairs, we wondered if they had their own insurance for this dilapidated building.
Half way through the tortuous process there was a power cut and the broker had to fiddle with some terrifying-looking wires at our feet then fire up a diesel generator in the office next door so he could finish the online form. All in all, we would perhaps have been safer just driving uninsured.
We finally took off and marvelled at the increasingly smooth roads. Actual speed! We’d almost forgotten what it felt like. We made the most of it by putting the boot down for a few hours and unexpectedly managing to catch up with Ken and Rose for an impromptu little reunion at their wild camp. Here’s Ken doing his own special version of Chicken Run.
Then, we reached another milestone - Yaoundé. The vehicles had been through a lot, and the aim of many overlanders at this point is to just get to the city without falling to pieces. We spent 10 days there which ranged from fun to spectacularly un-fun, with some other words beginning with F in between.
Firstly, it was straight to a mechanic’s yard to discuss the investigations we wanted to do – mainly the smoky exhaust issue and suspension checks – and started the simultaneous process of getting cleaned up, inside and out. We had lots of work and other stuff going that needed focus and wifi, so we opted to take an apartment instead of sleeping in Ivy at the yard.
Who doesn’t love videos of dirty washing? Here’s the result of me washing some of our cloths and towels in the little semi-automatic machine in our apartment.
We alternated between working and admin-ing in the apartment and spending time at the workshop, discussing and overseeing the work and cleaning the truck. Jeremy was trying to help deal with a difficult situation at home, and also completing a project report. We were still on the come-down from our recent adventures and feeling pretty exhausted.
There was a lot of back and forth about Ivy’s fuel system and what was going on to create the extra smoke, which didn’t lead to a definitive answer in the end. We had to constantly keep pushing to get things done. The injectors were cleaned up and, long story short, although we had various theories and things to keep an eye on, the mechanic felt there was nothing serious happening.
We also had the suspension system checked and, not surprisingly, needed some new balljoints and shock absorbers.
Weirdly, we had ended up in an apartment directly opposite Seth and Ollie, of @hold.mygear, who at this point were attempting to drive the length of Africa in a three-wheeled Reliant Robin, named Sheila. That’s a whole other tale, but in summary they’d been having nightmare upon nightmare with mechanical and suspension issues. We’d already met briefly in Nigeria, and now they were stuck in Yaounde, at the same workshop as Ivy, and waiting for a new engine to come from the UK. 😬
Sheila was a shell of her former self and, suspended as she was, looked like she was about to fly off to the scrapyard in the sky. To be honest, there were moments in that week when we all thought this was a more likely possibility than them making it to South Africa.
The new engine arrived and after a few other exasperating problems, Sheila came to life, before facing several issues again. They were pretty stressed and fed up.
[Spoiler alert….. the boys eventually made it to Cape Town, which was an incredible feat that bagged a world record in the process. 🍾]
We managed another reunion with Ken and Rose, who cooked us all dinner at their place in another part of the city. We all felt so civilised, sitting at a grown-up table and not being caked in dirt, but completely forgot to take any photos of this rare sight.
One week in, we were ready to take Ivy out for a test drive. We decided to do a supermarket trip and, after a stressy journey through the city, got to a Carrefour. As Jeremy was parking he said the steering felt funny. He drove back and forth in circles to test out the problem, before feeling a weird sickening thud. As we were crawling around trying to see what had broken, a security guard said he’d spotted a black line on the tyre as we’d been turning. We couldn’t believe it. A worker at the mechanic’s had left a bolt sticking out the wrong way and it had gouged a huge hole out of our tyre. That’s never going to be good news, but we’d only recently bought it in Ghana, for €600, which made things feel significantly more enraging.
We were absolutely livid. These tyres are not easy to get hold of and we’d actually felt lucky to find some in Ghana. We sent for someone from the mechanic’s workshop to come over and establish that this was their error. To his credit, the owner didn’t even try to argue. He immediately started looking for a new tyre for us, but we didn’t feel hopeful. We waited for hours in the car park, until we heard the news that he had found one in Yaoundé. Unbelievable. What an incredibly expensive mistake for them. When we put our spare tyre on to get back to the workshop, the valve was damaged and we couldn’t re-inflate it properly. We limped back with a saggy tyre. It was just one of those dastardly days at the end of a trying week.
One new tyre on, one spare repaired, and one other day of chores later, we were out of there. We were delighted to be in the countryside and wild-camping again. We spent the night in the first of many old quarries – something that was to become a staple overnight stop for quite a while to come.
Our time had been so short, but we were already resigned to the fact that we wouldn’t really be able to visit much. We needed to push on because there were date limitations on the visa for our next country - the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). Our last two nights in Cameroon were spent in a sublime, peaceful spot; an abandoned football pitch that was being slowly reclaimed by the forest.
We saw one passing hunter in two days. It was just us, the birds and the crickets. It hadn’t been the easiest few weeks so it was just what we needed to blow the dust away and get back into the groove.
What an adventure. I felt all the emotions for you. Sending you both lots of love. I hope everything has been resolved at home, too. I think it’s amazing what you’re doing. I’ve finally set up Substack do I can actually comment here! Yay! 🎉
I just did the Yaounde-Brazzaville route a few months ago on public transport. I was amazed at how good the roads were in Congo. Much better than the average in Cameroon.