Cameroon to Zaire

I left the palm farm after a few days rest and headed to Yaounde the capital city. Cameroon was much different than Nigeria was, the people were calmer and there were way fewer of them. My French was poor and my Pidgin was comical but I communicated quite well with everybody. The people were very patient and friendly with my attempts at both languages. Pidgin is mostly a collection of sounds for words like choo choo for train etc and that is mixed with lots of hand movements. It was fun playing around with the combination of methods to communicate with the happy people in Cameroon.

I didn't want to spend much time in the big city. Big cities are not my first choice for spending a lot of time. They are only good for catching up on all the foods that are impossible to obtain out in the boondocks or jungles and for a few museums or whatever other historical or cultural highlights there are for that particular area. I spent a few days in a hotel and walked all over town and then headed out toward the Congo which was to the South. The roads were terrible, rutted, muddy, narrow and dangerous but still safer than any road in Nigeria ever was. People were not rushing around like in Nigeria. Traveling in these conditions always ended up getting you covered in dirt and bruises. It was tiring, body abusing work but I loved every minute of it. My ears and eyes were always peeled for any movement that might be an animal or a snake or a bird, whatever. I was very disappointed by how few animals I had seen so far and I had been in Africa for almost nine months. If an African sees any animal he kills it to either eat it or sell it or just because they all hate snakes. So the amount of animal life on the continent was going downhill quickly. Birds were still fairly plentiful.

When I got to the border of Cameroon, I ran into a problem. I had no entry stamp into the country so technically I was there illegally. The border guard started to raise a stink and I quickly had to pull him aside and offer a small cash cadeau or gift to him to work out the details to allow me to exit the country. It took us about five minutes of animated discussions and we came to terms at eight dollars American to overlook the missing entry stamp.

The minute we crossed over the border, everything changed dramatically. The people just were not happy like in Nigeria and Cameroon. Lots of single men were standing around looking like thugs and I did not feel comfortable at all. I left the country of the Congo again as quickly as I could heading toward the Central African Republic.

On the road to Bangui, CAF, we ran across the first Pygmies of my trip. They were selling chunks of game meat wrapped in banana leaves along the road. I jumped off the bus and tried to get to know them better. They were very friendly and nonchalant at the same time. They did not try to sell very hard but instead just stood there and if you wanted to buy it you did if not they didn't really seem to care. All the packages stunk to me. It would have to cook for a long time to make sure it was safe to eat. No wonder the people used so much spice in the stews they all ate. I stuck mostly to my fresh fruit and nuts with bread and peanut butter and jelly most of the time. I did also eat all the local foods but in moderation to try to minimize my stomach problems. Since the water was not potable unless huge amounts of chlorine were added to it, I mostly drank great Belgium style beer all day for hydration after my morning coffee. Liter sized green bottles of Star beer became one of my favorite parts of this area of the world.

I got the Pygmies to take me to where they lived just off the road. They tied bunches of the tall grass into a knot at the top and then just pushed an opening into the bundle of grass and spread it out into a temporary shelter. They built a fire either just in front of the opening or sometimes right in the shelter itself, talk about a fire trap. The Baka as they were called were very friendly. I think that they are the original hippies of the world. They refused to work or go to schools instead choosing to hunt and gather then trade their game and other collected items from the forest for whatever they wanted from the rest of the world. Their wants were minimal to say the least. They didn't seem to care about anything. A few minutes after I started showing friendliness toward them, they offered their wives for me to play with sexually. They were not monogamous amongst themselves either. I saw no sort of animosity from any of them in any way over anything. They were incredibly calm. I turned down their offer for sex. There was just too much sexually transmitted disease around for my tastes and I had no condoms either so I just smiled and told them how nice they all were. I spent a couple of nights with the group. They loved to dance and partied late into the night. They appeared to be trying multiple different substances to get high. I tried one ground up mix that they were snorting and it just about blew my head off when I took a hit. I didn't get stoned but it was more like snorting horseradish or wasabi then anything else I can think of. They all laughed their asses off at my response to their drug of choice whatever it was. No idea what it was but I did not do more.

I finally headed out to Bangui and easily crossed all the borders. Every time I came to a border I pulled out my huge book, War and Peace, and tried to look like I had all the time in the world to cross the border. I almost never had to pay cadeaus or bribes because since I looked like I was not in a hurry they had no power over me. The people that approached the borders in a big hurry paid a big price and usually took longer to get through the customs and immigrations than I did. I checked into a small French hotel that had a cafe in the front and kicked back.

While eating dinner in the cafe, I met another American traveler. We talked and laughed for hours drinking our beer and eating while checking out the girls walking by. We shared our travel experiences and plans and decided to travel together to Uganda. We partied in the hotel and wandered around Bangui for about a week. We both had foul mouths talking gutter trash constantly. We tried to actually communicate using only swear words and we got pretty good at it. When one or the other of us came up with a good long nasty string we would both laugh. Once we started it was very difficult to stop our little dirty talking habit. Then in a matter of seconds everything changed dramatically.

We were quietly sitting at the cafe drinking our morning coffee and eating our French bread with jam on it when we heard rifle shots fairly close by. Then some cars and trucks went tearing past the cafe driving insanely. The shots were coming closer and we could hear horns honking. The cafe/hotel owner came out and told us to hide behind the hotel. We crawled under the hotel thinking about snakes and peered out at the road as a bloody parade went by.

The "king" of the country decided that it was too expensive to house and feed prisoners in the country so he had the military take all the prisoners out of the jails and whip them on trucks while driving all around the country. His plan was to save money by not having to feed prisoners but more importantly he wanted to intimidate the citizens so much that they would never want to challenge his rule. So the military was driving down the road stripping the prisoners naked and then with them tied up spread eagle to the side of stakeside trucks, they then began to whip, beat and torture them until near death. They next tied them to ropes and dragged them behind the trucks bouncing down the roads screaming until dead. I could not believe what we were watching. The sounds of these men screaming was way beyond Jamie Lee Curtis screaming in Halloween. The soldiers looked like they were enjoying doing this. They would shoot their guns right next to the ears of the prisoners or just wing them in the arms, legs, genitals or maybe just shoot their guns randomly in the direction of people and buildings as they drove down the road. It worked as planned. Everybody was intimidated big time.

After the parade passed we packed our bags as quickly as we could and headed west on the road to try to get to the ferry to cross the Congo River over into Zaire for what we hoped was some security. We walked for hours before a bus stopped to give us a ride. The bus was already packed with people, goats, chickens, pigs and every other farm animal or whatever so we rode up on top with the luggage. We had a great view of the countryside as we sped along the road next to the river. Everything went fine for a couple of hours until we came to a hill. The bus labored up the hill with its heavy load with us chanting "I think I can. I think I can." and then crested the top very slowly. As we started downhill we cheered thinking we were almost to the ferry. Then the bus started to pick up speed. Then it started to bounce up and down as it roared down the hill faster and faster sans brakes. All of a sudden it flew up into the air and came down hard into some wet muddy ruts and the undercarriage of the bus just stayed right there in the mud and the upper part of the bus flew down the road until gravity sucked it back down to earth with a loud crashing thud. We went flying off the front of the bus and landed down the hill in the soft muddy road without getting hurt. The people and animals in the bus however, did not fare so well. There were a lot of injuries like split open heads and broken limbs. To our amazement everybody that could move starting running down the road away from the crash leaving all the injured people behind. The driver quickly told us to start running or the army would kill us when they caught up to us in a few minutes time. We looked at each other and at the injured people and animals in the twisted heap of a bus and thought we need to help these people but the morning parade was still very very fresh in our minds and (to my dismay in retrospect) we took off running with the rest of the able bodied people.

This has haunted me for years that we left those people behind but we were victims of the violence that day too. Our perceptions were altered, even if only temporarily altered, they were still altered. We had a gut reaction to gross violence and we really can't be faulted for it. People stampede in fires and we were literally under fire. We hurried down the road as fast as we could in the heat and humidity of the equatorial jungles we were traveling through. With our youth and light loads we quickly left the crowd behind us.

About an hour later a land rover came down the road going East as we walked West. We flagged it down and told the driver and his passenger what was happening down the road in the direction he was heading. The driver was a missionary from Zaire going to Bangui to buy some supplies for his church and family compound on the other side of the river in Zaire. He turned around and decide to go back home to his family to protect them and offered us a ride to his place in Zaire. We quickly accepted his offer to get us the hell out of there.

We drove for a couple of hours. It was getting to be mid to late afternoon now. We got to the ferry crossing and had to go through immigration and customs to cross the border. We did not mention what we were fleeing from and the officials did not seem to know about the days events. The border stuff went fine until we got to the ferry. The ferry owner told the missionary one price, my friend another, and me a higher price yet to cross the river. I balked. I refused to pay more than the missionary was paying to cross. They were asking me to pay about twenty bucks while he paid two and my friend only paid five. The gross unfairness of the whole thing just pissed me off after the stress of the day so far. I told them to go stick their ferry boat and I would swim across the river. I walked out to the end of the dock and started to disrobe. I was handing my clothes to the missionary and he was telling me I should not even think of crossing the river by swimming because of crocs and snakes and worse than either of them the rapid current that would push and pull any swimmer, even Johnny Weissmuller to a certain date with death. I continued with my show of swimming. The owner of the ferry saw a quick five dollar profit going down the throat of a croc or down the throat of a river but he still saw his money floating away from him so at the last minute he capitulated and we negotiated a quick deal. I paid him two bucks and ten aspirins to cross on his ferry. He was happy. I was happy and everyone was ready to get the hell out of there.

The ferry pulled away from the shore and when were about half way across a large dugout canoe with about twenty or more people on it came floating by. The men with the paddles were madly swinging at something in the water and all the people were standing up and screaming. Now what the hell was going on? We looked and then to our amazement we saw the snake. A huge snake was trying to grab a quick easy lunch off of the canoe. We watched it float by as the fight went on but before it played out the canoe went around a bend in the river and we never saw what happened. Did the snake get a meal or did the people beat it off? I never found out. I just could not believe that one more insane thing had happened in this already crazy crazy day. But at least speculating on the outcome distracted us from the day's death and destruction that we had already experienced.

We continued down the road in the direction of the missionary's place after breezing though the officials on the Zaire side of the river. In the tropics it goes from daylight to night in about ten or fifteen minutes and it was that time of day. I was still wired up as we twisted and turned and bounced down the trail of a rutted road through the dark jungles of Zaire. It was Conrad's Heart of Darkness in real life. I could not stop thinking about the African Queen and all those stupid poorly made Tarzan movies as I experienced the real thing. I was riding shotgun, hoping to see the eyes of a lion or something in the headlights of the Landrover. I was getting tired physically but I was just so full of adrenaline that I could not relax. What next? Blow darts or painted faces hiding in the dark bushes. Do elephants really respond to Ungouwa like in those Johnny Weissmuller movies?