Back in the Tropics

One great thing about being back in the tropics is that we only have one backpack to lug around - because we were able to leave all of our cold weather clothing at Tim & Jessy's (thanks guys!) - and Scott is such a gentleman that I am not allowed to carry it around. Hmm, it may also be because it would not look so good here to have me carrying a backpack half my size while he carries nothing, but whatever the motivation, it means my back is much less sweaty in this heat!

A second great thing is that we can play our advanced version of the "smell" test game. Because one's clothing becomes sweaty and damp within 5 minutes of putting them on and the primary means of fixing this is try to air them out after a long day in the same tee shirt (but "airing" a shirt out in 100% humidity is kind of an oxymoron), we spend some of our evenings trying to figure out which of us is or is not acceptably smelly and which article of clothing is the most offensive. I don't think I am being unfair when I say that Scott's socks usually take top prize.

Limbe
After the wild commercial capital of Douala, we headed to what I hear is the best beachtown in the country, Limbe. We traveled to the town from Douala via two taxi cabs and one minibus. The minibus was similar to those we took in Uganda/Rwanda/Tanzania except in this one, there were some angry Angry people. The minibus proprietors piled people into the bus, telling them that the bus would take them to their destinations - the only trouble was, people in the bus were going to all different destinations. Their game was to take people's fares to their final destination, then take everyone to a major road junction, buy them onward tickets on some other vehicle for less money than was paid to them, dump everyone off the minibus, and make money on the transaction. By the time people compared notes and realized that the bus could not be taking everyone to the disparate destinations, all people could do was vocalize their complaints, but everyone was already piled in and ready to go (or, wait for 20 minutes while the driver prepared himself to drive) so there wasn't much to be done other than suck it up.

The taxis, which was just small (typically very old) cars like nissan sentra hatchbacks, are super efficient. They are always shared unless you request to buy the whole thing out (and why would you do that?) , they travel on major roads and you point in the direction you are going in, the driver slows down, you shout your destination into his window and either he stops or it is not a good fit so he keeps driving. They carry the maximum volume of people possible of course. Typically, that is 3 people in front and 4 people in the backseat. We have not ridden in one with people in the trunk yet, but we have seen them drive by with 7 in the main part of the car and the trunk open with 4 people sitting in the trunk with their feet hanging over the back. People are very friendly on the taxi but I have a hard time understanding their conversations which are usually in English-pidgen.

In Limbe, we visited a wildlife sanctuary which was very interesting; the place is nearly completely populated by gorillas and primates rescued from poachers or from people's homes where they were being held as pets (typically purchased from poachers who killed a baby-gorilla or baby-monkey's mother for bush meat). The exhibit included each animal's story of arrival to the sanctuary.

We met a university student from Barcelona who was volunteering at the place and, after we congratulated her Spanish team on their victory, she noted that actually, the World Cup was won by Barceloneans as most of the team is from that region. We also eavesdropped on some other volunteers, one of whom were observing the behavior of the gorillas. As we were sitting watching them do what they do, the gorilla-observer correctly noted that one big male gorilla was trying to mate with a baby gorilla, she sighed and marked it in her notebook.

We also tried a lot of different food in Limbe. I was finally able to try Scott's famed rice, beans and pepe (hot pepper sauce in palm oil) dish, his favorite in Cameroon or actually anywhere. This is best procured from ladies on the street who set up their wares on street corners. They can be identified by their special pots, they look kind of like crock pots but no plugs and plastic, not glass. Inside these pots can be any variety of items so you must ask what they have cooked that night. The first night we did this in Limbe, we encounted several ladies without beans or rice so you must be persistent! When we finally found our lady, we bought the dish for 200 CAF (central african francs, a common currency used in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Congo, Gabon, Central African Republic) less than $0.50 and it was very good. I must say that the delight with the flavor of the dish (essentially white rice with a tomatoey/oily pinto type of bean along with hot sauce) cannot be disentangled from the fantastic value. Cheap restaurants provide comparably sized dishes (but less flavorful in general!) for 2,000 - 3,000 CAF. There are risks with eating street food with sanitation and what not, but these risks exist in restaurants and at least we can watch the lady cook/plate our food the whole time. We have eaten street food everyday and so far, so good with the not-sick..

Limbe's beach is below - Black sand and volcanic rock.. And pretty strong waves!



The Worst Value Meal Yet
After 2 nights in a scrappy-beach hotel, we decided to splurge on one night in a fancy-ish place. This hotel was was some miles from town with no meal options nearby so we expected some overpriced meals. Unfortunately, the only choice at the restaurant wa a fantastically overpriced buffet - a whopping 9,000 CFA, $18 per person, compared with 200 CFA for a whole meal on the street. We sat in the restaurant with maybe 3 other tables of people waiting for the buffett to get prepared while numerous other diners approached the place, saw the price , laughed and walked out... We stuck it out to avoid traveling at night. The food was not good, the staff were extremely surly (probably because they couldn't believe how little they were getting from that 9,000 CFA per person we forked out), and I left feeling overly full because I stuffed myself on couscous, the only item I liked, to justify the huge expense.

Congratulations Seme Beach Hotel at Mile 11 near Limbe, Cameroon, after nearly 3 months of searching, we are awarding you the Worst Value Meal of our trip!

Cameroon - Arrival

The final stop on our trip is a long-delayed return (for me) to Cameroon. I spent two years here as a Peace Corps Volunteer between 1999 and 2001, teaching high school physics and geology in a government high school in Kumba, in the southwestern part of the country. I had always intended to come back and visit, and finally made it back to Douala after 9 years and 35 days.

Any two-year period generates memories in life, but those two years were more memory-generating than most, and the overall experience has impacted my life in any number of ways. Without those years in Cameroon, I would likely not have been interested in public policy for graduate school, not have met Becca, not have visited South Africa and thus had an interest in the World Cup. The experience informed and changed my opinions on any number of subjects that could fill many, many blog posts (for instance, I think that the US Post Office does an amazing job). And Becca has never seen the place.

So, from the start, I planned for these 13 days to be filled with visits to my old haunts and to actively dredge up memories, to visit my old house, my old school, the spots where I vacationed with and visited other Peace Corps Volunteers (who remain an integral part of those memories and lifelong friends--it was with one of them that we stayed during our visit to Kigali in May), to find former students or colleagues, to see how Cameroon is different and how it's similar.

Our journey here began months ago, when I looked up the visa requirements from the Cameroon embassy in Washington and discovered that a) Cameroon requires tourist visas to be obtained in advance and b) they only issue the things 60 days in advance of a visit. The 60-day threshold was perilously close to our departure date, so we resolved to get the thing in Pretoria.

Two weeks ago, we arrived at the Cameroon High Commission in Pretoria hoping to get visas and to be on our way. We should have known better. The consular official handed us the visa requirements: valid passport (check!), proof of plane reservation (check!), completed application (ok), proof of "sufficient funds" (I had brought a bank statement, check!), letter of approval from your employer (uh, hmm, really?), proof of hotel reservation (really??), and $100 (well, if you insist). We showed him what we had (basically everything but the letter and the hotel reservation) and he sneered at us: "Why didn't you get this in Washington? We only give visas to South Africans." After we explained the 60-day problem he relented. "Ok, come back when you have a complete file."

So, uh, we turned in a "complete" file. And we were duly issued a visa three days later. (Because of the delay, we travelled to the Kruger Park in South Africa rather than visiting Namibia or Botswana, as our passports were held by the Cameroonians).

So we were in!

We arrived at Douala airport at 7:30pm on July 14 after a six-hour flight from Johannesburg and a brief stopover in Libreville, Gabon. Various authors of Africa travel have remarked on the dichotomy of travelling from Johannesburg, whose airport (especially with the World Cup upgrades) is a rival to any in the world in terms of modernity. We left ATMs and cafes and duty-free jewelry stores and, a few hours later met the decay and chaos of Douala's airport. The airport infrastructure is more or less unchanged since 2001, and we walked off the plane onto the tarmac and up a flight of stairs to the jetway--the mechanism to move it up against the plane was broken. Down a long corridor to the health check (all visitors to Cameroon and most of West Africa are required to have a WHO-certified yellow fever vaccination, and to prove it on arrival) where we waived our certificates past a bored immigration official who stamped our passports, and into the grubby arrival hall.

It's hard to describe "grubby" in one of these places, and developing countries tend to be a bit touchy about people taking photos of airports or power stations or banks, so I can't show you what it looks like. Hot and sweaty, full of travellers and porters and security agents, with just a few dim fluorescent bulbs flickering from the high ceiling, with unfinished toilet stalls in the basement, and in desperate need of a good paint job and a sweep, it's the kind of room you can only find in the developing tropics.

I had remembered a more chaotic scene with porters attempting to run off with your bag to a waiting taxi, but on this night we basically collected our bag and walked through customs without incident. One immediate change was useful, however. ATMs. We brought a wad of hundreds to convert into CFA, and immediately discovered that there are no money-changers at the airport. But some loiterers waved at a corner of the dark hall where a visa logo stood, and to my surprise there was an ATM. And it gave us money. And it (apparently) gave us money at a good exchange rate!

So, with my broken French we arranged a taxi and made our way to the Foyer du Marin, our pre-booked accomodation for that first night in Douala.

Kruger Park

I have been falling down on the job and have not done South Africa justice on this blog.. to be clear though, we have been watching so much soccer and driving around the country so much (more than 4,000 miles) that I think I can truthfully plead busi-ness!

We are off to Cameroon tomorrow so I will take this one moment to post about Kruger Park and then will have to come back with a full-on-long-post regarding all of the other wonderful places we have visited in this lovely country!

We went to Kruger Park, South Africa's premiere national game park, during the World Cup semi-finals (we watched the Uruguay-Netherlands and Germany-Spain matches in the Park, to give you an idea of the timeframe). Unlike the Serengeti, which is largely full of foreigners, Kruger is full of South African families on school-holiday. These folks drive from all over the country, tour the park in their own vehicles, and rent small bungalows and braai every night (South Africans love braais = BBQs).

Much of the park has paved roads - and even the dirt roads are graded so our little car (smaller than our Yaris at home) can easily travel on them - and visitors can see all of the favorite animals (lions, elephants, giraffs, rhinos, hyenas, buffalo, leopards, cheetahs, etc). The setting is very different than the Serengeti (my only frame of reference for this stuff) - while Tanzania's park is very flat with little in the way of shrubs or trees, Kruger has many stretches with thick bushes meaning that an elephant is either 10 yards from your car, or he is 20 yards away, but you can't see him through the growth. This is both exciting and frustrating, either your sightings are great ones very near, or you can drive along for an hour seeing very little. Also, because there are so many people in the park driving themselves, as soon as there is something cool, a crowd of cars collects, jockeying for good-picture-positions.. The Serengeti was pretty empty of people and everyone had guides driving them. While we had some great highlights with elephants, hyenas, rhinos and lions, we did not see any leopards or cheetahs like we did in Tanzania.

The accommodations in Kruger are great big campuses with camping, permanent tents, and small bungalows with kitchens and bathrooms. We did not plan ahead, so the only thing we could get were the bungalows (and the reservations woman told us we were lucky to get that, that there were some cancellations otherwise the place would have been COMPLETELY full).

Our first day we searched and searched for lions but only managed to see a couple far away just before we had to get back to the bungalow (you can only drive yourself around from sun-up to sun-down, then only guides can drive guests, for animal and people safety I suppose).

We needed help finding lions! The lodging campuses have maps up where guests note where they sighted animals, which is pretty cool. We checked the map for lion sightings (since they hang out in their turfs, a couple of kilometers from one another, these sightings maps can be good guides for where to find them from one day to the next). The map had many, many lion sightings. Sigh. We also heard this dude bragging to some people about seeing 20 lions in 4 days.. Sigh, the lions are all over, just not where we were looking!

We committed to find them the next day by getting up a dawn, when they are more active.. (Getting up at dawn is much harder for me than for Scott for some reason.) On the road that next morning we saw hyenas and all manner of birds and antelope but NO lions.. Darn it.. By the evening we came across a crowd of cars and joined the group viewing a sleeping lioness right near the road and a male lion. The word from the crowd of cars was that they were a mating pair. We hear that lions mate for a week or so and during that period they will have sex up to 700 times. Exciting. We waited by the side of the road, hoping the lioness would wake up in the mood. No such luck, we had to return to camp as sun-down was approaching. Good lion sighting but not great.

The next morning, up at dawn again. Hyenas in the road again, we are a magnet for those animals it seemed. No lions for one and a half hours. Then, on a dirt road (good because little traffic), we saw a car stopped ahead of us in a river bed which was largely dried out, but still had small pools of water in it. We looked about spied one, two, three, four.. SEVEN lions!! Two lionesses and 5 cubs, the cubs were probably several months old.. OH Sweet Kruger overlords! It was awesome, the babies were playing in the river sand, we sat there for more than an hour.. They played and drank water, then the lionesses looked disturbed/interested in something along the river bed.. We looked in the direction of their gaze/noses and saw a GIANT male lion walking right towards us! This created great drama because the males sometimes kill baby lions so that they can mate with the mothers (like people, mommy lions do not often conceive while they are attending to babies/nursing). Would the male lion pick a fight to get to the lady lions??


Our lions playing in the sand.



Male lion passing by our car, keeping an eye on the group of lions in the sand.


Lionesses have their babies peering over this sand bar as the male passes by.

He would put himself at great peril to try this, two female adults could cause him a lot of damage. He veered off away from them, both groups eying one another warily. In avoiding the lionesses, he walked right past our car. It was awesome..The best lion sighting ever. Strange but not that strange that the 'best' sightings one can have of animals involve either mating or violence.

Luckily, we had this great experience our last day in Kruger, I left loving the place of course!

We also had a great encounter with a mommy and baby white rhino when we staked out a water hole. The baby rhino was very cute, babies always do a lot more than the adults, those adults are always saving energy and not moving much.

World Cup Notes

The World Cup is down to its final four (Holland v. Uruguay and Spain v. Germany), here are a few musings about the event so far:

• What a spectacle. Nationalism (patriotism?), politics, larger-than-life personalities, celebrities, technology, marketing...it's hard to enumerate the passions and excitements that go into the World Cup. Let me just say that the event, in its entirety, has been remarkable.
• Despite years of negative publicity, in the event South Africa has been amazing. The stadiums are spectacular, crime has been a non-issue, the organization has been (mostly) flawless, people on the street are welcoming and friendly and more than willing to assist fans visiting the country. Extra police and armies of volunteers have ensured that the event has been safe and well-run for everyone.
• The US played well and won a lot of support. Not well enough to win, and not enough to steal support from Ghana. But the soccer world has too many players who whine to the referees and lie on the ground at the end of games. The US played in some dramatic games and their hustle and grit were a credit to their country and to the game.
• Americans were the largest bloc of visitors and spent the most money (according to Visa). Thank God they ignored those news articles (you WILL get carjacked) and the crazy marketing (some British company sold stab-proof jackets), every American we've spoken to has had a blast.
• England fans are annoying, and seem to be mostly drunk. Or most of them, anyway. Apologies to our English readers, but that's the truth. One funny English fan moment...at the Ghana-Uruguay match some guy in front of us bellowed "Come On England" every eight or ten minutes for the entire match.
• South Africans have readily transferred their support. There were some wild expectations of the South African team, but when they went out the country switched allegiance to Ghana en masse. We saw the Ghana-Uruguay match with 84,000 Ghanaian supporters (um, no, there were very few actual Ghanaians). Brazil would have been a third choice, and Spain may be the fourth choice for the country.
• We've been to four stadiums, and Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg's Soccer City are all world-class. Durban's is probably the most dramatic, with a huge arch supporting the roof over the seating and, like Cape Town, situated close to the beach.
• Live 3D technology isn't a world-beater. Sony is broadcasting matches in 3D, and we watched Spain-Paraguay in a cinema, live, in 3D. It was cool, definitely a new perspective, but I don't think I need to run out and buy a 3D TV. Unlike HD-TV, which makes a huge difference in watching sporting events, 3D TV doesn't seem to add much to the experience that was previously missing. And the glasses are annoying.
• Who's going to win? After early South American dominance, we are down to a fairly normal European threesome in the semis. But Spain and Holland have never won the Cup and Uruguay hasn't won since 1950, so we could still have some drama in the final week.

Kimberley

(In front of the Big Hole)

History

By the 1870s, the South Africa interior was taking on some modern characteristics. Boer farmers had populated and appropriated large portions of the land, and had declared independent republics in the Transvaal and trans-Orange regions. The British had consolidated control in the western Cape and in the Natal province around Durban. Khoisan Africans were completely marginalized and had seen their populations dramatically reduced. And the black African civilizations were in the process of being subdued.

Then, in 1871, two farm children discovered a diamond on the banks of the Orange river.
In the following decade, the region around Kimberley experienced a diamond boom. Prospectors from across the globe flocked to Kimberley, staked a claim, and started digging. Those who "hit it big" bought more claims, and began to hire laborers from amongst the black population.

Kimberley, as a town, flourished. By the early 1880s it had the first electric streetlights in the southern hemisphere. It soon had streetcars, saloons, banks, and mansions for a lucky few.

Diamond Mining and De Beers
The individual claims were originally staked at about fifteen feet on a side, with the claimant owning the vertical rights to the claim. And since the diamonds were underground, that meant that you had to dig. And since some diggers were faster than others, there was soon a chaotic jigsaw of holes and bridges and guywires across the main diamond site. Cave-ins were common. And the deeper holes began to fill with water. What's more, by the early 1880s the easy digging near the surface was finished, and few diamonds were found in the harder "blue earth" underneath. Small operators or individuals began to sell off their claims.

(The Big Hole today)

Through the 1880s, this consolidation of claims created a handful of major operators, each "hiring" labor from African tribes and each struggling to stay ahead of his peers. Finally, Cecil Rhodes managed to buy out all the remaining operators (using loans financed from Rothschild bankers in London) and formed De Beers Consolidated in 1888. As the "blue earth" was found to contain lots of diamonds, De Beers, via their local monopoly on Kimberley diamonds, effectively gained control of the global diamond market.

Boer War
Kimberley, as an English town in the middle of the Boer interior, and as a tranport hub (the British, of course, built roads and then railroads to Kimberley as its importance grew), became an easy target for the Boers during the Anglo-Boer war in 1899. The siege of Kimberley lasted four months before the British were able to raise it, from November 1899 to February 1900. The siege is perhaps most famous for the "Long Cecil" a six-pound cannon designed by an American working for Rhodes and built in the De Beers workshops in town. The local British garrison had only small weapons while the encircling Boers had artillery, so the "Long Cecil" was built using the tools at hand. That it actually worked was quite remarkable, given that there were no gun-making tools (or expertise) in Kimberley at the time.


(The original Long Cecil)

Modern history and Big Hole
Unlike ostrich feathers, diamonds have never gone out of fashion, and De Beers careful manipulation of the diamond market has ensured that Kimberley has remained fairly prosperous throughout the 20th century. Today it is a fairly sizable modern city, with continuing mining operations in the area. Tourism is significant, with lots of markers to nearby battlefields and guided tours of the "Kimberley Big Five" the five large holes in which open mining of diamonds took place.

The premier attraction, however, is the Big Hole. The site of the original diamond digging by individual claimants, De Beers continued mining the site until 1914. In the end, it became the largest hand-dug hole in the world, with hand digging from the surface down to almost 300m in depth, and underground digging (via shafts) continuing to a depth of 1000m. Today the Big Hole is partially filled with debris and water, and there is no longer any mining at the site. In all, 2.7 tonnes of diamonds were harvested from 22 million tonnes of rock.

(Big Hole statistics)

De Beers dominated the diamond market in the 20th century. Savvy marketing ("A diamond is forever"), the absence of a secondary diamond market, and supply constraints meant that they could largely control the price of retail diamonds. While their control has been challenged in recent years by other diamond producers (mostly in Russia), they remain the largest player in the global diamond business.