Weekend in Limbe

I spent the Easter weekend in Limbe with some of the Embassy gang. It's a small town in South West Cameroon, notable for being on the coast, close to Mount Cameroon (a volcano and west Africa's tallest peak at 4,095m) and home to an oil refinery that was controversially neglected in choosing a location for the terminus of a new oil pipeline to Chad. Francophone Kribi, in the president's home region, was chosen over Anglophone Limbe, and it is widely believed by the Anglophone minority to have been a stitch up. From Limbe you can also see Equatorial Guinea's Bioko Island, one of those islands whose location makes you wonder why it belongs to the country it does rather than the one right next to it (the Falkland Islands come to mind, for example).

To get there you have to drive through Douala, which bore obvious signs of the recent unrest. The majority of the petrol stations we passed had the prices smashed out and a couple were still closed. One had a burnt-out car in the forecourt and its petrol pumps ripped out, and several had smashed windows or other smaller signs of violence. Those belonging to Total seemed to be the worst hit, I wonder if this has anything to do with their being a French company. Driving through Douala is always chaotic, and on the way back we witnessed a small accident as a woman was hit by a motorcycle, stumbling and falling backwards from the road and leaving the motorcyclist and his motorcycle in a small heap on the road. Luckily he was travelling at a low speed and she was robustly built, so it seemed that no major damage was done. I was surprised and relieved to see how calmly it was dealt with, having heard many reports of road accidents ending in heated arguments, violence and sometimes mob murder in other parts of the continent.

Limbe itself is very nice, the sands are volcanic grey which is unusual, but it has a very relaxed feel to it, and the ever-present mountain backdrop is something I really appreciated. Our hotel had a great view over the town, the sea was warm, and the beach was quiet with delicious fish available on tap from the beachside restaurant. We also went to visit Buea (pronounced "boy-ah"), which was the German colonial capital for a short while, passing through the Tole Tea Plantation on the way. Buea is at about 1,000m altitude and has a nice cool, airy feel. It looks an interesting little place but we didn't have time to hang around unfortunately.

The tea plantation was interesting too, at one point we stopped to have a drink and some food that we had with us and started to attract a fair bit of attention. First the woman who works on that part of the plantation came to see what we were up to, then the guy who said he guards it. He came with a bit of attitude, telling us that "snapping" (photography) is prohibited and that he would have to take our memory cards away and call the management. Although he had no real basis for doing that, our will to be co-operative (and perhaps the thought of the group of men with machetes we'd just passed who were working on the land) made us try to reason with him a little. It worked to some extent, although in the end it was the language of the bribe that came through. Two meatballs, some small pieces of cheese and a packet of biscuits apparently meant that our photos were no longer a problem.

Just before he left with the goods, now all smiles, he mentioned that had we been French there would have been a *real* problem. We didn't sit and challenge him on his racial stereotypes, preferring to let him wander off on his merry way to share his spoils with his cohorts. A few minutes later the manager actually turned up anyway and chatted amiably with us about the problems they are having with privatisation for a few minutes before carrying on about his business. The hatred of all things French is apparently not unusual in this part of the country: the restaurant that evening had "Freedom Fries" on the menu. In a token act of resistance to this frog-bashing I ordered "fries, French fries", before settling down to a very tasty and cheap meal, followed by a bit of a dance at "Dreams", Limbe's nightlife hotspot.

When we first got to Limbe I'd completely forgotten that there is an oil refinery there. As we drove through the town on the way to the beach something stood out - a paved residential road running parallel to ours. It immediately made me wonder why it was like that, until the entrance to the refinery came into view and the connection between the oil wealth and the paved road became obvious. It's a small thing, but it was reassuring to feel that I'm starting to get some sort of sense for the way things are here, so that unusual things stand out on an instinctive level as well as being identifiable on a rational level.