Kribi so far.

Well, we’re in Kribi.

We left Banyo to go to Kribi at 7 in the morning on Wednesday. We got into Yaounde, the capital, by 8 in the evening and spent the night at the home of some missionaries, the Colemans. We then left at 7 on Thursday to make the four hour trip from Yaounde to Kribi. Our hotel, Costa Blanca is a few hundred feet from the beach. It has several rooms and hosted all of the missionary families until today. The Colemans came today around two and all of the youth, myself included, are now at the Schneiderhouse Hotel just a couple hundred feet from Costa Blanca. All of the adults and small kids will stay at Costa Blanca. I shared a room and bathroom with Timothy Lokker while at Costa Blanca and I think I’ll share an even bigger room with a few more boys although I’m not sure. I haven’t actually seen the room yet.

For the most part, since we arrived, I’ve been watching the kids. Most of the parents and adult missionaries have been having meetings most of the day each day. We spend a lot of time in the water swimming around playing games. We’ve also watched some movies and played some card games.

The beach is very nice. The sand on the beach itself is white, but underneath the water it’s black for the most part. The top sand is very very fine and it gets coarser the further down you go. There aren’t very many seashells or pebbles in the water like there are in the Jersey shore. And the water is pretty warm, although not as warm as South Padre Island, TX. The water only very gradually gets deeper as you walk out. I can walk out for probably about 150 feet before I can’t touch the bottom with my feet anymore. It’s like a large wading pool. So far I haven’t come across a point where it very quickly drops off like in Jersey. And there aren’t sand dunes underneath the water where it gets deep and then shallow again like in Texas. It’s just a very slow descent.

I haven’t seen a ton of animals around; mostly just a few stray dogs on the beach. There are some minnows or other small fish swimming around in a lagoon close by. I’ve seen a couple crabs but that’s pretty much it. I saw a dead shark about three feet in length in a bucket from a local girl who had taken a boat out to go fishing. So there are sharks in this water but they don’t come close to the beach, at least that’s what I was told. They wouldn’t cause a problem anyway. As I said, they’re only a few feet in length. Humans are not their prey.

To eat, we’ve mostly had fish, shrimp, chicken, bread, mangoes, pineapple and rice. I’m not much of a seafood fan but I’ve been managing. The first lunch we had here consisted of a lot of shrimp. They still had their legs, eyes and mouths attached so I had to learn how to pull it apart. It took me a few minutes just to get one apart until a missionary named Dan showed me how it’s done. First you rip the head off which really is more like the upper half of the entire body. Then, you dig you thumb under where their legs and shells are and you peel the shells off. Then, you grab the very tip of the tail, pull it back, and wiggle the whole body as you yank the meat out of the tail section. And then, you can eat. It’s very messy and in my opinion isn’t worth the hassle, although the shrimp did taste good.

We’ll be in Kribi for the next week before heading back to Yaounde. I’ll probably spend a few days there before travelling to the east and staying with another missionary family for a week or two.

Here are some photos so far: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2038953&id=1337370415&l=bba13eaecb