Back from the Far North

Last Friday, Jean-Luc, who arranged our trip to Rhumsiki, showed up to the Baptist Rest house in Maroua where we stayed just a little before 7:30am with the driver whose name I can’t remember. Sulemanu and I weren’t quite ready to go and the driver actually needed to get gas. I paid him 35,000 francs of the 50,000 total so he could get gas to prepare for the journey. The driver, Sulemanu and I left around 8am for the two hour drive to Rhumsiki. When we got there, we were met by teenage looking boys ready to give a tour. The driver picked one named Jean-Pierre.

Jean Pierre led Sulemanu and I around the town of Rhumsiki while the driver waited around at a hotel. In the far north, the land is pretty flat overall but Rhumsiki has tons of tall rocks shooting out of the ground. It almost reminds me of the cliffs in Arizona, California, Nevada, etc. that just shoot up out of nowhere. There are plenty of smaller rocks in the town and many of the people of Rhumsiki, known as the Kapsiki people, use these rocks to build walls between farms and house properties.

Rhumsiki is named after one particular big rock jetting out of the ground called Rhum, pronounced “room”. The siki part was named after a hunter, Siki, who had lived up on the rock around hundreds of years ago. In Rhumsiki, there are many pottery makers, basket weavers, cloth weavers, etc. Seeing them, the Kapsiki, and where they live is part of the charm of going on the tour, besides seeing the beautiful landscape. I bought a few small pieces of pottery that were made from soil and oil as well as a few other souvenirs. The soil/oil pottery is formed, baked in the sun, then polished to a shiny black finish. I was able to try some homemade wine on the tour too. They mix ground up corn with water, let it ferment for two days, and heat it in a pot over a fire when serving. It tasted like wine but was a bit thick and a tiny bit gritty. Sulemanu, who used to be a devout Muslim, and has never had alcohol before, did not like it at all. His face wrinkled at the taste of it.

On the tour, we also met a traditional medicine man. For a price, I would be able to ask him a question about my future. Both Sulemanu and I knew, of course, whatever his prediction is, it isn’t necessarily true but we were curious what the ritual looked like. I couldn’t think of a question right away so Sulemanu, who was speaking both Fulfulde and French to Jeanne-Pierre, who in turn was speaking Kapsiki to the medicine man, said I could ask him anything, like about marriage for example. So I thought to ask if I had already met the woman I will marry. Sulemanu told me it would probably cost the full price, 1,000 francs ($2). I didn’t really want to pay $2, which may not seem like much but you can get lots of things in Cameroon for less than 1,000 francs. It seemed a bit steep to me.

So I thought of a different question: would my flight from Douala to Brussels be affected by the volcano in Iceland? Apparently that would also be 1,000 francs! So I gave in and stuck with the first question. The medicine man said he’d answer both anyway though. He took a big bowl filled with sand and poured some water in it. He then shoved shells and sticks into the sand. One stick represented me, another represented Cameroon, another represented Africa, and another represented Europe. He then took a live crab out of a vase, spat on it, blew on it, and put it up to his ear. He then spoke to it very rapidly, almost in a chastising way, spat on it again, and then put it down in the sand. He then covered that bowl with another bowl, inverted upside-down.

We waited a few minutes for the crab to do its thing. When the medicine man lifted the cover off, he analyzed where the crab was and where it had been in the bowl. He told me that my flight would not be affected and I will be able to travel fine. He also said it will be long time before I am married. It’s not time yet. I guess the question got a bit lost in translation but oh well, close enough. He also said when I am married, it will be a happy marriage, free from problems and divorce. We’ll see if the medicine man is correct both in the near future and in the rest of my life.

Of course I don’t believe what the man said has any sort of realistic truth to it, but it was interesting to see him conduct his connection with the spiritual world and also it was nice to help an older gentleman out financially. I have a video of the whole ritual I’m hoping to post online sometime when I get back to America. He closed the ceremony with a benediction by sprinkling water on Jean-Pierre’s feet, then my feet, and then Sulemanu’s feet as we exited his place.

All in all we were in Rhumsiki for a little over two hours. It was a bit expensive to get there (45,000 francs for the car, 5,000 for the tour, and a thousand here and there for pottery, the medicine man, etc.) but it was worth the trip. Sulemanu told me that the far north tends to have darker colored people and it’s definitely true. In Banyo, the Fulfulde people tend to have more of a lighter shade of black but people in the far north are definitely much much darker.

We left Maroua the next day, Saturday, and spent a night in Ngoudere at the same place we stayed on the way up. Again, the bathroom with no light, no toilet paper, etc. but the faucet seemed to work better this time (see previous blog). I thought about how the faucet probably works inside, what’s causing it to not work until full blast, and realized all I have to do is just turn it on a little bit and then smack it really hard.

We found out this time though, that our room key happened to be the same key for all of the rooms. When we arrived, there was no one to greet us and give us a key. We made a phone call to the person in charge who at the moment was out. We noticed a set of two keys on the table when you first walk in, one for the main entrance door, and one for the room. The woman on the phone told us that was our key and I noticed it had a three on it, which was our room number just a couple days prior. She confirmed that we were in the same room as before. Then, later on that day, there was a man in the hall wondering what happened to the key on the table… it was HIS key for getting into HIS room. So we tried it and sure enough, it worked for his room. Then another person also wanted the key for their room, the SAME key. What a jip! We made sure to keep our valuables with us when we left that evening for dinner, just in case. No security there!

We left Ngoudere on Sunday morning around 7 am. We took a kind of bus I had never been in before. It’s made by Renault, is very jacked up, with big tires and a very very very cramped passenger space. All 25 passengers are crammed in the back of this bus with hardly any leg room. The driver, and his two helpers sit in a separate, closed off section of the bus, almost like a prisoner transport bus with a steel wall/wire barrier. You enter the bus from the one back door, which requires nobody to be sitting in the center aisle, which also has seats that fold up so people can get through, and then people can sit when no one is moving in/out. Most buses here, besides really really big ones, have folding seats in the aisle in order to cram more people in.

Sulemanu and I were able to get seats in the front row which he said had the most room. But throughout a decent chunk of the trip the guy’s knees behind me were digging into my back and side. There was so little leg room I had to either sit with my butt only half on the seat and my knees pointed down, sit all the way back with my knees bent upwards, or have them angled to one side. If at any point they touched the metal wall in front of me in between me and the driver, I could feel the burn from the heat of the engine right behind that wall. The ride was very bumpy and very uncomfortable. For once I was very very thankful I was not an inch taller than I am right now (just under 5’9”). I can’t imagine how anyone any taller could manage in that bus.

We were on the bus for six hours before we really stopped for a while in Tibati. I was so happy to be out of that bus and wasn’t sure how I was going to make the rest. The bus is a slower kind of bus than the ones I’ve taken before, and the trip from Ngoudere to Banyo is about 11-12 hours in it. We left Tibati at 2pm and drove for about two hours. As I was nodding off to sleep despite the massive bumps in the road, a load screeching noise came from the engine.

We pulled over and they stopped the engine. I thought to myself it must just be a bad belt. Hopefully it’ll be okay. Well 20 minutes passed and I realized it was more serious than just a bad belt. I figured it was probably a seized pulley, which made sense for the screeching noise. Also, there was definitely a coolant leak since the driver kept adding water to the radiator every few hours. However, he wasn’t using a coolant mixture, he was using straight water. Not only does that not protect against the water from boiling, but straight water does not have any rust-inhibitors. I imagine that the seal in the water pump could have gone bad, (explaining the coolant leak) and the water rushing passed the seal, caused the water pump bearing to rust and go bad (causing the seizing of a pulley and the screeching noise).

I asked the driver as best I could think of if it was the water pump. Est-ce que c’est la pump de l’eau? I believe he said he didn’t think so but I couldn’t catch everything he said in French. There were definitely several maybes in his explanation of what it could be as he was talking to me, putting the valve cover back on that he had just taken off. Maybe it could be this, maybe that, maybe this, maybe that. It was then I realized we weren’t going to be going anywhere anytime soon.

They hadn’t touched the water pump, or even the belt for that matter, which didn’t make much sense since I can’t think of anything else that would cause the screeching we just heard besides a belt problem. They drained the oil, took the oil pan off and was looking around underneath the engine. Sulemanu and I walked up the road a little bit to a nearby village to see what else is around. There were only a few homes, no stores and no electricity. We bought some fruit from a boy selling bananas and mangoes, hung around for a little bit and then walked back the bus where everyone else was still waiting at the side of the road. Then, dark clouds started to form in the sky. It was about 6:30pm at this point and we had been stopped for over two hours.

Sulemanu and I headed back to the village where we just were and it started to pour. We found shelter in someone’s home and everyone there pretty much accepted the fate that this is where we would all be for the night. So we made pillows out of our bags and laid down on the ground to see if perhaps we could get some sleep. Well, Sulemanu didn’t want to sleep there. He didn’t want to deal with any snakes, rats, etc. while sleeping on the floor. So, when the rain cleared up a bit we walked back to the road and hitched a ride with two truck drivers on their way from Maroua to Banyo to deliver goods. This was around 8:45 and we made a very cramped, mud-ridden hour and a half drive to Mbamti, the next biggest town on the way to Banyo. There, we could hopefully find an Auberge (hotel) to spend the night.

Along the way, on the very bad, very soggy muddy roads we came across a truck that was almost perpendicular to the road because it had slid around so much. There was a multitude of guys trying to push it out of the mud and we waited around for 20 minutes for the road to be clear to pass. We got into Mbamti around 10:15 and all the rooms had been occupied by truck drivers spending the night because of the bad roads. Luckily, Sulemanu found a room in a random person’s home who happened to have a family member that was away that night. We shared a double bed in this random place in who knows what kind of sanitary condition but at least it was better than the floor of the other place.

I then woke up the next morning at 6am because Sulemanu said he found us a car taxi that would take us to Banyo. I got ready, went to the bathroom (a very small hole in the ground outside surrounded by a woven, straw fence), and washed my hands and face using water that had been collected in buckets from the rain the night before. We then waited, and waited. The taxi driver said he only needed two more passengers so the car could be full (even though as it was we already exceeded the number of available seats in the car). We waited over two hours, until 8:30 when we finally took off: eight adults in a five seater who knows what brand car. We got into Banyo at 9:40 and I had never been more happy to be back in Banyo. It felt so wonderful to take a shower again and relax.

I’ve been finishing up some final things here in Banyo. This morning, Dayyibu, Abdu and I hiked up Mt. Banyo, where we had hiked the first week I was in Cameroon. It was a little over two hours up and a little under two hours down. Quite tiring! Tomorrow night I’ll leave and take a night bus to Bafoussam. Friday morning I’ll take a bus from Bafoussam to Douala, spend a night at the Baptist Rest house there, and then I leave Saturday night to head for Brussels and then Newark. I may not update again until I get back in the States.