December 28, 2006

Yesterday was an exciting day. I went down to the market and bought new flip-flops. Yup, life in Cameroon is a thrill a minute.

That said, Bec and I returned Tuesday from spending Christmas on the beach. That sentence is a bit misleading. We did have a room, so we were able to get off the beach occasionally. I will say this: it was lovely spending Christmas in flip-flops and shorts rather than freezing my butt off, although it sounds like the New York area is feeling the pleasant effects of global warming this year. I don’t know what everyone’s complaining about.

We went to Kribi, which is on the Gulf of Guinea coast. Since I’ve described Cameroon as the armpit of Africa, Kribi is that pleasant part of the body where armpit gently edges into a person’s side. With us were our friends Charles and Ruth, their son Paul and his wife Laura. Charles and Ruth, if you haven’t guessed, are significantly older than us.

Kribi is delightfully underdeveloped. There’s electricity and paved roads. But there aren’t massive Hilton resorts or Club Meds along the beach. Instead, the hotels are much smaller structures, none more than two or three stories tall and decked out in the whites and pale pastels one expects from a beach community. They’re nicely spaced out and all have the easygoing vibe people want when they’re on vacation. Sure, there isn’t non-stop entertainment. But you aren’t sharing the beach with a thousand strangers either.

Our hotel, the Tara Plage, was just south of Kribi’s town center. It was a cluster of eight rooms spread between two buildings with an open bar area doubling as the reception desk. The bar opened on to a covered verandah, which then led directly to the beach. Despite all the problems with oil extraction, the rigs and platforms and pipeline terminals around 20 miles out provided beautiful lights at night. Jealous yet?

So, what did we do during our three days in the sun? Well, this being Shrimpistan, we ate shrimp. Lots and lots of them, and they were pulled straight from the water and plopped on our plates. We also ate other fish that was fresh-caught, including barracuda. Consider that vengeance for the time you went snorkeling and were confronted by a fleet of them, Dad. I probably have so much mercury in me that you can use my toe to take your temperature. But use your mouth, please.

We competitively lounged. The goal of the game was to see who could do less over the course of the day. I figured that since I have the most expertise at this of the people we were with, I would give everyone a head start. It’s no fun dominating when you know the other players don’t have a chance. I finished one book and read the better part of another. I lounged in a beach chair. I slept in said beach chair. I swam in the gulf.

I spent a great deal of time watching the lizards – Cameroon’s answer to squirrels. These are fascinating creatures, chomping on bugs so I don’t have to squish them. Some are colorful – there’s one especially attractive lizard with a Halloween-orange head, grey to black body and orange tail with a black tip. Others are just green. They don’t run so much as skitter, with short, choppy movements that almost look like stop-motion animation straight out of the original King Kong. They don’t bother people at all. They simply skitter, look for bugs, do what look like push-ups and climb trees, occasionally falling out of them with a splat into the sand and a confused look. I could watch them for hours. Actually, I did.

The Gulf of Guinea waters deserve their own special mention. They are pleasantly warm, like a salty bathtub. Sure, I went running out of the water when seaweed touched me. But I had just been reading about the silent, sudden death of saltwater crocodile attacks and I was a little on edge. Sure, there are no saltwater crocodiles on the west coast of Africa, but you can never be too safe. Fine, I’m a sissy.

We attended a traditional French reveillance on Christmas Eve, hosted by the Tara Plage’s French owner. A traditional French reveillance basically consists of eating. Course after course – ooohhh, squid salad, mmmm, fried shrimp, what’s that? Beef filet, chicken gizzard salad? ewwwwww – came out seemingly without stop. Dinner lasted from 8 to 12:30 and culminated with a beach bonfire.

“Why do they have a bonfire?” Bec asked, somewhat befuddled.

“Because they do,” I said.

The only trouble came to paradise on Christmas Day, when the hotel’s water pump broke. After a relatively long walk on the beach, Bec and I wanted to rinse off our feet before lunch. No luck.

Later in the day, we went for a swim (where I courageously fought off the aforementioned seaweed) and then splayed out on the loungers, sleeping and reading. Paul then came out and said, “They’ve fixed the pump!” I think every guest at the hotel went to his or her showers at once.

I chivalrously let Bec go first. I’ll be honest. She was far more vocally concerned about the lack of showering than I was. So in she went. I thought I heard the water pressure waning a bit, but figured that was from the large number of people showering at once. “You might want to give it a minute before you go in,” she warned. I kept reading.

After a chapter or two, I went to the shower. Figuring that I didn’t want to get all soapy and then be stuck with only toilet water at my disposal, I let the water run for a minute or two. It started with two streams of water, then went down to one, then went down to none. I stepped back out and got dressed, impressively steaming for someone unable to get wet.

“You know, there are times I don’t like being in the developing world,” I said to Bec. She then proceeded to give me helpful bathing tips. “Get one part soapy, then rinse off, then move to the next.” I finally said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
So, we went back out to enjoy one last sunset, which were never as spectacular as we hoped. As I wrote in my journal, I remembered that all life began in the ocean. It felt as if the conditions to create new, single celled organisms were present in the crevices of my body as I sat and stewed. Fortunately, evolution is slow and the mutations stopped at algae by the time I showered after dinner.

I am pleased to report that I did not get sunburned, and even actually picked up a bit of a tan. Take that, sun.

Going to a resort in the developing world is always a fraught experience for me. To be honest, I often feel a little guilty. For the most part, the only locals I see at these resorts are the ones hawking trinkets on the beach, cleaning the rooms or scurrying off to get me another beer. Now, I recognize that all of these are legitimate professions and that these Cameroonians/Khmer/Thais, etc. might not have a job or way to feed their families if I wasn’t enjoying the time at the beach.

To be fair, there were a few well-off Cameroonians hanging out at the beach with us. And the French guy who ran the place all had Cameroonian wives and children. But at the same time, it just feels imperial in a way that makes me slightly uncomfortable.

Then again, the beer sometimes comes out slow, and I stop worrying about imperialism.