December 29, 2006

Getting to Kribi involves driving Cameroon’s notorious inter-provincial roads. I’ll be honest. Of the many reasons I don’t travel as much as I’d like – distance between locations, days getting away from me, the vain hope that I might have stories to write among them – is the roads scare the bejesus out of me. I still remember one of the veteran correspondents I met in Uganda saying, “Everyone thinks the most dangerous part of reporting in Africa is going to unstable war zones. Really, it’s getting from place to place.”

I’ve written before about the Cameroonian government’s efforts to reduce the blood spilled on its highways. Apparently, it’s not working. I guess they can’t forcefully remove people’s heads from their butts.

Charles heroically did all the driving last weekend. Our first stop was Douala, Cameroon’s commercial capital and largest city, to pick up Paul and Laura. They had just arrived from Chicago the night before. We left early Saturday morning to avoid as many of the massive rigs hauling massive logs that slow traffic down and legitimately cause people to try to pass them on the winding two-way roads. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the trucks with the logs that are unbelievably big going unbelievably slow. I’d be far more freaked about the roads if they were trying to pick up speed. And I also don’t have a problem with people passing the tractor-trailers on the two-lane road. If we didn’t, Paul and Laura would probably still be waiting for us in Douala. It’s just that people pick the most inopportune times – on curves, near the crest of a hill – to do this. And that’s where the accidents happen.

Charles for the most part did his passing in a safe manner. Every once in a while, he’d have to jerk back into his lane because someone was coming head-on way too fast, but that was fairly rare.

I sat in the back seat, next to Bec, on the way to Douala. I was safely strapped into a seatbelt and in a relatively comfortable seat. There was traffic getting out of Yaoundé. Most people in Cameroon’s cities – and across much of Africa as well – still have family living in their ancestral villages. So a lot of people take Christmas as chance to get a bit of mom’s home cooking. When we passed by the bus station area, it was a zoo. There was the usual inability to take turns and wait, something I’ve noticed in Cameroon and other parts of Africa, and not just on the roads. There were tour buses backing into spots. There were traffic police in baby blue shirts and white pith helmets trying to get cars to move in an orderly manner, but to no avail. Taxis drove on the shoulder, and then cut off other cars when they could go no further. Jeeps tried to take up the entire road. Pedestrians walked behind the backing-in buses so they couldn’t go. All in all, a traffic nightmare.

As I said, the drive to Douala was a relatively peaceful three hours or so. There were few trucks on the road and only a few maniacs. I noticed black signs that looked a little like stick figures, almost like Keith Harring paintings, but standing still. On the first leg of our journey, I couldn’t figure out what they were.

Traffic was snarled again on Douala’s outskirts. Like in Yaoundé, there were many people heading back to the village. But then we saw the real reason for the backup, especially since we were going against traffic. A green Volkswagen pick-up, essentially a VW bus with the passenger section converted into a flatbed, probably attempted to wind his way through the traffic until it met the immovable object of a box truck. The VW had its grill rearranged in such a way that I can’t imagine the driver walked out under his own power. The blue box truck had a few scratches to its paint job. The accident managed to back up traffic for seemingly miles in both directions for hours. Cameroon needs a traffic copter.

I sat in the trunk going from Douala to Kribi, a two-hour jaunt. There were jump seats, unfortunately without seatbelts, so it was a lot like riding in the way back of the Party Wagon, only facing the side. Oh yeah, there was no foot well, so I had to sit in ever more creative positions and still, parts of my lower half that I didn’t know could fall asleep did. But riding in the back did have one benefit: I saw all the stuff we passed after we safely went by. That was a pleasant change.

I also managed to figure out what the black signs were: markers of where people died along the roads. I also started to notice the charred hulks of wrecked cars periodically dotting the landscape. Some were there so long they had been mostly reclaimed by the surrounding forests. The roads in southern Cameroon run through relatively dense rain forest, in various shades of green with rolling hills and a few tree-covered mountains sprouting up. Charles pointed out that much of the forest around the road had been chopped down already, and that these were second-growth plants. We’d occasionally pass patches of scarred landscape where the second growth was clear-cut and burned, with fresh fires still lapping and crackling. It’s sad to see, but people have to eat, right.

I could see the water and beach of Kribi from the side of the car I was facing. It was gorgeous. Stretches of blue pulling out from the white beach, shrouded a bit by swaying palms and other trees. Delicious. We passed a public park with wide expanses of green for people to play football (soccer to you and me) and have picnics, complete with beach access. Many families were out enjoying the sun, an altogether idyllic sight.

I wrote about our trip and won’t bore you anymore. I rode in the trunk again on the way back to Yaoundé. I wanted to sit back and listen to my iPod, mostly Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, since they manage to capture the mood rolling through the Cameroonian countryside better than anyone else. I found this to be the case driving through Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi as well. Plus, there was the benefit of seeing what didn’t hit us after it didn’t hit us.

I noticed one last bit of the Cameroonian campaign to promote road safety. Along with the black signs are smaller ones that say “32 people died here,” or whatever the number was in that spot. And then I thought about why this campaign may not be working as well as the authorities might like. Most likely, people don’t pay attention. Or if they do, they think, that’s too bad, but it won’t happen to me. I think that’s the same for every road safety campaign throughout the world.

But there are some technical problems. The black signs are a little conceptual for most people. You need a second to think about them. Maybe they should be streaked with red or twisted in unnatural positions or missing a leg. And the signs advertising the number of people who died at a particular curve are too small. You have to really look at them to see what they say. Well, that hardly seems safe. It might even explain some of the freshly crumpled cars rolled onto their sides in ditches next to those signs. I think they should be bigger, like American highway road signs or billboards. “SLOW DOWN. THIRTY-TWO PEOPLE DIED IN AN ACCIDENT ON THIS SPOT,” in five-foot tall letters would probably work a lot better.

Maybe I should be the minister of transport. I’ve got the time.

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Apparently, Another Day in Shrimpistan is picked up in Google’s survey of blogs about Cameroon. Who knew my reach was so global. Get more people to come back, because the more hits, the higher I might be in their alert.

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On that happy note, Bonne Annee, mes amis. Don’t worry; we’re staying in Yaoundé to celebrate. Talk to you all next year.