Item: Landing at Douala International Airport, Cameroon.
To whit: Exeunt aircraft, cue immediate: heat. Sticky. Smell of ripe fecundity. Overlaid with something bad, something poor and not washed. Latter item could be self, or stained concrete walls of airport complex. Equatorial night feels like a cotton curtain; on the tarmac, fire blinks. A cigarette, and its cherry. Out of the aircraft, of Al Afriquiyah airlines (or Freaky Air, as a friend calls it), a company that transfers you through Tripoli where the rudest nationality I think I've met yells you through several layers of transit lounge rigmarole all the while looking like they should be standing outside of a cheap bar in a Greek island in gold chains and tank tops smoking Gitanes and growing chest hair, out of this airline come businessmen looking business-y and French looking ready to holiday in their old colony and, past the luggage handlers, a female passenger balancing her carry-on on her head. The image is so African it should be banned.
I almost wasn't here. Unbeknownst to me, my flight made a stop in Cotonou, Benin, before heading to Cameroon. In Benin, half asleep, I stumbed out with the majority of the cabin passengers, waited in a security line and managed to fill out half a disembarkation form before realizing this was, in fact, not quite Cameroon. I ran into the plane with tail firmly between legs, wondering how a Lonely Planet author on assignment almost ended up landing in the wrong country.
Doala? Not my first choice for a honeymoon destination. Not as bad as some may claim, either. Last night I had beer, cold and fresh, sweating out of a mug in an expat spot that was normally surreal -- dark wood verandah overlooking the docks, a mix of the French and the British overlanders and the working girls and the rest, and me, in a hostelry made for members of the German Merchant Marine.
When I went home the street kids came out, hands outstretched, groaning and/or giggling. Excuse a rather flip observation made at the expense of Cameroonian poverty (which is of the stagnate sort -- the people have generally enough to eat. But they're dealing with a president for life who's been around for 26 years whilst managing an incredibly corrupt network of vested interests), but nothing made me feel more present in Francophone Africa then being addressed as blanc, blanc (white white).
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