Celtic Rover
Cameroon, relaxing a bit…..
After the difficult border crossing we reached the little town of Banyo and breathed a sigh of relief, a little too soon.
Our first surprise was the fact that there were no functioning fuel stations in the town or nearby. However we have learned to ask around and another diner at breakfast “phoned a friend” and 15min later two guys on a motor bike turned up in the hotel car park where we had camped with 30L of diesel.
The next surprise was the condition of the road from Banyo to Foumbam, a distance of only 213km, we averaged 14km per hour on the rough muddy road with many stuck or tipped over trucks, so it took us two days of hard driving to do a route that we planned for one.
Allegedly there was an interesting Sultans palace, Museum and a really nice cafe/patisserie with great reviews in Foumbam so we took the risk on the road which did have lovely views of the Cameroon highlands. Sadly the Patisserie was long closed, the Museum had no content (literally nothing) but was an interesting building combining two headed serpent and spider, and the palace was pretty rubbish.
The upside was that we finally escaped the mud after Foumbam and headed to a luxury lodge on the beach at Limbe on smooth roads for some TLC, once again we should have prefixed it with “allegedly” the lodge was shut, restaurant closed but caretaker let us in and we camped there and did our washing, the only guests!
It seems the rainy season, and hence the tourists, are late this year
Never the less we got lots cleaned up after the jungle mud and have now made it to the capital Yaounde to get our Congo visas so we can head bank into the Jungle of Congo and DRC on reportedly reasonable roads for the next leg of the trip ending in Luanda where Tony hands over his keys to Duncan for Angola and Namibia, 15,001km done, 5000 left until the Christmas break !
