Mom & Dad Part II

At Peace Corps HQ, we picked up my friend Kristina, who would be our "fourth" on our trip to the north. I had told her some time before that my parents and I were making a trip up. She really wanted to go, and being a teacher, the summer was the best time for her to do that. Seeing as a fourth person was necessary to not have a stranger in our sleeping cabin on the train, and we were getting two hotel rooms any way (not to mention the buffer she could provide with her social worker background in case things got testy), so it seemed as though it would be a great idea to have her along.

Once we arrived at the train station, we saw our travelling mates, Debbie and her family who were also visiting. The train was scheduled to leave at 6.30, and we arrived around five. They were just begi?ning to let peo?le onto the train, and there was a mad rush of people going out to reserve their seats. We weren't sure how it worked, so we rushed out as well to find our small room of four couchettes waiting for us -no reason to hurry. We arranged all of our bags into the small room, and settled in.

Debbie had helped us greatly in getting the tickets, and her and her family ended up next door. We sat around in the room for a minute and then decided to go outside and walk around. The time for leaving came and went, marked only by an announcement that the train would be delayed. No kidding. Eventually, it got late and we were tired, so we went back to our little cabin, turned out the light, and went to sleep. We all assumed that at some point during the night we would begin moving and we would wake up en route. Well, when morning came, I woke up, looked out the window and saw the exact same sight that had been there the night before. At 7:30, we began moving and 37 hours after getting on the train, we arrived, exhausted, in Maroua (we transferred to an 8 hour long bus ride at midnight in Ngoundere).

We split up from Debbie and her family, whom we had gotten to know and like pretty well, and found our way by motorcycles to the hotel. Believe me, the sight of my father and mother on the back of a small Japanese moto with their luggage in front of the driver is quite a sight.

After sleeping a bit, we began our grand tour of the Extreme North. Of course, shopping was the first order of business, and a trip to the artisanat temporarily cured those yearnings. After a nice, relaxing dinner at the hotel (which was very cool, run by a German guy and each room was its own round hut complete with straw roof), we found a driver for the rest of our stay.

We left first thing in the morning, stopped by the bakery for breakfast and the bank for cash, and were on our way up to Waza National Park. It was a several hour drive, and we had decided to stay overnight in the lodge there so that we could do both an afternoon drive and an early morning drive, but not on the same day. It worked out nicely, and at the entrance to the Waza game reserve, we got a guide and proceeded on our way. Jean-Paul, our driver, in his Toyota Land Cruiser, was not as aggressive as I was hoping for, but between him and the guide, we managed to see quite a few animals on both the afternoon and next morning drives. These included lots of giraffes, monkeys, cool birds, jackals, warthogs, and four or five kinds of antelopes. We also saw elephant skull bones and dung and a lion paw print. We looked hard for those two, but the roads were already quite muddy and mostly impassable. We missed prime season by about three weeks. The lodge was pretty neat, again stayin? in our own hut?, and was built on a large hill overlooking the plains of the park.

When we had finished Waza part two, we headed back towards Maroua. I had read in my Lonely Planet about a little village that was sorta on the way that sounded neat: Oujilla. Just the drive up was beautiful, up and over rocky hilltops which were all tiered for farming, mostly millet. Once we arrived at the Chefferie, one of the chef's 60 or so sons came out to meet us and to be our guide. It was quite unlike any chefferie I'd been to before, and I was swearing at myself for allowing the battery on my digital camera to go dead (I have hundreds of giraffe pictures, but only two of this chefferie). There were over twenty wives living inside the chefferie, each having four cylindrical, straw-capped huts, all in close proximity. Two were for storage of grain throughout the dry season, one was her own "kitchen", and the fourth was the bedroom for her and her small children. There were common rooms for the chefdom's tribunal, holding pens for animals, and sacrificial altars. It was truly quite a sight. We then continued on to Maroua to finish up the day. That night, we had a nice dinner outside the hotel. Fifteen minutes after returning to the hotel, I got a call from some volunteer friends asking us to meet them at the very same restaurant for dinner and drinks! Very strange, but Kristina and I took some motos over and had a drink with two good friends, Anna and Felice, and Anna's friend who was visiting from the US. We were all planning a trip to Rhumsiki the next day, and since my parents were already paying for the car which had extra seating in the way back, I offered to bring them along.

The last of our daytripping began early the next morning, the three women showing up a few minutes early, eager to begin our adventure. We piled into the car and had a nice ride up, with the scenery gradually becoming more and more dramatic. The weather was overcast, however, and became more and more ominous. When we arrived, we found that our recommended restaurant was not in operation because the proprietor was in the next town 'at the market'. We went to another place that was run by some cousin of Jean-Paul (still our driver). Since lunch was going to take over an hour, we took the guided tour of the village first. We choose the one who could speak english the best. He started us out to the side of the mountain that we had driven up to show us the dramatic valley below. Of course, once we were about halfway out, the rain started to pour down. I stayed with Dad who was having a little trouble with the rocky footing, while the others hurried along. Needless to say, I wasn't so happy for the next hour or so, while we sat under the thatched roofs of some tourist merchants ?ho were all too?happy to see us. We finally made it to lunch, and completed the tour with a visit to the fortune teller who tells the future using two river crabs in a ceramic pot who rearrange shards of pottery in the dark. The old man even spit on the crabs before letting them loose inside the covered pot. My Dad will be successful in whatever he chooses to do, and my mother was comforted by the fact that she will have a grandchild in the next two years (note to my brother: NOT IT!).

The next day we continued our trip by returning early in the morning to the bus station for the return trip, which happily was much less eventful.