We drove out of Douala, packed together in a van that sang a creaking crunching song of motor strain and axles that have lived lives much too long, much too traumatic, a song with cleffs of honking every time we passed another car or truck or motorcycle.
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| Photocred - a friend |
We bounced like popcorn kernels in the van; it lacked AC and also shock absorption, so it seems.
We laughed, relaxed into the jolts, and told each other stories of our lives, little tributaries from across the world converging in a common stream, little bubbles blown across a giant yard to meld for one moment in a sun-glossed sphere.
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| Photocred - Wendy |
We watched the palmseeds pour into the expeller funnel, feed through the churning press, reduce to rivers and to oil dripping from a greasy spout.
We stepped aside for men whose muscles said I'd never know labor the way they do - never be shaken by its harsh hands or crushed under its suffocating weight - men with shoulders like Atlas making paths through the smoke that rose in clouds from the flames under the barrels of crude palm oil, flames fed by the mutilated fibers of the crushed mother palmseed.
We wandered through heavy shadows in the broad central pavilion of a flower plantation where sheaves of orange lilies soaked in huge concrete troughs after insecticidal rinses, and reserved women plaited gold and emerald grass for the next shipment of floral arrangements to France.
We looked up at the avocado trees' knobby trunks, punctuated by prim round holes - "scorpions love to hide in the holes, said the guide, "but it's not necessary to climb the trees to harvest the avocados. If a worker falls while attempting to harvest avocados he does not receive workman's compensation because his climb was unnecessary."
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| Photocred - a friend |
We ate spicy rice and curried chicken and plantains at the entrance to the Ekom Falls preserve, with bleating goats all around our pavilion and a hopeful cat scurrying between our legs.
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| Photocred - a friend |
We hiked our way down stone stairs slick with mud and moss; one of us fell and got up, grimacing, such a good sport.
We found our way to the overlook on the falls where part of Tarzan was filmed and watched the cascading, crashing water - wild romance of gravity and surface tension - turn to diaspora misting droplets exploding off the jagged lava rock below.
We explored the river above the cliff, found our way to the very edge; I scampered barefoot across a fallen tree above the water, so precarious, some said - but so secure, its trunk wider and flatter and smoother under my feet than most sidewalks.
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| I stood on this log |
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Photocred - Chelsea
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We jostled in the van again, back to lands less wild and up a rocky muddy road to the hotel where a dozen charming huts would house us overnight.
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| Photocred - Chelsea |
We dropped our backpacks in the rooms and went wandering through regiments of banana trees on the slope of a mountain, under arches of bamboo along a little humming creek, out and across the road into a stretch of unfarmed land dotted with guava and mango trees - so like the Plateau State of my childhood, feeling and smelling the same.
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| Photocred - Chelsea |
We followed a red dirt path to a lone, half-hidden house on the crest of a hill. An old man sat on its porch, staring past us at the view we hadn't imagined we would find over our shoulders - oh, you could search the whole world all your life for a view like this. Layers of clefts and cliffs and gorges and jungle framing mountains piled on sunset-gilded granite-faced mountains arching to meet the misty gray sky.
We stood still in the face of this view, this moment, this day - unexpected, the gifts people search all their worlds and lives for, laid out right before us, until the old man came down off the porch and shuffled up and stared at us.
Love it so much❤❤❤
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