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Talbot Cultural Tours - Visas and Bamenda

5 February 2007 - 12:31pm -- Joseph

Jan 22nd - 26th

Our visas have finally been approved and issued! It took quite a while, and delayed our trip to Bamenda by a day, and involved Genesis travelling to Douala at the crack of dawn to collect our passports off a bus from Yaounde and then rendez vous with us en route to Bamenda (oops, too much French? - Bon Voyage!) We are illegal aliens no more...

The trip to Bamenda was highly successful, in a thre day trip which consisted of a many many hours in cars and buses we managed to visit two households worth of Genesis' family, gate crash a Cry-Die (pidgin for memorial service), drop into Genesis' old primary school, visit an African craft market, a pottery centre complete with extraction-to-firing demo and see alot of breathtaking scenery (the terrain of the North West is quite different to here in the South West, somehow simultaneously more African and more English).

One highlight was dad being invited to fire a rifle at the Cry-Die - a six-foot antique musket which he managed to fire without injury - unusual for a man who specialises in injuring himself at every given opportunity. Also the Ju Ju dancers athe Cry-Die were cool - young lads dressed up in traditional masks dancing around trying to scare people - kind of like halloween, only without all the plastic orange rubbish.

Going to see Genesis' mum's farm was really interesting - the kids chased a chicken around for ten minutes then killed it, and an hour later we ate it! You in the village now boy...

The journey home was a bit of a nightmare, taking nine hours instead of the usual six, on a very cramped bus, and the usual police stop delays (here's a new one, they wanted to see the bus' first-aid kit and fined him for having out-of-date drugs!), but eventually we made it to Limbe for a beach-front rest...

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