One of the main goals of our March trip to Cameroon was attending the second National Symposium on Cameroonian Languages (NASCAL2), which was held some six hours by road north of Yaoundé. So before detailing the conference itself, I’ll chronicle the trip up and back. Mostly because I saw more of the country than we did in Yaoundé, but also because I had little to do but converse and take pictures. :-)
It took pretty much forever to get out of the city:
But once we did, the roadside view was mostly beautiful:
Though it was also much a work in progress:
There were lots of shops in larger and smaller villages along the way:
And various dead vehicles, as elsewhere in Africa:
As well as construction materials and crews:
And cell towers:
We saw gasoline brands we only see in Africa:
We crossed a major river:
And we eventually stopped for lunch:
We spent a lot of time behind trucks:
But we also got to see countryside houses of the more powerful: 
and lots of kinds of trees:
including evergreens!
Along the way, we also saw lots of small shops:
And people going about their lives:
Eventually, we stopped for gas:
As far as I could tell, this truck was filling up, not filling the station tank: 
The gas station was across the street from Air Force One:
Some colleagues were trying to send someone money, so we spent some time at the post office:
Unfortunately, things didn’t go smoothly (between internet, phone calls, who was in the office, and who had money, etc), so we spent about an hour looking at the post office, and the road it was on:
But we ultimately got back on the road, and filled up at a station with croissants:
So the summary I take from all this is that there are some things that are just like Kenya and DRCongo (e.g., much of the road, shops, and scenery), and there are somethings that are very much different (croissants, pyramids on houses, evergreen trees). So this trip was helpful in the process of adjusting to Cameroon: setting our expectations for a better and more productive time working there.
This work by Kent is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
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