I'm posting this from Dr. Kamga's office computer at the University of Buea. I got into Cameroon at 1:30pm (about 8:30am Eastern time) but I haven't gotten a chance to hop on the internet until now.
The flight over wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. It was long, to be sure (about 17 hours from DC to Addis), but my seatmate was very friendly, the service was great, and they served food and alcohol often enough to make the flight better than it otherwise would have been. I'm going stop short calling the flight pleasant. I watched all three in flight movies at least once (twice for the kingdom fo the crystal skull), and read through the bulk of the Poisonwood Bible. It is a wonderful book, by the way. I finally finished it in the hotel Ethiopian Airlines provided and was blown away by how much the book was able to contain in 500 or so pages. I highly recommend this book.
Hotel Ararat was a decent hotel room with a small TV and a fridge. They served complementary dinner (disappointingly, not Ethiopian cuisine) and an exceptional breakfast the next morning that put to shame every other hotel breakfast I've ever experienced. I also determined (too late) that each hotel room had it's own hot water heater. After the flight, I felt dirty enough to justify an icy shower on a cold Ethiopian night.
Pretty much all of Ethiopian Airlines' flights to Subsaharan Africa go through Addis Ababa, so rubbed elbows with a lot of interesting folks. There were two women on my flight that were adopting Ethiopian children and were flying over to take them home; Nicole, a perky blonde who was working a 10 week social work internship at an adoption agency; Karen and Janet, two occupational health nurses on their way to Johansburg for a photo safari before going to a nursing conference; and Dr. Emily Vargas-Baron, a former director for USAID in the Clinton years who now worked for UNICEF and the RISE institute. Over the non-Ethiopian dinner, she gave me some powerful advice, mostly about not complaining about cold showers.
The flight from Addis to Douala was fairly uneventful, except when a frenchman spilled red wine on my pants. Now I have a pair of pants with splotches of purple down one leg.
The doctor at the desk next to mine is playing Bryan Adams on his computer. Driving in Cameroon is as crazily exciting as I hoped it would be, and Dr. Kamga, who picked me up at the airport, drives a Mercedes, although the speedometer is forever stuck at 20kmph.
The room at the Presbyterian mission is nice and cozy with it's own bathroom. When I first moved in, there were some oversized bugs here and there, but after their eviction, I've gotten comfortable with the rest of the nonmosquito roommates. Hot water is hard to come by, so I've gotten used to cold showers. It's actually pretty invigorating. Nothing wakes you up in the morning like ice cold water dumped on your head.
What else is there to say? I'm still a little jet lagged, but not enough to stop me from taking a walk around Buea. It's beautiful here and in the morning, the clouds on Mt Cameroon part, baring the summit, which is majestic. Enormous cloud banks roll in under Buea, like a parade of fluffy primordial titans around a sailing, floating mountain.
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