Dec. 20th 2005
We got a lot of mileage out of that "vast trackless wasteland" phrase. I should have held more tightly to my absolute distrust of the Lonely Planet and suspected the phrase of being at least inaccurate. For one, a road is a track and the countryside through which we passed was covered with roads, not just random roads appearing and disappearing without pattern, but functional ones that connect one city to another and experience regular use. For two, "wasteland" is a hell of a word to throw around. It seems most likely to conjure something barren and trash strewn, perhaps the pissing grounds of a city or the uncultivatable lands around harsh desert. To my mind, "wasteland" is not a word that offers an adequate description of a hilly, well forested and increasingly jungular area, populated regularly enough with villages of people who speak Sean's African language. For three, "vast"? That is a matter of opinion. Maybe it was vast.

At this time of year (the only time of year that one would never imagine that we were within hours of the one of the three wettest places on planet earth) the area through which we passed deserves special attention only for its quantity of dust, which was staggering. None of us, least of all the car, have recovered. You could mud wrestle for several hours and emerge far cleaner than the three orange people who stumbled out of their wheezing personal dust bowl named Stingray. In my life at no point have I been so filthy in such a filthy seat, not even in the rank basement of my shared college house which escaped condemnation only through subterfuge. When the many unsettling trucks missiled past us on the narrow mountain road we were forced to stop for five to fifteen seconds while the trail of powdered earth settled and allowed us to see that we were not inhabiting the color brown. During one such intermission (during which we were naturally vulnerable to any second or third truck that might be in the process of slaughtering its way through our completely opaque and unhelpful cloak of invisibility) a rusty chicken walked past our car, leaving dust footprints two inches deep.

At all times we had our windows open. This was air conditioning, air purification and torture by dust. Aggravatingly, the dust tended to enter the car from beneath, behind and inside, especially through the cracks in the upholstery and the rear speakers. Closing the windows would have created an unamusing and more hazardous parody of Cheech and Chong's signature move. So, instead, we allowed ourselves to transform gradually into human attic crawlspace. When we exited the vehicle in Foumban, where the paved road to Douala begins, pedestrians and street vendors laughed at us.
* posted by Nathaniel at 5:03 AM