Hailstorm Yaounde

I’ve seen a few things that been perfectly characteristic of Africa, like the little boy marching along diligently carrying a broken piece of polystyrene on his head, in preparation for heavier loads. But this hailstorm was not one of them. Yes that's right, I thought I was prepared for any extremes of weather the tropics could throw at me, but chunks of ice over 1cm across? It just seemed so out of place...

Other than realising how easy it is to be stranded the wrong side of the road for 15 minutes or so by a tropical ice storm, here's a few more things I've learned here so far, in no particular order.

1) There's no such thing as simply 'tropical forest.' If I didn't know it already, the Dja showed me very clearly how variable these forests can be. The plots were arranged in three pairs, the two plots in each pair a few hundred metres apart. One of each pair was a mixed forest, full of weird and wacky trees, tangled lianas, and treefall gaps bursting with very spiny palms and shrubs, a nightmare to get through. The other member of each pair was a monodominant stand, where 90% of trees belonged to the same species, undergrowth was very limited, and all in all they couldn't have been easier to survey, although that did make them a bit boring. As for why forests so close together should be so different, well that's a good question.

2) It’s not only women that go to the toilet in groups. I’m using the word toilet in a very loose sense here, but really in Britain you wouldn’t expect to see three men walk off together to empty their bowels. Maybe it was the machetes they were carrying to dig the holes to shit in that made the task suitably manly? Or maybe it was just a convenient time and there was no particular reason for them not to go together?

3) Ideas about family composition vary hugely. I think the biggest laugh I got from the guys was for my response to hearing about Sagam’s 11 children – “Avec 11 enfants on ne peut pas dormir!” Sagam didn’t seem to find this a problem, indeed he wants one more, his wife only wanted 8 though. But what the others were really shocked by was the fact that in these 11 children, he has a pair of twins.

4) It’s possible to create a transport system using only yellow taxis. That’s not completely accurate because I have seen buses here in Yaounde, but they’re so rare as to be practically irrelevant. Most countries I’ve travelled to, I’ve found the public transport to be very efficient, even if initially confusing. But here instead of the usual packed minibuses, almost 90% of the traffic on the streets is these yellow share taxis. They never put up destination signs on the dashboard because this depends on who they happen to pick up. So if you want to go anywhere you just have to stop every taxi that passes and name your destination – if they drive straight off they weren’t heading in that direction, if they stop you can get in. Since each taxi can only take 5 passengers there’s a lot of traffic congestion...

5) Some people have incredible faith in the power of medicine. At least in comparison to me that is. This might take a little bit of explaining, but for a day or so I managed to convince myself that I’d contracted Hepatitis (watch out Gavin, you’ve got competition for the title of family hypochondriac supreme). The next day I felt perfectly fine, and whatever it was has definitely gone now. But anyway that night I’d consulted my medical bible and come up with Hepatitis as fitting the bill. We decided it was best for me to rest and take a day off. But Lise was also determined to give me medicine. Before giving me a chance to refuse she presented me with a cup of dissolved generic-copy soluble paracetemol. I tried to explain that as a painkiller this wouldn’t actually cure the illness. Since I was going to rest the next day a bit of pain wouldn’t be too much of a problem, indeed its presence or absence could tell me whether or not there was still anything to worry about. Plus if it really was hepatitis then both the medical book and the leaflet from the paracetemol pack strongly warned against taking any medicine that could further damage the liver. But Lise is not a person to back down easily. She knows what’s best and she makes it happen. She was so insistent that in the end the only way I could refuse her remedy was to say goodnight and go straight to my tent.