五月，六月： Mont Febe, Yaounde, Cameroun via Paris Charles De Gaulle

 Back in Africa by way of Europe, instead of South Africa.

Didn't expect Charles De Gaulle airport to be that retro. Well, part of it, that is. The newer terminals were all glass and steel, but the older ones were like old concrete blocks.
A Concorde airplane sits on the tarmac, with it nose tilt slightly upward to suggest movement. But this is only an outdoor exhibit piece. The Concorde have long been put out of service. The crash at Paris in 2010 lead to her retirement in 2013. It took another nine years for Continental Airlines to win a bid to overturn its manslaughter conviction for the deaths of 113 people in the crash. The appeals court in Versailles, near Paris, reversed the 2010 guilty verdict, while holding the carrier and two employees civilly responsible for the crash and awarding Air France 1 million euros ($1.3 million) in damages. Continental fought the lower court’s decision to hold them responsible for the deaths, saying the Concorde’s explosion wasn’t the result of debris from a Continental plane.

The train station is connected to the airport terminal. I did contemplate riding into the city and double back within a few hours for my connecting flight. But I worry if the French rail network is as good as the German one. Is the timetable accurate? And on the notice was news about rail interruption because of track maintenance between the city and the airport. Language wasn't the top of my concern after what I witness at the tourist info counter.
A what-looks-like-Taiwanese couple was having no problem conversing with the French guy at the counter, in English. Worries that I would be snubbed for speaking English in Paris went away. I did have first-hand experience of the infamous Parisien-aloofness. I was checking in for the Paris-Cameroun leg when I noticed that my boarding pass for the Singapore-Paris leg was missing. I asked the counter staff to help check if it had slipped behind or under the counter. I didn't expect their reaction. It was as if I have accussed them of stealing the pass. They spent all the time and energy saying the pass had not slipped, instead of just taking a quick look around the counter. Failing to move them, I relented. They went back to their chitchatting. Frogs :).

Douala is by a river, while Yaounde is at the foot of a mountain. I have not much recollection of the whole process of entering the country. Which is a good thing. The company sent in a local guy to help with the custom and immigration officers, and the pesky moneychanger. The tall local guy, his height could put him in a NBA team if he had the athletism to match, knows a lady who is a immigration police. Everything went smoothly. The moneychanger even hand over the small changes. On the way out of the airport towards the city, we were stopped at a road block. A traffic police were making checks. The immigration police was in the back seat, taking a ride on the company car home. The traffic police saw her, they saluted each other and he wave us through. More than anywhere else, it is good to know people in high places here, or at least someone in uniform. The driver drop her by the side of a dim road, with some low houses scattered around. I can never figure out how they get around in Cameroun for those who don't have their own transport, and public ones are almost non-existing.

That retro feel folowed me from Charles de Gaulle to Cameroun. The Mont Febe is situated on the slope of a hill. It is possibly a grand hotel (I was told the only better one is the Hilton right in the city), but the lobby and the deco was time-frozen in the late 70's. To be fair, the place was clean and everything (lights, shower, TV and all) were working over the lenght of my stay. 
Although, on one evening there was a blackout, and it seems the rain earlier had flooded the diesel backup generator, so electric was knocked out for most of one night. I had to made my way up the darkened stair.

The view high up on the hill was great. But, for the first week, I spent any spare time I had sleeping off the jetlag.

I am sure David Attenborough must has expressed, at least once during his wildlife documentary, his amazement at how animals in the Africa plain can forecast a change in the weather. Actually, given the great openness of the terrain, it is not that difficult for me to see a rolling rain cloud rolling in from afar, and thus predicting rain.

There were news that an application has been put up to list the hilly city of Yaounde on the UN World Heritage sites. 

The programmes on the TV are mostly in French. From satellite were French stations. Dance and hiphop is hot here, too. Nicki Minaj MV was on such heavy rotation here, I had a pretty good idea what starships are meant to do. Alright already!!!
 
Over the weekend, Queen Elizabeth were celebrating her Jubilee. As Prince Charles were toast his mummy with a "hip---, hip---, hurray....", the panel in the French studio were having a good laugh. The French republic must have seen the funnier side of this whole royal pageantry.

Earlier in the week, Sweden won in the Eurovision song contest. That's Sweden, of the group ABBA. That's the group that gave us Waterloo. A timely reminder to the French that "My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender".

For most of my stay at the Mont Febe, the Cameroun national football team was also staying under the same roof. That prospect would have been an exciting one, a few years back. Because a few years ago, Samuel Eto'o (him of Barcelona, and now with a Russian team) was playing in the Cameroun national team.


Even back before Eto'o, the Camerounian had earn a reputation as a formidable force in African football. Then in-fighting (between players and team manager, and between players and official) came along and wreck the team. Eto'o was actually accused by the national federation officials of once instigating players to go on strike before international matches, over pay heldback by the officials. The stories of late night player meeting in hotel room were intriguing. The Cameroun is no longer a certain shoo-in these days in international tournaments. There were no one in the team that were familiar to me. There may be some of them playing in the bigger European league, but none of them marque names like Eto'o.

One evening coming back to the hotel, I noticed a bit of a comotion in the lobby. There were men in uniform, police and soldier in fatigue by the door. A small crowd were gathered at the car park. And tall young men in Puma jersey were wheeling their lugguage in. When the team bus pulled up at the entrance, I realized the Indominitable Lions (their nickname, Les Lions Indomitables) were in town.

They were playing a few games to qualify for the next African Cup of Nations (2013) and World Cup 2014 over the next few busy weeks, and Hotel Mont Febe will be their home base. Over the next few days, while I see the team in the common area, I try to see if I recognize any one of them. None ring a bell. Even when I look through the team sheet on the papers, none of the names were familiar. This is a very young team, probably one that were rebuilt from scratch when the senior members retired, or revolted. I couldn't find any senior players, the statemen that gave a team it gravitas. It would be exciting if Roger Milla came in and put in a guest appearance at the hotel.

 

Even the coach was new. He had been managing the team for almost a year, but I was surprised to learn on TV that he was only given a contract on the second week I was in Yaounde.
 
Cameroun won 1-0 against the Democratic Republic of Congo over the weekend, so I guess that prompted the national football body to hand him the contract. I actually ran into him in the lift a couple of times after he signed the contract. I was trying to see if he was visibly happier. As always, he was poker-faced.

I guess the team did most of their training at the stadium. They remain indoor most of the time at the hotel. Only once did I see them venturing out, to the golf course behind the hotel.

Their compatriot plays in muddy field in the city centre, maybe hoping one day to make it to the national team.

On the second week, I finally worked off the jetlag and venture out to Mont Febe. It was amazing how many of the Cameroonians spend their weekend jogging up the slopes.
Even on weekdays, when I return from a night at the office, I could see joggers making their way up the slope before daybreak.
 
 
In any case, the last thing I expect to see on a hill in west Africa is a Chinese lady doing morning Taichi. And that was what I found that morning, and she was all decked out in all-white kungfu costume.


Mist usually hangs over Mont Febe in the early morning. A church could be found there, and also an army facilities.



This was also the week Euro 2012 kicked off. If there is something good about African, it is the fact it is more or less on the same timezone as Europe. So, there was no need to stay up late and watch the european games early in the morning. Of course, that also mean you might not make it back from the office when a game starts.


The other thing I will miss is the chilli sambal. Fiery stuff, that's how chilli should be.




I try to observe if the Euro 2012 was stirring up much excitment in Yaounde. Before the France-England game, I saw kids selling flags of the two nations in the traffic.
 
But it looks like the Cameroun flags on sale by the street were more popular. One day when there were matches going on both the Euro2012 and African Cup of Nations (Cameroun playing) fronts, I went over to lobby and the bar to check out what was playing on the screen. The Cameroun match was playing, and a small crowd was cheering them on before the TV. I remember once I were in the National stadium many years ago. Singapore was playing the Liverpool FC team, who was on their Asia tour. I could remember how no one seem to bother with the National anthem, while the supporters belt out "You will Never Walk Alone" with gusto, with scarves held high. That was during those days when the government dreamt up "Goal 2010" (the campaigne to work towards a spot in the 2010 World Cup), and then scrapped it.


Curiously, Myanmar (or Burma.....they keep tweaking their country it's hard to keep up) unfurled their new flag sometime in October, and it looks almost like the Camerounian ones.

Myanmar, new flag

 

Myanmar, old flag

Early in the week, an airplane dropped from the sky over Lago and crashed into the residential area near the airport. It was an internal flight ran by a Dana Air, a Nigerian airline partly owned by a Indian company. The plane was coming into land in Lagos’s busy Murtala Muhammed Airport from the capital, Abuja, when it plunged into buildings in Agege, one of the city's  suburbs. The death toll came to 159. When I flew in from Lago to Douala last year, I have hoped to take an indirect flight on South African airlines via J.burg. But in the end, I have to take one on a Nigeria airlines. When I heard the news about this crash, my inside knotted tight.

Taken from news website

For the next few days, the flag at the Nigeria embassy in Yaounde flew at half mast. After about a week, it wasn't flying anymore. I guessed the ambassador went home for business.