Days in Kribi

The two days I spent in Kribi were lazy.

There was a stand where I had my avocado salad in the morning, 700cfa. Café Abou was closed in the morning and Abou himself told me it’s because of Ramadan. I almost forgot. He still made me the 100cfa coffee. The next day however he said something about machine not working.

Kribi – and Yaoundé to a certain extent – suffered from the same problem as all Ivory Coast. Il n y a pas de monnaie. The it people who didn’t have a problem with change were the moto drivers. Perhaps they were the culprits, hoarding all the coins. I tried beating the system – it worked in Yaoundé – and went to withdraw something like 8000cfa but Société Générale only allowed 5000cfa notes and BICEC even worse allowed only 10000cfa notes. There were quite long queues to both ATMs and at Société Générale there was even a fight about who stood where in the queue. Just like in Poland.

I also managed to find a few stands selling groundnuts, they were becoming a bit thin on the ground.

On the first day I asked a moto driver to take me where I could have ndole for lunch. We rode and we rode on streets I didn’t even know existed around me, asking at places I wouldn’t even tell food is served at but nothing. Wow. I ended up at the same Senegalese restaurant I had food the previous day, they had no yassa rice, I had Senegalese rice again.

Afternoon on the first day I wanted to take a walk to Lobé falls. It used to be a nice 5km+ walk along the beach. The beach in Kribi is maybe not spectacular, not even very wide, just a few meters till the dense vegetation begins but it used to be empty and the sea calm and easy to swim in.

I took a moto to around Coco Beach guesthouse where I used to stay many years ago when I was in Kribi.

The beginning of the walk is quite rocky. I met some boys drinking palm wine. Of course I had my share, two cups exactly. The palm wine was fresh and sweet. It was around 4pm and the clouds were already gathering on the sky but the boys said it would only rain at night.

I walked on, the tide was high and the sea not that calm, possibly due to the rainy season. There were a few people already swimming. Some remote couples on the rocks.

And then after maybe 1-2kms where the sand takes over the path was covered by fallen trees. I had to either manoeuvre among the fallen trunks or wad into water knee deep (of course I had my passport in my shorts because Cameroon) to go around the trees. It’s as if the water went so deep into land that it washed away the shore. There were even some houses fallen apart due to the destructive nature. Wow. Climate emergency indeed.

At one point the water became so deep I had to climb the low escarpment onto the ground and walk through the dense bush. I walked out on a clearing onto a bar, of course, people drinking beer. The place is called Beau Séjour On The Beach I found out later. There was no beach below, just a mangled row of fallen trees. I asked the bartender how to continue, he advised to scramble through the bush to pass the fallen trees. And I did scramble but not for long, I went down onto the beach and continued scrambling through the fallen trees instead.

The bartender said the fallen trees are the effect of people digging out the sand, which they use for construction. And some time later I saw three men shoveling the sand from the beach onto the higher ground above.

The beach finally became as it was before, how I remembered it, empty and sandy. There were however more buildings nearby, many of them “for rent”, two of them quite busy hotels and bars. Development. I walked on and just as the beach became nice and empty it started raining. And raining quite heavily. I was about 1.5kms before the waterfalls, the map showed about 1km to the main road. I hid under a roof of an empty villa. It was after 5pm.

I was lucky, the rain stopped after maybe 20mins and I could walk on. And the clouds dispersed and by the time I reached the falls the sunset was spectacular.

Before reaching the bay to which the falls fall down – apparently these are one of the two waterfalls in the world from which water falls down the the sea – I met a man named Albert who in the middle of nowhere ran a chop joint business. He walked with me for some time. If I didn’t want fish or shrimps maybe he could talk me into a pirogue trip right in front of the falls?

By the falls now where we used to take beer on the sand under a tree now a full wooden installation, a restaurant, a handmade postcard seller and even a mask shop. I wonder how the mask business is going in such a place.

The falls are more like rapids in my opinion, nevertheless they look beautiful, surrounded by the greenery.

Add to it a very orange sunset there was, it was a good end to the walk.

I took a bottle of Mützig, 1000cfa. I was worried a bit about transport back but there were bikes around and the road back to town – the driver asked for 1000cfa which I think is double the normal price – was quite busy with motos.

Dinner of course was in débarcadère, I splurged again and took a 5000cfa bar, which possibly is a sea bass, a bottle of beer there is 800. It was delicious. I gave the woman a 10000cfa bill and she disappeared for maybe half an hour. I was even a bit annoyed to wait for this long but when she came back she gave me back 5000cfa bill and said that the next day I would bring her the 800cfa for the beer. Wow.

So I went to rue de la joie to a buvette where the woman owed me 200cfa from the previous day. There was another woman there and it took me a while to convince her I was not lying but she did agree to the deal in the end. Wow.

I went to another place around and sat down. I had two gizzard soya but again it was cold. Nigeria does it better. And then it started raining so I went back to the hotel.

On the second day in Kribi I found my Ndole. It was served with fried bar and the bar was not well fried, there was still some fresh meat in the fish, but the ndole was good. It actually was a proper restaurant, that had menu, I was torn between ndole and snails. 2000cfa. It’s a restaurant next to the roundabout by the town beach.

I wanted to repeat the afternoon walk, hoping perhaps for a lower tide. But the tide was high and it started raining much earlier than the previous day so I ended up at Beau Séjour halfway to the falls. The cheapest room there goes for 35,000cfa. It has a very nice location but there is no beach to speak of, just the fallen trees.

After the rain stopped it was already dark and I walked to the main road, maybe 300metres. The Moto back to town was 300cfa.

Débarcadère was busy that night, it was Saturday. There were even white people. I had a 4500cfa bar but I had to ask the woman to bring the price down, she asked for 5000.

I went back to the auberge earlier than usual as I planned to get up early the following day to catch a bus to Yaoundé and Ebolowa towards Gabon.