Last Sunday morning I went on a hike/mountain climb with another teacher. He made it sound like it was going to be an all day excursion so I was getting ready for Mt. Cameroun part two, but it actually turned into a delightful trip. First we road our bikes about 40 minutes to the base of one of the large mountains that surround the town. I had noooo idea that this whole ride was still part of my town and had he left me there, I would have been pretty hard-pressed to find my way back. (That’s not true… I’m sure somebody would know exactly where I belonged and taken me back… but now I’m starting mission discovering the different quartiers.) We leave our bikes in some woman’s house at the bottom of the mountain, who I realize halfway up my friend has never met before. Anyway, the initial hiking was very steep and a little difficult. But then the ground leveled out and it was more like a hike and less vertical.

We found 2 people on the path who turned out to be students at our lycee. They both actually live in a smaller village farther back in the mountains then we were even trying to visit. They spend the week in town living at a “sari” together with a lot of other students and then only return home once in a while. They knew the lay of the land really well so they became our guides and took us to the “borage,” this huge damn built in the middle of nowhere within these mountains. It just sort of appears out of the blue. Apparently the Germans built it in the 1980s but it’s not necessarily for drinking water. The boys washed their school uniforms in it and talked about the big fish in there. They said its “really deep,” but that’s sort of a relative term… just like how now its “really cold,” although definitely too cold for swimming. Anyways we had a little picnic up on the rocks overlooking the water and then the students continued onward and we hiked back down the mountain. Being the informatique teacher, my friend LOVED the flipcam so we have a thoroughly documented mountain climb… or rather minutes upon minutes of me hiking in my track suit pants and fleece tied around the waist… had to do it.

We saw a pretty big snake en route. Thankfully he was up in the rocks and I declined to follow everybody else as they trooped over to get a better look at it. Alex got a little too excited and recorded about 2 minutes of their argument over whether they were looking at the head or the tail while pointed at a random rock. However, he said it was the biggest snake he had ever seen. The students assured us that it wasn’t the kind that bites though.