Cameroons Coastline: Limbé and Kribi

Limbé:

LimbéOn weekends during the dry season, beach lovers in Douala head for Limbé, founded in 1857 by Alfred Saker, a British missionary. The beaches here are of black volcanic sand and are not as scenic as those in the area around Kribi.

Limbé is in the anglophone part of the country. It´s people differ from those around Douala not only in their language, but also in their appearance and behavior. Some of them feel closer to Nigeria than to Cameroon. There is a large Nigerian population in the area of Limbé, too. The English is quite hard to get used to. Many people don´t speak plain English, but Pidgin. Pidgin is a mixture of English and several African languages. It is so different from “normal” English that Hilary, a Scottish trainee who was Limbéin Cameroon at the same time as I was, told me she could not understand a word. But many African people speak it, so it is a sort of “lingua franca” for them with their many different languages, like English is for us.

One day we hired a pirogue and set off for one of the little islands close to the beach, which was sort of an adventure because water kept flooding into the pirogue from everywhere. Nevertheless, the island was worth it, rocky, deserted, but beautiful. The water is not as refreshing as it looks, for it has the temperature you´d rather choose for having a bath than to swim in - it must have been at least 30°Celsius.

Kribi:

AtKribi the beautiful coastal region of Kribi, there are long, isolated beaches of  white sand. Kribi is Cameroun´s best beach resort. The beaches are white - in contrast to the black, sometimes rocky beaches at Limbé - and there really aren´t many foreigners except during the short high season (December to February), when the hotels are full of expatriates, mostly from Douala.

SevenChutes de la Lobé km south of Kribi, just before Grand Batanga, you´ll see a sign pointing the Chutes de la Lobé, one of a very small number of waterfalls in the world that empty into the sea. With a nice beach nearby and a small restaurant where they prepare the best shrimps I ever tasted it is worth the trip. The waterfall is not very high, but very easy to reach from the beach and quite broad. And it is interesting to see how there is a river above and the sea beneathpygmys near Kribi it.

In the south of Kribi there is thick rainforest populated by pygmys. The nearest pygmy village that can be reached by boat on the river Lobé is quite touristic. Not surprisingly the pygmys are not very small. As we went there with some Cameroun friends, we brought them traditional gifts: rice, tobacco, sugar. They thanked us with a dance, which really didn´t look very traditional. There was a man clothed in an old jogging suit and with huges leafes covering his head, hands and feet. He performed some sort of dance which the other pygmys and our group joined after a while. Then we were guided around the village.