New Year’s Eve day found me and four fellow PCVs setting out
from Garoua to track a pod of hippos in the Benoue with Le Maitre
d’Hippopotome—the Hippo Master—a self-appointed hippo conservationist and
wrangler, and one of Garoua’s resident characters. We met him Tuesday morning at the bridge that spans the
Benoue River south of Garoua. The
area beside the foot of the bridge was already bustling; children hawked palm
hearts and kola nuts from trays on their heads, while women poured frothy millet
beer, or bilbil, into voluptuously shaped clay pots. The tangy odor of fish hung over everything, punctuated with
whiffs of noxious river mud.
After lively negotiation with a clutter of moto drivers,
three PCVs piled on to one moto, leaving me and a youth development volunteer,
Santina, to get on behind Le Maitre.
We sped over the bridge and a few kilometers down the paved road before
turning off onto a dirt path that led into the bush.
This was when Santina and I started to realize that Le
Maitre, albeit a man with numerous abilities and undeniable hippo charisma, is
not a very practiced moto driver.
I had gone out with him once before, almost exactly a year ago, and he
had ridden as a passenger behind a licensed moto driver; why he decided this time
around to conduct the motorcycle himself is unclear to me, but quickly became a
matter of no small concern. There
is a particular set of skills necessary to steering a moto in the bush, among
them knowing how to deal with sand traps.
Most moto drivers will slow, stick both flip-flopped feet into the deep
drifts of sand, and waddle the moto through the patch until the path becomes
firm again. Le Maitre, on the
other hand, tried to gun his way through the sweeping sand, a method guaranteed
to fail.
About twenty minutes—and several alarming wobbles through
sand—into our trip, we hit the longest patch of deep sand we had yet
encountered. Le Maitre approached
it, like the others, with unwarranted gumption. The moto immediately started fishtailing wildly from side to
side; his response was to throw himself forward. Predictably, the moto flew out to the side, throwing me off
and trapping Santina and Le Maitre beneath it.
Sliding in the sand had slowed us considerably, so neither
of the riders tangled in the moto were hurt beyond scrapes and bruises. I, however, had thrown my arm out to
break my fall, and managed to impale my elbow on a rock. I felt nothing, only the impact
of the fall, but as we picked ourselves up and dusted off, I noticed blood running
freely down my forearm. Our
friends, seeing that we had wiped out, stopped the lead moto and ran back to
check on us. My friend Brian drew
in his breath with a sharp hiss. I
turned my arm; there was a deep inch-long puncture right below my elbow. Santina helped me pour water over it,
nudging out as much sand as possible.
Rachel, an agroforestry volunteer posted in Garoua, offered a thin scarf
as a makeshift bandage, and Brian helped me tie it into a tourniquet. It was just shy of uncomfortably tight,
but provided enough pressure to stop the bleeding.
We arrived without any further mishaps in a small fishing
village on the banks of the Benoue.
There Le Maitre stored the motos; he and the other moto driver, now
wearing the hat of Canoe Paddler In Chief, made their way to the water’s edge
with the five of us in tow. We
piled into long, shallow wooden pirogues and glided out into the middle of the
river, where we let the current carry us downstream.
Soon enough we spotted the first massive hippo head, eyes
and nostrils just breaking the surface of the water, a Mesozoic monster
watching us watch it. Further
downriver we could see the rest of the pod, mostly submerged but betraying
their unseen bulk with occasional glimpses of a vast arched back. We eased to the starboard shore and got
out for a closer look.
The striking thing about hippos is their size. Pictures cannot convey the length of
their teeth, the enormity of their yawns, or the sheer underwater mass of these
creatures, leftover megafauna from a bygone era. The five of us stayed on land, watching and taking pictures,
marveling over their deeply reverberating grunts and seemingly unhingeable jaws
gawping and closing like a real-life version of the children’s game Hungry
Hungry Hippo. Le Maitre, on the
other hand, waded promptly into the water towards the pod, calling to them in
Fulfulde.
“You know, I read about a guy in Garoua who had trained a
hippo and rode it in the river,” Rachel mused, as we watched Le Maitre with
trepidation. “Then it killed
someone, so they had to put it down.”
She paused. “I’m pretty
sure that was this guy.” We nodded
thoughtfully, digesting this information.
It might have been better to know this before we put our safety in Le
Maitre’s hands. Then again, now
that we were this far into it, it might have been better not to know at all—or
at least not until we were safely back in Garoua.
But we were not fated to watch a hippo mauling, at least not
that day; Le Maitre finally, grudgingly responded to our beseeching calls and
left the water. We got back in our
boats and headed for Garoua, where I had to deal with the hole in my arm.
The worst part wasn’t cleaning the wound. The worst part wasn’t the lack of
anesthetic. The worst part wasn’t
the first stitch, hooked into my skin with a curved needle like a tool for
fixing tapestries, nor the subsequent stitching, obscured by blood so that the
nurse had to hook the skin several times before pulling it closed. No, the worst part was the two-ounce
shot of penicillin and lidocaine administered straight into my left glute
through a terrifyingly, comically, unnecessarily large syringe. The shot just kept happening, far
beyond the point at which I expected the needle to be withdrawn, my muscle
aching the more liquid was forced into it. I limped back to the Garoua transit house and curled up for
a stiff, pained nap.
But I woke up from the nap ready to welcome 2014, and even
made it out to go dancing at midnight.
Happy New Year from Cameroon; by definition, it’s gotta start on a
better foot than 2013 left on.
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