Climbing up and skiing down Mount Cameroon

Mount Cameroon was a discussion topic amongst our group right from the very start. To climb or not to climb?

I always thought I would as long as I wasn’t sick, though I was a little concerned about my level of fitness, particularly after several months of sitting on truck, essentially doing minimal exercise. The last hike I went on was in Madagascar in October last year. Fast forward to February this year and I am a little unfit!

But anyway, I decided what the hell, I might as well do it. Somehow I will make it. And 10 others in our group thought the same – Shaun, Karen, Guber, Katie, Andrea, Garrett, Dom, Julia, Haydon and Lee. Might I add Haydon was the only one in our group who had been going on optional hikes for this entire trip and is freakishly fast on hikes. His Facebook status update was apparently something to the effect of ‘had to wait around too long for these other guys to climb the mountain’! In short, he was fit. The rest of us hadn’t done much in a long time.

So we started at Buea and had our bags weighed to ensure they were 15kgs or under for our porters to carry. We had one porter each and one extra porter to carry up cooking water and our kettle as you have to take everything with you – tents, food, water, utensils, etc. Everyone carried their own food for the whole 3 day trip – our brekkie and dinner rations (off the truck) were: 2 x Cup a Soup, 2 x 2 minute noodles, 2 x tins of tuna, 1 x tin of baked beans, and 1 x tin of spaghetti. And let me assure you, never before has tinned spaghetti tasted as good as it did after hiking all day long. We provided our own lunch and snacks – I had a stash of bread, ‘La Vache Qui Rit’ (Laughing Cow) cheese, boiled eggs, oranges, apples, muesli bars, biscuits, nuts and a beignet (French sugar-coated donut – though I was disappointed to find out halfway up the mountain that there was no jam filling in it as there normally is!)

It was raining on the hike up the mountain but it was refreshing and most likely a better alternative to hiking in the baking hot sun.

The hike just seemed to go up and up for a long time (6 hours precisely for the 1^st day) and at times was incredibly steep. It was a bit of a shock to the system.

I did my 10 pieces of litter picking each day on the slopes of Mount Cameroon, finding mostly lolly wrappers, tin cans, and plastic whiskey sachets!

We caught our breaths at many short stops, and at a much longer lunch stop at 1,875 metres. Not long after we took off again, we hit the savannah where the clouds were flying rapidly along the edge of the mountain. We later stopped for a short break at the intermediary hut at 2,200 metres and then at the magic tree at 2,640 metres. It’s called the magic tree as it’s such a steep hike, it’s lucky if you make it! We finally reached our destination for the day, Hut 2 at 2,875 metres, around 3pm.

We had dinner very early and then went to lay down in the hut. Most of us were in bed by 7.30pm. There were three rooms with a large plank of wood about 1 metre or so off the ground. Both the ground and the bench were covered in straw. The porters slept underneath the plank of wood, and we slept on top. A very cosy arrangement with 7 of us on the one plank – one of them not from our group. She was a local Cameroonian, named Priscilla, who had been at that hut for almost a month and was praying and meditating every day on the mountainside.

Didn’t sleep very well. But managed to get up at 6am on Day 2 and continue climbing at 7.30am. It was daunting nonetheless as it was a 10 hour hike. The uphill section was pretty tough and the howling wind seemed to make it harder, as did the altitude.

We caught our breath at the intermediary hut at 3,765 metres. Katie, Guber, Shaun and Haydon had already reached the hut when I arrived, and poked their heads out to welcome me.

The last slog to the top wasn’t as hard from that point on, and we were ecstatic when we reached it at 4,095 metres.

After a few interesting photos of one of our group members (probably not appropriate for this blog), we began our descent. It was a scramble down an extremely slippery path with lots of little pebbles and rocks, and in parts, it was almost like you were skiing down, with each foot sliding several centimetres every step.

I stopped to take a few photos of the vegetation – mostly short shrubs and flowers. We didn’t see any animals though mice are meant to live here.

We had lunch at the bottom of the slippery slope, walked past the 1901 lava flow, and peered into several of the 11 craters from the 1999 explosion that were between 10-30 metres deep. Most have green ferns and bushes now growing inside them.

The locals were burning off the mountain here, and ash was flying around everywhere. A large fleck of it got into my left eye. At that time, our guide Samuel was walking with me.

He suddenly brought his lips up to my eye and blew air and spit into it! I definitely didn’t expect that and didn’t really know how to react so I just laughed. I told him I could use my finger to get the rest out and he wasn’t having a bar of it and then blew air and spit into my eye again! It actually did help, although when I woke up the next morning, a piece had evidently been stuck in there and my eye had gone puffy. It only subsided when I put some eye-drops in.

The descent was steep and started irritating my left knee. We finally made it to our campsite at 5pm and simply collapsed into our tents that the porters had kindly put up for us. The sleeping arrangements were very cosy to say the least – 4 people and all our luggage in the one tent! And it didn’t help that we were on a slope on bumpy ground so we ended up sliding into the one corner all night long!

On Day 3, we got up at 4am and set off at 5am in the dark by the light of our head torches which annoyingly attracted all of the surrounding insects. We glimpsed at the 1999 lava flow (from the 11 craters we saw yesterday) before making our way down through the jungle, where we had breakfast around 8am.

It started raining and as a result got pretty slippery. Most of us, myself included, slipped over several times.

We finally reached the edge of the forest and crossed over into farmland and out to a neighbouring village. One family beckoned us over and offered us their palm wine which tasted great,

as did our celebratory beers at a pub at the end – after we arrived at 10.57am.

The boys wanted to continue drinking and bought some palm wine on the drive back to Buea,

a bottle of which later exploded all over Garrett and Andrea’s tent! I think it was still fermenting. Who knows what that stuff does to your stomach!

The Race of Hope, a race up and down Mount Cameroon, took place on the same day we finished our hike. We were watching it live on TV in the pub, and found out the winner made it in 4 hours and 10 minutes (breaking last year’s record by 10 minutes)! In comparison, it took us 3 whole days! We saw several runners still completing the race on our drive back to Limbe - they were still running and didn’t even look tired.

Meanwhile, most of us found it pretty hard to move for the next couple of days.