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Explore Africa!

I
Surf magical waves in the land of voodoo.




 


The 'Oceansurf Guidebooks' surf guide to PORTUGAL from Oceansurf Publications. Everything you could ever need to know for a surf trip to Portugal.


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HEART OF DARKNESS


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With a flurry of leaves, a stamping of bushy feet and a wiggling of bushy behind, the shrub leapt onto the path and launched into a series of pirouettes and cart wheels. This, it can only be said, was a rather unexpected thing for a bush to do.

Looking back on it I probably shouldn’t have been that surprised to have bumped into a dancing bush, after all things had been a little surreal since we arrived. I mean I wasn’t even supposed to be in Cameroon, we were only there because the flight had been cheap. The real goal of this surf trip was an offshore island belonging to Equatorial Guinea. It had looked so promising on the maps, stuck a short way out into the Atlantic Ocean it seemed like a perfect bet for some long distance south swell action, but in this corner of the world nothing much ever goes according to plan and even less seems to make any sense. So it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to us when my two travelling companions, Adrian Savio and Jon Bowen, and I rocked up at the embassy of Equatorial Guinea to demand our visas and ended up engrossed in the type of conversation that could only occur somewhere like this.

“Hello Sir”, Jon volunteered to the ambassador, “We’d like to come on holiday to your country”,
“ Well you’re not allowed”, came the curt reply,
“ Why ever not?” I queried,
“ Because you’re all wearing sandals”,
“ But so are you” Adrian countered,
“ This is true, but it’s my country so I can. Anyway tourists like you always make war in our country”.

And with that he shuffled us out of his office and slammed the door shut behind us.

Squatting like a super soaked sponge across the heart of Africa, the rainforests of the Congo Basin, covering over one and half million square miles, are, after the Amazon, the biggest chunk of tropical forest on the planet. This forest provides a steamy home to some six hundred known tree species (most of which, I believe, don’t dance), a zillion lesser plants, ten thousand different creatures and who knows how many unknown ones, a million possible adventures, several wars and, in places, the potential for outrageous empty waves. Unfortunately we were now stuck in Cameroon, which, wedged as it is in the armpit of Africa, behind the swell shadow of Equatorial Guinea’s forbidden offshore islands, was almost certainly the one country in the entire region that didn’t get waves.

For years Central Africa had been a romantic lure for me. I even gave it a go a decade earlier, in the former Zaïre, but revolution and genocide were in the air and I aborted the mission early on. Even after that disastrous, and at times very scary first peek, the seed of an idea had refused to die. Central Africa was the final frontier, the continents black core and, for a surfer, the ultimate adventure. So after years of dandying around its fringes I realised that it was time, once again, to plunge back into the heart of darkness.

The forests of the Congo Basin are no ordinary forests. At best only semi-explored and mapped, these jungles have long dished up all manner of improbable people, animals and legends – many of which have later turned out to be fact. There’s the half zebra, half giraffe like creature called the Okapi, lakes that randomly poison people, a horror film virus called Ebola that kills its victims by making them bleed through all orifices, militia groups that eat people alive and the Mokele-Mbembe, a prehistoric monster reported to live in a region of remote swamp, but maybe the strangest thing of all, stranger even than a dancing bush, was Gabriel.

After being refused entry to Equatorial Guinea due to unsuitable footwear we drifted about Cameroon’s capital for a few days wondering what to do next. Neighbouring Gabon and Nigeria, both with far greater wave potential than Cameroon were equally scathing of our suggestions that we go wave hunting there. Then, as we were about to give up any hope of getting wet, I remembered a friend telling me how he had a mate who knew someone who had claimed to have surfed Cameroon, at least I think he’d said Cameroon. Whatever, it was enough for us and we set off with zeal in search of adventure. Having come all the way to Central Africa, and not now expecting any swell, we thought we might as well have a bit of excitement on the way to the beach and, rather than taking the nice smooth highway, we’d go the long way round and, at the point where the road ran out, we’d just pick up our bags and hack our way through the jungle to the surf. I’m never less than amazed at the kind of seemingly good ideas you can come up with over a few beers.

My guidebook had little information on the region we planned to hike through, saying only that it was an area of, ‘dense, unmanaged rainforest providing a home to forest buffalo, elephant, leopard, chimp and gorilla. There are no facilities, little access and no infrastructure’. Clearly this wasn’t going to be a gentle stroll in the park and it was obviously essential to be well prepared. It would be no exaggeration to say our lives could depend on it. Therefore Adrian and I, with our Cub Scout backgrounds kitted ourselves out with some laughing cow cheese and a few tins of corned beef and set off. Jon, by contrast, brought an SAS survival manual, a Swiss army knife, a bivvy bag and a tent and a GPS unit. All well and good you might think, except that the SAS survival manual kind of assumed you’d have things like parachutes with you that could quickly and easily be converted into handy rainwater catchers. The GPS system was, in theory, also an excellent idea; unfortunately Jon omitted to mention that it doesn’t work under the cover of trees, which was to prove a little problematic in the jungle. However the most useful bit of kit he’d brought was the blood transfusion kit, except of course that Jon had no idea how to use it and hadn’t yet worked out where we were going to find a supply of fresh, sterile blood in the middle of the rainforest. Still, almost well prepared, we left the make shift mud road behind and vanished under the canopy of the forest. After a couple of hundred metres the trail split into two separate tracks and we all looked at each other waiting for someone to produce a map. Ah yes, map, good point, none of us had one.

It was just over a week later that we first saw Gabriel. The three of us were sat under the shade of a palm tree watching the waves when suddenly, bursting out of the forest and onto the soft beach, came a man who appeared to be carrying a surfboard. Fascinated we stared as he strolled across the beach to the waters edge, bent down to do up his leash, dived head first into the waves, paddled smoothly out to the line up and quickly stroked into a shoulder high lefthander. Here we were in a jungle where we thought surfers would fear to tread and someone else had just taken over our peak. Gabriel, who seemed even more surprised to see us than we were to see him, turned out to be a confident and proficient surfer, but more than that, Gabriel might well be the worlds luckiest surfer as well as the most unusual.

Our hike through the forests of southern Cameroon had not been without incident. After reaching the fork in the trail we did what blokes do when faced with a problem and had a piss, ate half the corned beef and blamed each other for not thinking about bringing a map or asking for any kind of directions. Finally, we returned to the last village we’d gone past where we roped a man by the name of Pierre into acting as a guide for us. I’d like to say that the forest was beautiful, inspiring and life changing, but that would be a lie. In fact, for the next few days I saw little of anything, except for the back of Pierre as he strode confidently ahead of his three stumbling, panting charges. All around us were signs of animals, in particular the trampled trails of forest elephants and buffalos and the occasional sounds of shrieking and tree thumping from troops of chimps, but sightings were rare and limited to fluttering rainbow butterflies, squawking parrots and the odd troop of monkeys crashing through the canopy. We quickly discovered that the easiest way to walk through the forest was to follow the old, or sometimes not so old, trails left by elephants and buffalo. This was fine so long as you didn’t round a bend and bound straight into a herd of surprised elephants. This might sound unlikely but a couple of times in the late evening dark groups of elephants passed so close to our camp that we could smell them but not actually see them. Then again with the density of the vegetation we were pushing our way through a blue whale wearing a pink skirt and dancing a tango just two metres away from us would probably go unnoticed. It was after we’d been lost in the bowels of the forest for two days that we came upon the land of the Baka. The Baka are a people so exotic and so unlikely that most of us assume they are nothing but a figment of an overly fertile imagination, but the Baka are real and they have another, more common, name. The Baka are Pygmies.

On entering the first Baka village everything appeared well and good, the log and leaf houses were suitably scaled down and the sun-dried porcupine indicated that traditional hunting methods were still followed, but there was something about the scene that wasn’t quite right. The headman of the village started to approach us, tripped over his own feet and fell into a slurring heap on the floor. Ah, that’s the problem - the pygmies are pissed. It’s thought that there are around 250,000 pygmies scattered across the Congo Basin and, though portrayed as a savage and almost inhuman group by both the Western and African media the various different pygmy tribes do in fact have a society as complex, advanced and contradictory as all the rest of us. They are the original guardians of the forest and one of the oldest peoples on the planet. Their past has long fascinated Western academics due to many of their myths and legends corresponding very closely to tales from the Old Testament, yet prior to the 16th Century they could have had no contact with the world of Europe or the Middle East. Most of these pygmy groups continue to live a traditional lifestyle in which the forest provides for all their needs; they gather fruits and herbs in its interior, build their houses from its trees, fish in its rivers and hunt for small antelope, pigs and monkey’s with spears or bows and arrows. But their lifestyle is increasingly under threat. The settled peoples living on the forest fringe abuse them and Western logging companies are rapidly destroying their home. Africa has the highest deforestation rates in the world and logging in Cameroon has trebled in the past fifteen years. Over the next two decades Cameroon will loose a further 20% of its forests and, incredibly, most of this timber, (the majority of which is sent to Europe), is logged illegally. All of this is having a massive impact on the life of the pygmies and, as is so common with aboriginal groups the world over who’ve had their culture and lifestyle uprooted by ‘modern’ life, the pygmies have fallen to the very bottom of the human food chain and have been left with nothing to numb dark hearts but cheap alcohol.

Tired, bruised and very sick of corned beef, we finally emerged from the jungle onto a ribbon of stunning gold beaches close to the border with Equatorial Guinea. I’ve got to admit to being surprised with our arrival here, not just because we had survived the jungle, but because of what greeted us on one of those beaches. A mellow left that trundled in ideal longboard fashion down a semi-submerged point straight over the border of Equatorial Guinea, across no-mans land and on into Cameroon. For a country that lay in the swell sheltered armpit of Africa this wasn’t a bad discovery. From here we traipsed a trail back up the coast coming across a whole array of little sand spit points held in place by piles of boulders. It would be fair to say that it never gets big here but with some of the most beautiful beaches any of us had ever seen, a dozen or more playful left points and absolutely no chance of another surfer we were more than a little pleased with ourselves. At least we assumed there was no chance of another surfer, but then came the morning when Gabriel strode out of the forest, lent into a few shore break lefts and proved himself the luckiest and possibly most unusual surfer in all the world. Having ridden waves in more than a dozen African countries I feel quite qualified to say that black African surfers are somewhat rarer creatures than the gorillas that haunt the Central African jungles. I can count on one hand how many I have met and I’d still be left with a couple of spare fingers. But it wasn’t this that made Gabriel unusual it was something much more unlikely. Gabriel is a surfing pygmy.

His story is an interesting one. In the late 90’s Gabriel got a job working at a French run beachside hotel, his boss was a French surfer who had brought his boards to Cameroon and taught Gabriel to surf. After a year disaster struck when Gabriel’s tutor sadly died and our hero was left to carry on his surfing tuition alone. For most of us this wouldn’t be a problem - we’d just watch and learn from the surfers around us, but for Gabriel there were no other surfers to gain inspiration from, no surf films to watch, not even any surf mags to devour. In fact, Gabriel told us that we were the first surfers he has been able to share waves with for seven years. Can you imagine that? Surfing your very own point and beach break waves completely alone for seven years. No wonder Gabriel might be the world’s luckiest surfer. Of course there are one or two downsides to this crowd free paradise. The most obvious being that the complete lack of a surf industry has meant that its been years since Gabriel has been able to put a fresh coat of wax on his board and what a board it is. He originally inherited two boards from his former employer, one longboard and one shortboard, but he quickly snapped the longboard in the shore break and when we arrived on the scene his one remaining board was very much on its last legs.

The unlikely story of Gabriel and his discovery of surfing almost has a ring of magic to it, but in the Congolese forests that seems highly appropriate. Magic positively floats in the air here, nothing is ever how you expect it to be and the unlikely happens at every other moment. It’s a place where elephants can be invisible, sandals ban you from a nation, prehistoric monsters hide in forest swamps and pygmy surfers ride waves all alone for years on end. It’s also a place where Gods are disguised as dancing bushes.

“ I am Jengi. The spirit of the forest”, the bush bellowed. If I had thought a bit of shrubbery with a neat line in disco moves odd then I can only admit to being completely flabbergasted when the same dancing bush started to speak to me. On our last afternoon in the jungle Adrian, Jon and myself were walking past the edge of another Baka village when, completely unexpectedly, a shrub leapt onto the path and launched into a series of pirouettes and cartwheels. The Baka believe in a forest guardian called the Jengi, he is the spirit of the forest and he provides, protects and destroys everything in this jungle. He is a mystical visitor from another dimension who appears only rarely and only when the need is great, yet here he was leaping from the undergrowth to halt our progress. A further flurry of backspins followed before silence fell and the bush appeared to glance expectantly at us. What on Earth could the God of the Baka want from us? Not being entirely sure how best to respond to a talking, dancing bush, I put on my best British accent, looked him square in the leaf, stuck out my hand and wished him a good afternoon. The bush let forth a huge manic scream of laughter that made us jump with surprise and then, in a terrible and eerie bellow the Jengi announced his requirements from us mere mortals. “Give me vodka” he boomed and then collapsed into a drunken heap next to a group of his fellow Baka villagers. “How very peculiar”, I thought, and wandered off in search of a hedge trimmer.

THANKS
Thank you as always to Oceansurf Publications www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk and C-Skins Wetsuits www.c-skins.com for giving me the opportunity to explore the Central African rainforests. Good luck and many thanks to Gabriel for so happily sharing his wave stash. Finally, thanks to whoever invented Jon’s very useful GPS unit…

For more on the problems and perils facing the Baka and the jungle itself see
Survival International www.survival-international.com and WWF www.wwf.org