Waza

Waza is a national wild life preserve in northern Cameroon. It is located a couple of hours south of Chad’s border with Cameroon. Our team decided to go check it out and spend some time together Monday and Tuesday of this week. We headed out on Monday morning and arrived in time to find the hotel and get ourselves signed up for dinner. When we arrived we discovered that around 20 American Embassy workers who had been evacuated from Chad because of the rebel movement in the East, had the same fun idea. So the hotel and park were full of American white people with Chadian license plates.



We purposely went out around the end of the day on Monday. We were told that the best time to go see the animals was the end of the day and the beginning. We had great luck on Monday night. We saw herds and herds of giraffes! They were incredible!



The next morning we were in the park by 6am and we did not have as much luck. But it had rained the night before which made the morning cool and the ride was pretty nice. Since the electricity had gone out we had no fans the night before and couldn’t open the windows in our bungalows, so the cool breeze was welcome. Then we got stuck in the mud! And wow were we stuck. We had 13 people in the car so some of us climbed out in order to reduce the weight in the car. After a few tries we were getting a little nervous, then the Americans came drumming across the savanna. “It’s the embassy workers!” we said. But they kept driving right past us. Margit commented, “I know they said they weren’t going to do any evacuations but this is ridiculous.” It turns out that they wanted to get to solid ground before stopping their trucks. So one of their drivers came back to us and got us out of the ditch.



From there we stayed close to their three land cruisers and didn’t get to see many animals for the rest of the morning. We did come across an iguana and some baboons and a lot of elephant tracks, but never found the elephants.



The ride was bumpy and educational. We know a lot more about off roading than we did before, and most of us had sore muscles in strange places the next couple of days!