Martin (he lives at the house where I was staying) and I took a day trip to Limbé, a beach west of Douala (though Douala is on the ocean there is no good beach in the city). Limbé is near Mount Cameroon, the largest mountain in west Africa, and is in a volcanic area so it has black sand. It has a nice sandy bottom and decent waves, enough that some people were body surfing and even real surfing.

Though the temperature is usually around 30 degrees, it is almost impossible to find sun tan lotion here in Douala - as I've been told several times, no one else needs or uses it! After much searching I finally found some in one of the "western" grocery stores, which meant a taxi trip to the south end of the city. I had my hard-found sun tan lotion with me, but forgot to put it on before we went swimming, so of course I got a slight sunburn.

We went to Seme beach, which is a private beach (you pay to enter, but it is cleaner and better maintained). They also had a really nice fresh water stream where you could swim to rinse off the salt water.

More interesting than the beach was the travel to and from Limbé. It is about an hour away according to Google Maps, but of course it took us much longer. We went by "private car", which is closer to a taxi that collects a bunch of people going to the same place. The taxi rules apply - at least 3 adults (we had 4 plus a 10 year old) in the back and 2 adults (poor Martin got the gear shift seat) plus the driver in the front. There were several police checkstops on the way where cars were randomly pulled over, which our driver tried to avoid since he didn't own the car (though I'm not sure why driving a borrowed car was a problem). He first of all had Martin get out and go past the checkstop on a motorbike taxi, then for the next one we closed all the windows, I believe the assumption is that closed windows = A/C = a private car. The next time we got pulled over, so we spent time standing by the road while they worked it out, then we were finally on our way.

We thought catching the bus back would result in an easier trip, and it was much better though there were still 5 people in a row of seats built for 4, and the traffic got really bad on the east side of the city so the bus just pulled over and dropped us all off at the side of the road in the rain. But we were able to catch a taxi back to the house, so all ended ok.