Picnic, Policemen and Python

Ok, so the last one is a slight exaggeration but read on to discover the pleasures (and perils) of our latest holiday. We’ve just had our two week February skiing holidays (the French always have two weeks off because one is just not long enough for a skiing holiday!). Mum and Dad had the first week off. We spent it at Bakara, at a Catholic retreat centre.

Bakara

It was very pleasant and relaxing. The centre is on the eastern outskirts of N’djamena next to the river Chari. On the other side rather than being northern Cameroon you can actually see another part of Chad. We spent our time there resting, reading and bird watching. Being a lot closer to the river than normal we saw a lot of different birds like herons, open-billed storks and pied kingfishers. Unfortunately we forgot our bird book so we weren’t able to identify them all! As well as reading Ruth and I did some running. After the holidays Ruth has got her sports BAC. She has chosen to do demi-fond which means running 500 m as fast as you can three times while predicting your time. We did some practising as her teacher had recommended it.

Running! Well actually we saw that Dad was taking pictures so...we posed!

Whilst there we also went on an adventure! We decided to go on a picnic on one of the empty stretches of the river bank by Bakara. We set off and wandered a bit along the bank looking at the birds and river. Dad was just trying to get a picture of these beautiful green birds in flight when a policeman and a soldier pulled up on a motorbike behind us. They spent 10 minutes talking to Dad, asking us where we were from, if we had a tourism permission paper and if we had permission to take photos! They were surprised to hear that we had been in chad for 5 years, living and working at the hospital in N’djamena, and therefore hadn’t thought of applying for a tourism pass. As for the photos they let us off after checking that we had only photographed birds. The security around N’djamena has definitely gone up over the past couple of months. This meeting put an end to our wanderings and we headed back to the car to quickly eat our picnic and then go. Whilst we were enjoying tuna sandwiches, Mum suddenly spotted something moving in a pile of rocks behind us! She saw what looked like the head of a lizard, but it slithered out and lifted its head off the floor, no legs! A snake.  Before it came any closer we moved everything away from the shade under the isolated tree. We had soon finished and headed back to Bakara where we decided it was probably safer and more relaxing just to stay on the compound! Whilst picnicking we had been approached by the local village chief’s son who offered to take us on a boat trip to the island in the middle of the river to see hippopotami! In the end we decided it sounded a little too dangerous though we hope to see some again before Ruth leaves us. We did however manage to go on a last family camel ride!

The camels arriving

Ruth and I from the back of Dad's camel

Mum

We had failed to organise our usual three Wisemen Christmas excursion but Mum and Dad surprised us both by telling us they had organised one for that week as Bakara is very near to the golf course where we have ridden camels in the past! We spent an hour riding camels through the golf course which was full of young Chadians studying and people drying mats on the empty plains. No one was playing golf.  It was very fun though the camels seemed to have insatiable appetites and ate a lot of neem tree leaves! After the usual abrupt coming down Ruth and I thought we’d never be able to run again!

The camels

 Later in the week we were surprised to see more camels this time from afar. We were just eating a picnic (at Bakara this time) when we spotted a herd of camels walking along the long island in the middle of the river! There was one man with about 100 camels of various sizes!



The camels on the other side of the river

It was an amazing but fleeting sight as they had all soon moved on, on their way out of town. We’ve had a very nice break at Bakara; we finishing with a trip to the swimming pool where we all got thoroughly tanned!

Relaxing at by the river Bakara

Now Mum and Dad are back at work and Ruth and I will a quickly getting our homework done before school starts again on Monday!