So there you sit, gorged and bloated, promising never to eat that much for Thanksgiving. And promising to start back on your exercise program, just in time for the holidays. If you were here in Yaoundé, you would have no excuse, because tomorrow is Friday Night Fitness!
That’s my name for the weekly ritual of exercise at the Rond Point Bastos, the traffic circle near the American Embassy, at the terminus of Avenue Jean Paul II. (Eventually there will be a photograph of this circle HERE.) During most of the week, the most striking feature is the 25-meter tall steel sculpture shaped like a giant pick-up jack. Electric lights are strung across the frame, and I’d imagine that as the holidays approach it will shine bright in the night.
For now, the show is underneath the sculpture. The Rond Point is the conjunction of several interesting routes in western Yaoundé. One leads past U.S. Embassy Yaoundé. The opposite way leads to a swanky neighborhood calls Bastos, with big houses and lost of other embassies and missions. Another rises toward Mont Febé, where the Presidential Residence is hidden in the hills overlooking our neighborhood, and the government-owned Mont Febé hotel.
This Mont Febé route relates to our fitness routine: Saturday and Sunday mornings many Cameroonians head up the hill toward and past the hotel as part of a ritual. Walkers. Runners. Chatters. A former prime minister. Diplomats. Some head up to the hotel, others higher into the fog that sometimes cloaks the hills, many to group exercise sessions at a plateau in the clouds.
But the groups on the hillside are nothing compared to the crowds back on the ground on Fridays. About 5 pm people start coming from all over Yaoundé, most on foot, some by car, and they gather at this circle -- and exercise. Some sprint laps around the roundabout. Others set up, in groups or individually, in the medians of the rond point and start exercising. Groups doing pushups, sit-ups, jump-ups, all sorts of ups, healthy or not. Groups running to or from the circle, to join or celebrate the fray. Others stretch. Or jump rope. Or ride bicycles. Or roller blades (there are apparently three Cameroonians who own roller blades, and this is where you find them).
A couple of weeks ago I ventured down to the circle: it’s barely 3 km from our house. On the way there, I was challenged by a couple of kids who wouldn’t let me pass. Subtly (but definitively) I wore them down. After passing them, I descended a hill toward the traffic circle. Easily 300 people, mostly young, men as well as women, assembled, slowing auto traffic as they showed off their form and their forms. After nearly colliding with a herd circling the intersection, I reversed course and will remember to run counter-clockwise if I return.
It’s an encouraging scene. There are a lot of young people who would spent their Friday evenings with friends, exercising an honest sweat, instead of carousing or other such nonsense. And I’m especially encouraged by the number of women who exercise, and publicly. Green, the color of Cameroon’s football jersey, is the most prominent hue, but joy in fitness is the theme.
New Year's Eve finds us in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea. While it's only a 15-minute flight from our home base in Cameroon, it's very different from the life we've grown into back in Yaounde.
Se habla espanol: Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa. (I'm not going to get into it about the former Spanish Sahara -- there's not much time left in the year.) EG has a decidedly Spanish colonial feel to it - witness the cathedral downtown, a stone's throw from the President's palace. We have decided that we like Spanish much better than French. 
No bumps: We're staying near the Embassy, which lies along a highway that follows the northern shoreline. Steve's morning run was completely flat, a stark contrast from the hills he finds on every outing in Yaounde. Make no mistake - geologically Bioko is part of the range of mountains that includes Mount Cameroon back home. Pico Basile looms over Malabo, but we've barely been able to see it because of the dusty haze the dry season has brought. Here's a better picture someone else took: 
One of the first dishes I tasted here is probably as typical Cameroonian as there is: Poulet Director General.
The Yaoundé Hash House Harriers completed something like their 680th run last weekend. We paid for it. But we got our money’s worth. 
We returned to find most of the Hash already piled into cars, and waiting impatiently for us. Ideally, we’d like to think they didn’t want us to miss the fun, but we were driving a vehicle that could take at least four more hashers, and space was tight. We squeezed five in, but that left two carloads relegated to hailing taxis and joining in our convoy to Nkalan-Bisson (completely phonetic), a suburb west of the city. 
And we hashed. The ritual is refreshingly familiar around the world: about 30 of us circled for introductions and instructions, and then we took to a trail marked by shredded paper in hopes of finding beer at the end. Markings guide the runners along the trail in hopes of making it to the end where beer awaits. The Yaoundé Hash is officiated in French, which allows me to answer a question I've pondered for sometime: In English, the runners yell "On-on!" when they are on the true trail. Comment dit-on en français?
