Andrew and Grant for President!

We had just entered Cameroon’s capital – Yaounde. It was rush hour and we were desperately trying to make the Democratic Republic of Congo’s embassy to apply for visas before the embassy closed. We came to a huge traffic circle. You could either go straight (about 20m on a 4 lane road through the circle) or go around on a 4 lane road with bumper to bumper traffic. Grant was in Maude’s driving seat and he chose to go straight. Andrew, driving Mr Bling, followed. As we went through we heard a policeman shouting loudly in French and blowing his whistle. We decided to try keep going and pretended that we hadn’t heard him. Grant managed to get through the traffic but unfortunately however, we then hit the traffic the other side and we couldn’t get across it quickly enough. The policeman banged on the back of our car and demanded that we stop in the middle of the 4 lane traffic. He was furious. He demanded to see Andrew’s driver’s licence which he then wouldn’t give back and told Andrew that he had to go see his boss. Unfortunately Andrew had no option as he didn’t have his licence and we waited as Andrew went to find out what the problem was. It turned out that we had just driven on the president’s road! Only the president is allowed to drive on that piece of road and absolutely no one else!!! Obviously it’s ridiculous that there’s a perfectly good road that is quicker to drive on and that no one but the president is allowed to use it but in the policeman’s eyes, we had arrogantly assumed we were as important as the president! Andrew had to muster every bit of African charm he had learnt over the past 3 months of travelling in order to get out of paying a huge fine and most importantly, get his driver’s licence back. His charm (in broken French) included – South Africa (therefore he was a fellow African brother) Nelson Mandela (the hero of the African continent), the world cup (and that it’s finally come to Africa, Indomitable Lions (the Cameroon soccer team), Samuel Etto (Cameroon’s best soccer player), Bafana Bafana (our soccer team which obviously isn’t as good as the Indomitable Lions) and finally that we were tourists and had just arrived in Yaounde and of course what a wonderful country we thought Cameroon was! It worked! We got away after 15 tense minutes very relieved that things weren’t worse! Andrew and Grant got away with being on par with the president!