i'm racing agianst my 22 minutes remaining at the cyber...so this is going to be brief!

i have spent the last week traveling with the group the the extreme north. actually, i think we may have spent more time in the bus than at the places we visited! the highlight of the hot dusty cramped and bumpy adventure was the village of Rhumseki. "touristy", at least for rural
Cameroon, Rhumseki is nestled in a valley between these amazing rock formations which, according to Emily (who got an A in "intro to geology"), are the left-over cores of volcanoes. Apparently the inner rock is much harder than the outer...the outer erodes away leaving giant jagged pillars.

Our 'tour guide', the 16 year old that lead us on a hike, told us the most interesting story.
Picture in your mind first an absolutely enormous rock pillar jutting out of a relatively flat area. See it?
Ok, so, if a woman in the village is having fertility problems, she must go, with the traditional doctor, to this 'mountain' and walk around it's base with a basket of eggs on her head. If none of them break, she will be cured of her infertility.
Hope you're smiling.

The traditional doctor in the village also tells futures...but he uses crabs instead of sand. You pose your questiong and he picks up the crab, asks it the question, shows you to it (by holding the crab in your face...so the crab knows it's you) and then places it in a basin with little wooden objects that represent different things. The crab scurries around and knocks some over and then gets picked up by the doctor. The doctor holds the crab to his hear and listens to your future, interprets the knocked over objects...and sends you on your way. The strangest part actually, is that Rhumseki is in the driest region of the country, and I have no idea where the crabs came from.

Also, we caught the end of mango season in the extreme north. i've never tasted anything like them!

Tomorrow we are leaving Ngaoundere for Yaounde, the capitol. Thankfully, we will be traveling by train and not bus...although the train promises to be just as much of an adventure! We have all come up with cameroonian themed halloween costumes and are going to trick or treat in each other's sleeper cars! I'm sure that all of the cameroonians will think we're crazy. I'm wearing the dress my family made for me and tying a pineapple to my head and going as miss chiquita banana!

miss you all!
bisous
brianne