Things to Do in Cameroon in April

The road south from Yaoundé to the Ebogo river site and the Méfou National Park develops through a corridor of oil palm and cocoa plantations. The air thickens with the sweet, fermenting tang of drying cacao beans spread on tarps at the roadside. At Ebogo, pirogues carved from single tree trunks glide along the Nyong River beneath a cathedral canopy of raphia palms. Their paddle strokes are the only sound apart from the metallic trill of sunbirds overhead. Méfou Park, a primate sanctuary set in dense secondary forest, houses gorillas, chimpanzees, and mandrills rescued from the bushmeat trade. The mandrills' electric-blue and scarlet muzzles are startling at close range. The low rumble of a silverback gorilla shifting in the undergrowth is a sound that settles somewhere in your chest.

Yaoundé reveals itself best on foot or from the back seat of a slow-moving vehicle winding through its hillside quarters. Corrugated-iron rooftops in faded blues and greens cascade down slopes thick with banana plants and papaya trees. A city tour here is less about monuments, though the Reunification Monument and the National Museum housed in the former presidential palace have their weight. It is more about texture: the clamour of Mokolo market where dried fish, mounds of ground egusi, and hand-pressed palm oil in recycled bottles crowd every stall. The cool, incense-tinged interior of the Basilique Marie-Reine-des-Apôtres at Mvolyé, whose modernist stained glass throws amber and sapphire light across the nave. The quiet residential lanes of Bastos where embassy compounds sit behind walls draped in bougainvillea. In Cameroon's capital, the food alone justifies the detour. A plate of poulet DG, fried chicken braised with plantains, peppers, and onions in a glossy sauce, at a neighbourhood restaurant is the city's signature dish. The charred, smoky edges of the chicken against the sweetness of caramelised plantain is a flavour combination that defines Yaoundé as clearly as any landmark.

The Dja Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site that sprawls across more than five thousand square kilometres of near-unbroken lowland rainforest in Cameroon's southeast, is one of the largest and least-visited protected tropical forests on the continent. A week-long safari here is not a drive-through affair. It is a full immersion, moving on foot along muddy trails where the air is so saturated with moisture and decomposing leaf litter that the smell alone tells you the forest is alive in every direction. Western lowland gorillas, forest elephants, and bongo antelope inhabit the reserve, though sightings depend on patience, silence, and the skill of Baka pygmy trackers who read bent stems and knuckle prints in the clay the way a typographer reads kerning. At night, the forest's acoustic architecture takes over: a layered drone of insects, the distant crack of a falling branch, and occasionally the eerie, rising whistle of a tree hyrax that sounds nothing like the small mammal producing it.