Beautiful Cameroon could be all of Africa in one country. There are savanna in the north, dotted with Sugar Loaf-like granite rocks (where a few lions still manage to roam), mountains in the central regions and palm-fringed beaches backed by tropical rain forests in the south, towered by the iconic silhouette of 4000m high Mount Cameroon. My business first took me to Yaoundé, a capital which for me felt like in the middle of Cameroon‘s nowhere. In this peaceful but unassuming town, strange of all things,  I was stripped of my watch by some otherwise very kind locals, the only robbery in my entire travel career.

From Yaoundé I timelessly went to the steaming metropolis of Douala (with a fancy restaurant called “bratwurst”, probably as a “tribute” that Cameroon was part of the German colonial empire. Africa may sometimes pose enormous challenges for entrepreneurs. But wherever I went on my favorite continent, breweries always shine and function. Understandably, they are too important to fail. I stayed overnight at the traditional Seaman Mission and remember that I was wondering whether becoming a seafarer would have been a career choice option. Without the work of the seafarers, my and many lives would be different and less pleasant, for sure.

On this visit in 2006, northern Cameroon already had become a no-go-area thanks to the plague of Boko Haram. But in those days I could at least visit the beautiful beaches of Limbe Where I had a wonderful chillout weekend with the added pleasure of consuming Cameroon Fan Shrimp. They were so good and so abundant – it’s no accident that Cameroon’s name in Portuguese is Camarões! Nowadays even Limbe seems to be out of bounds due to the conflict between Anglophone separatists and the Cameroon Armed Forces. A Cameroonian friend asked what I would do if my president spend more time in Switzerland than trying to solve problems at home?