12-Day Cameroon Culture and Rainforest Tour with Dja and Foumban

Fly into Douala, Cameroon's port and its loudest city, and meet the team at the airport. The rest of the day is intentionally soft after a long flight: a first drive through a city of markets, traffic, and rain-blackened concrete, and, if the light is right, the estuary at sunset, where Mount Cameroon rises out of the sea on the far horizon - the view that tells you what kind of country you have landed in.

Travel west along the coast to Limbe, an hour and a half away at the foot of Mount Cameroon. The Limbe Botanic Garden has been running since 1892 and is a good, shaded introduction to what grows here; the Limbe Wildlife Centre next door holds drills, chimpanzees, and gorillas recovered from the bushmeat trade and is the best-run conservation project on this coast.

The afternoon is for the black volcanic beaches at Down Beach and Seme, and grilled fish where the boats land.

A short drive and a walk through forest bring you to Bimbia, where the ruins of one of the busiest slave-trade departure points in this part of Africa sit almost unvisited: the barracoon foundations, the chained-together stones, and the path down to the water. It is a quiet, difficult, necessary morning.

In the afternoon, climb into the lower slopes of Mount Cameroon through old lava flows and tea estates for the view back down over the coast.

A long coastal transfer south, skirting Douala, brings you to Kribi, a small Atlantic town with the best beaches in the country and a great deal less noise than anywhere you have been so far. You arrive with the afternoon still in hand and go straight to the Lobé Falls, five kilometres down the coast, where the river drops across the rock shelf into the surf.

Dinner is fish on the beach, which is what Kribi is for.

Take a morning pirogue up the Lobé River above the falls, into forest where Bagyeli families live and fish, with time to walk and talk rather than photograph and leave.

In the afternoon, continue south to Ebodjé, a fishing village on a turtle-nesting coast where a community conservation project monitors the beaches; between November and February you may see nests, and out of season you will at least understand the work. Return to Kribi in the evening.

Head north-east away from the coast, through rubber and palm plantations and small roadside towns, to Cameroon's capital. Yaoundé is spread over seven hills, greener and calmer than Douala, and the afternoon takes in the National Museum in the old presidential palace - the best single explanation of the country's hundreds of cultures - and the view over the city from Mont Fébé before dinner.

This is a hard, interesting day east and then south on deteriorating road, past Ayos and the Nyong, into the forest belt and the village of Somalomo on the northern edge of the Dja Faunal Reserve. The last stretch is slow going.

You arrive in the afternoon, meet the reserve staff and the Baka guides who will take you in, and settle into simple guesthouse accommodation; this is the least comfortable night of the trip and the most interesting place you will sleep.

Spend the whole day inside the reserve. Travel by pirogue on the Dja itself, then continue for hours on foot with Baka trackers on trails that were not made for visitors: buttress roots the size of walls, hornbill calls overhead, elephant sign in the mud, and monkey troops moving through the canopy.

The Dja holds forest elephants, western lowland gorillas, and chimpanzees, but this is dense forest and it does not hand you sightings. What it gives you instead is the closest thing left to an intact Congo Basin rainforest, and people who read it like text.

The morning belongs to the Baka community: the forest pharmacy walk, the traps and the net hunt, and, if the mood is right, the polyphonic singing that anthropologists have been trying to notate for fifty years. This is arranged directly with the community and paid to it.

In the afternoon, start back west, breaking the drive at Ayos or Abóng-Mbang so the following day is not brutal.

Travel north-west out of the forest and up onto the western highlands, a change of climate from wet heat to cool green hills terraced with maize and coffee.

In the afternoon, visit the Bandjoun chefferie, one of the great living courts of the Grassfields, known for its carved wooden pillars, conical thatch, and beaten-earth courtyards. The museum beside it helps explain what you are seeing rather than leaving you to guess.

Travel east across the Noun to Foumban and the Bamoun court, unbroken since 1394. The royal palace of 1917 and the museum inside it hold the thrones, the beaded masks, and the manuscripts written in King Njoya's invented script; the newer Museum of the Bamoun Kings tells the dynasty's story in full.

The afternoon is for the artisans' quarter - bronze casters, carvers, embroiderers, the best craft street in Central Africa - and the Sultan's Friday court if the day falls right.

Make the long descent back to the coast, out of the highlands and down through the plantations to Douala, timed for an evening international departure. It is a full driving day and the journey is broken properly; if your flight is late enough, there is time for a last lunch and a shower before the airport.

Gabon or São Tomé can be added to either end of this route.