KamerunA Buea outfit that grew into a national one.
We started in 2011 with one guide, one borrowed pickup and the mountain. Fifteen years later there are eleven guides, four vehicles, two offices and eleven circuits — but the mountain is still where every new guide is trained, and every one of them comes from the regions they work in.
The mountain taught us how to run everything else.
Anyone can put a traveller in a vehicle. Getting eight people up a four-thousand-metre volcano and back down without incident, in weather that changes in twenty minutes, is a different discipline — and it is the one this company was built on.
The first departures were mountain treks booked in person at the Mount CEO office in Molyko, mostly for volunteers and teachers already living in Buea. Word travelled faster than we could keep up with, and by 2014 we were being asked for the coast, then the Ring Road, then the north.
Everything we learned on the hill went into the rest: written itineraries with the hard days marked as hard, a fixed turnaround time rather than a summit at all costs, radios and a medical kit on every departure, and a rule that the group moves at the pace of its slowest member.
We opened the Douala office in 2017 because international travellers land there and want to meet somebody before they hand over a deposit. Buea remains the operations base. If you telephone on a Saturday afternoon, that is where somebody will answer.
Fifteen years, in the order they happened.
The short version, without the seasons where nothing much changed.
First circuit out of Buea
Registered as a guiding partnership working through the Mount Cameroon Ecotourism Organisation. Fourteen departures in the first season, all of them the three-day summit route.
The coast added, and the first vehicle
A second-hand Land Cruiser and the Limbe–Kribi run. The first circuit that did not involve walking uphill, and immediately the most booked.
Class A tour operator licence
Licensed by the Ministry of Tourism and Leisure, which brought insurance obligations, an audited client account and an inspection we now pass every year in February.
Douala office opens in Bonapriso
A room with a desk and a kettle, ten minutes from the airport road, so arriving travellers have somewhere to sit down and a person to shake hands with.
A year with almost no travellers
We kept all eleven guides on a retainer through the closure by running domestic weekend departures for Cameroonian families at cost. Several of those families still book with us every dry season.
The northern loop reopens
Bénoué and Waza brought back into the programme after a four-year suspension, with a revised security review that we now repeat every month.
Every guide is from the region they walk you through.
All eleven hold the Mount CEO guiding certificate and a current first-aid qualification renewed every two years. Six are also registered park guides with MINFOF, which is what allows walking inside Bénoué and Korup.
Grew up at Bokwango on the mountain's south flank and has been to the summit more than three hundred times. Sets the turnaround times and trains every new guide on the hill before they take a group anywhere else.
Trained as a park ranger at Korup before joining us. Reads the forest floor for drill and elephant sign, knows the camp keepers by name, and carries the leech socks nobody believes they will need.
Fulfulde, French and English. Runs the Bénoué–Waza loop, handles the park service and the checkpoints, and is the reason a nine-day northern circuit feels like an easy one.
Three per cent of turnover, and the rotation we did not invent.
The guide and porter rotation on Mount Cameroon exists so that the work moves fairly between Bokwango, Bonakanda, Mapanja and the other mountain villages. We work inside it rather than around it, which occasionally means you do not get the guide you asked for by name, and we think that is the correct trade.
- Village fundThree per cent of turnover, allocated by the four village committeesSince 2016
- Trail workTwo maintenance weeks a year on the Guinness route, paid at guide rateJun & Sep
- Korup patrolsCamp fees fund ranger patrols in the Mana and Rengo sectorsVia MINFOF
- No single-use plasticFiltered refills in every vehicle; all mountain waste carried downSince 2019
- Guide trainingTwo funded certificate places a year for candidates from the villagesAnnual
Ask us anything before you commit a franc.
Licensing, insurance, who exactly will be driving, what happens if somebody turns an ankle at 3,000 metres — these are reasonable questions and we would rather answer them now than on day two.
- Licence
- MINTOUL 0412/AG/19, Class A tour operator
- Insurance
- Public liability and passenger cover, certificates on request
- Guides
- Mount CEO certified, first aid renewed every two years
- Written
- bonjour@kamerun.cm