Being someone who loves travel, adventure and new experiences and living in bilingual country in West Africa called Cameroon with diverse cultures, tribes, languages and different foods, there is no better way to experience the world than to first explore your home to the fullest.
Let me rewind, I have many friends from different backgrounds with different life styles but they all have one thing in common, they love to live and spontaneously like to try weird things, experience new places, foods, spots, cultures and taking weird trips. It has always been easy for them because like they always say, the have me, their database. This has always been fun and it made me so proud that they looked up to me whenever they wanted to experience something new and deep down I also felt a little bit of pressure to never disappoint them, so, this pressure motivated me to always stay up to date with the best places to go to experience certain things.
This was all nice and fun until I moved to the economic capital called Douala of my country Cameroon, the one town I never particularly liked because it was always hot, noisy, busy and seemed dirty to me, so I never really explored it, until I had to move there temporarily for work. The first few weeks felt like hell, as a remote software engineer that I am, I spent most of my time in doors because I had not gathered the courage to face Douala. Every time I was with some of the new people I met in Douala, they always told me all the amazing places, foods and culture in Douala, so the pressure started building up again, for someone like me who loved exploration, for the first time I felt lost in own country, and started asking myself, what if my friends decided to visit me and I didn’t know where to go to give them the kind of experience they are used to having from me?
So, I decided to face Douala head on, it was also the biggest city in my country but I was determined to experience and bring out the best and worst of this strangely amazing city as it turned out to be, because it has all this beauty hidden beneath its crazy surface and share my brutally honest experience with the rest of the world and anyone interested in visiting my country and Douala in particular and thats how I joined the Google Local Guides, for no specific reason apart from helping people see my country through my eyes, making things and places easily accessible and it is also the best tool to share my experiences with the rest of the world and making sure no one ever have to go through the stress of finding things and places like i did.