Boxing Day in Ekok: Money, Motorbikes, and an Unexpected Beer

Boxing Day 2025 – A Slow Start

Good day. Boxing Day 2025. I slept okay, which already felt like a good start. The policeman who had brought me to the hotel the night before told me he would come back in the morning to help me find a place to exchange my naira. After leaving this town, naira would be pretty useless.

I had assumed I wouldn’t be able to access any “real” money right away in Cameroon, and that turned out to be true. Fortunately, I had enough naira with me to exchange into Cameroonian currency.

Waiting and the Money Exchange

We hadn’t agreed on a specific time, so I waited around for a while. Around 10:00 a.m., he showed up on his motorbike. The place to exchange money wasn’t far.

I had a fair amount to change—close to a million naira. The exchange itself was simple, and I ended up with a much smaller stack of bills afterward, which was a very good thing.

Later on, I realized I had forgotten to exchange about 60,000 naira, which I took care of the following day.

An Unexpected Morning Stop

Back on the motorbike, he told me we needed to make one more stop, again not very far away. We ended up at a place where people were already drinking beer.

It was around 11:00 in the morning, and there were about ten to twelve people there. As it turned out, they were all policemen on their day off, and beer was very much the drink of choice.

It’s a warm country, and beer hits a little differently than it does in colder places. I was along for the ride, so I joined in and did my share.

Conversation was mostly in French, but we made it work. It was one of those moments that make travel interesting—definitely not something that happens every day.