maps

Cameroon is a bit bigger geographically than California:
Cameroon: 183,568 sq mi/475,442 sq km
California: 158,302 sq mi/410,000 sq km

People seemed surprised by this when they asked about the trip. I think this is due to Cameroon's appearance on the map of Africa (see first post, or the the page title above for map). For an African country, Cameroon is not particularly large. And traditional maps understate the size of Africa.

Africa is about 11.7 million square miles/30.2m sq km. The US, in contrast, is about 3.8 million square miles/9.8m sq km. But if you look at them on a traditional Mercator projection world map, they look much closer in size; Africa looks about twice as big as the US:


In fact, Africa is too small by an entire US in this projection (which also positions the equator well below the middle of the map). You can see this if you look at a globe, or at a different projection, such as Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion map, where the globe is projected onto a polyhedron and then unfolded into two dimensions:


(Fuller was a pretty interesting guy, by the way, if you haven't heard of him. His map deliberately had no right way up, and shows all the world's landmasses connected.)

This map shows the relative sizes of the US and Africa much more accurately. The Sahara by itself is just about as big as the US, over 3.5 million sq mi/9m sq km.