So Nigeria is at an end, 4 weeks there. It flew by and I haven’t seen a thing. It's an incredible place, not the easiest travel for tourists but incredible nonetheless. It's super diverse, it's huge and it's well worth a visit. I can’t remember it all, nor do I want to write it all down, but there are some very special places we visited. One thing I can say about Nigeria is get in and hang on, its one hell of a ride!
Our leaving was an epic affair, driving down the road, enjoying the scenery…and then the tank fell out.
Yes, the tank and car parted in a most extravagant fashion. 170L beast of a tank, lying battered and broken 50m behind the car, gushing her expensive cargo onto the dusty ground. And what ensued can only be described as hilarious, semi-organized chaos. C-baz and Don in the other car made sure they got it all on camera, reversing and doing a drive by just to make sure they got a good angle of Greg trying to stop the flow and lift the 150kg tank. We decided to ditch the petrol in our Jerry cans and save the much more expensive, harder to come by diesel and so we needed to get rid of 60-80L of essence. It was brilliant, picture the scene, shirtless white guys racing around in the roads or rural Nigeria, stopping cars...”take petrol, take petrol”, “Need diesel, come get!” , we filled bikes, we filled cars, we filled bottles…It was like being a BP sponsored father Christmas. So from our 200 odd litres of fuel we had 60L of diesel saved and the rest is now powering the locals for a while. Better than letting it soak into the ground I’d say.
C-baz towed us in, the big beast of a car chugging effortlessly along over the potholes. And the team got into fix the car mode. Greg and C-baz got the tank welded and fixed the brackets. The tank is aluminium and so by welded I actually mean, heat a tent peg up until it melts, use a screwdriver to mush the ooze into the crack, cover the whole thing with epoxy and hope it holds. But hold it does, and is still holding so well done to that welder. He was a great guy, he took me off shopping for a new inlet pipe. I think that has been the highlight of my trip so far. On the back of a motorbike, in the pitch dark, racing around in the back roads of Nigeria, eyes streaming from dust, so tired of wiping them out that you let the bugs find their own way out of your eyeballs. The bike ducks and darts between potholes on strips of tar 6 inches wide, the headlight barely illuminating the front tyre…just way too much fun. 15km or so to the next town… lets go! He cranks open the throttle and we’re off. We negotiated for pieces of U-bend and pieces of conduit. I settled on an old piece of radiator piping which, with some duct tape and silicon made a perfect fit. The tank was ready to go by late the next morning, with some ratchet straps as reinforcing and cut pieces of rubber, we had our patch job ready for the 400km trip to Ougadougou, where we could get things fixed properly. Don had the bash plate hammered straightish, and off we went, cheers Nigeria!
What a blast Nigeria was, unexpected and so enjoyable! It’s a huge huge country and my four weeks were not nearly enough to appreciate the place fully. From the loud, in-your-face south to the quieter middle regions, Yoroba and Ibo gave way to Hausa and Fulani. People changed, dress changes, interactions change. The savannahs got drier and the ambiance changed., everything changed but all was good, all was friendly and all was enjoyable. I want to come back here; I want to go to Kano, the oldest city in Africa, and see the indigo cloth dying. I want to walk in the Northern Sahel with the Fulani people, stick across my back in a slow amble that is the only way to handle the midday heat. I want to see the shrinking lake Chad before its gone and play in the edges of the Sahara. These are things we did not get to, things I am yet to see. We did see some incredible sights, we experienced some incredible things. We were there during the Harmattan, the cool dusty wind that blows in from the Sahara and so you don’t see far, but there are some extravagant landscapes. The suddenness of Zuma rock, the belt of mountains running between Goma and Abuja. Hills, flats, forests, plains. Fish and peppers, star beers. Shouting cops, humble and friendly people. Market after market, villages and towns. What a trip! When people told me of Nigeria, I was told, corruption, crime and danger…. I suppose some of it may be true, but bar one man at Yankari I had an absolute blast. The rumours are unfair, don’t stay away come and see it. It’s not easy tourist travel, it’s not for a honeymoon, but it’s not supposed to be, hell I had fun.
As one man told me, when I questioned how he does things ; “This is Nigeria”…yes it certainly is, and thanks for the ride!
-Chris-
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