Alphabet Travel

The plunge into Central Africa brought us to a string of exotic-sounding places I’d never heard of in my life; places like Oyem, Ndjole, Lambarene, N’dende, Mila-mila, M’banza Kongo,Benguela and Lubango. The few that I had heard of – Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Luanda – did not fill my heart with delight, though there was a little buzz, a small flush of excitement, connected with each, because they seemed like cities of the imagination, places that had seen hard times, were or had been hard to live in, and were visited only by intrepid explorers, coffee swilling journalists and wary expats. The sense of adventure was with us as we headed south, though for me it came with some sleepless nights.

Gabon was easy to travel through until we hit the equator, and the paved jungle road descended into red dust. As a country, it seemed less scruffy and more ‘together’ than Cameroon, with heavier price tags to match. Friendly locals in the border town had helped us get our orientation.

‘This is Gabon!’ exclaimed a young man selling biscuits.

‘This is a sandwich!’ grinned another man close by, waving it at us.

President Bongo had just passed away and Gabon was in an official mourning period that was just winding to a close, after which talk of succession could take place. Big posters on billboards showing Bongo’s image were everywhere. In the countryside and along the edge of the forests, one story wooden slat houses saw the usual rural activity played out around them. Goats grazed and sprung about, chickens pecked in ditches, clothes hung on lines and people headed out with baskets and machetes to harvest fruit while others worked around the home. New to us was the bush meat trade. Roadside trade extended beyond the usual piles of plantain here – over barrels, the occasional dead monkey was laid out for sale, and pangolins hung from wooden frames by their tails. In Oyem, our alphabet ‘O’, we found pangolin on a restaurant menu (‘You know!’ smiled the waiter, ‘the one that curls up into a ball!’) it was not tempting. Seth got a haircut in this town, in a tiny dark barbers full of mirrors and dusty football posters. It looked to me that the barber had accidentally given him a big round bald patch, and for twenty minutes I was genuinely worried. In daylight, however, the bald patch was gone, and what Seth was left with was a classic Kevin-Costner-in-The-Bodyguard cut. Preferable, I think, to a monk-from-The-Name-of-the-Rose cut.

The women in our minibus south to Ndjole spent much of the journey picking on a couple from Equatorial Guinea, because their incomplete paperwork kept slowing us down at police checks. The bad vibe seemed to rub off on the bus itself because the strap attaching all the luggage to the roof snapped and everything fell into the road. For an hour, the women directed their shouting at the bus boys as they attempted to reload, and we sat by the road enjoying the view of Gabon’s thick forests as large hornbills flew over it. A little boy joined us and we threw stones at targets. The cliché about travelling in Africa teaching you patience is absolutely true. I learned lots about patience last summer when walking such a long pilgrimage day by day, too. Hopefully, by September, I will be a patience wizard. The afternoon ticked on, the light began to change. I walked two hundred metres down the road, retrieved a fallen plantain, and brought it back, adding it to the pile for reloading. Finally we got back on
the road, and the scene became stunningly exotic, with the wide brown Ogooue River to our left and whole tunnels of lime green bamboo to pass under. In Ndjole, I bought popcorn from a man in the street with a very old fashioned popping machine, and we ate grilled chicken from a street stall, and drank cheap Regab beer. Everything and everyone in the town was bleached with red dust, and logging trucks roared through the dusty heart of the place. It was a strange town and our being there was strange, too, for the people living there: a double whammy of weirdness.
The same logging lorries that roared through Ndjole also nearly killed us numerous times on the road south to Lambarene. They swung round corners on the wrong side of the road and almost sent us flying into ditches several times. Our share-taxi driver mumbled his disapproval but generally lost himself to the reedy tones of Phil Collins, singing about paradise again, as he always has since we came to Africa. Lambarene, on the Oogue River, would have been a great place to stay, if both of us hadn’t gotten intense food poisoning. (You know it’s a bad place to eat lunch when you see a member of the kitchen staff sticking his finger up his nose to prod a spot, but by then our plates were clean…) Both of us lay hot then cold, green in the cheeks, exhausted from vomiting, in what was a nice hotel with a pleasant balcony we never really got to enjoy. We had chosen it because the guidebook said the owners demonstrated ‘some eccentric behaviour’, and we wanted to know exactly what that meant, but sadly we were too ill to find out and it will remain a mystery. Whenever I closed my eyes, all I could see was road and jungle coming at me, and somewhere echoing in my brain were remnants of the usual minibus songs, about Jehovah, and being covered in the blood of Jesus, and being in-ter-nash-eeo-nal.

The next day, weak and grumpy, we attempted to catch a bus south to the Congolese border. Unfortunately, the white Toyota pick-up truck heading that way already had a full cabin, and the back was half loaded with boxes and luggage. The remaining space – about one by two metres if I’m generous – was occupied by a crush of six people. There was room for two more, insisted the driver. It was not wise for two people who were sick and who had not eaten for 24 hours to ride for many hours on the edge of an overcrowded pickup truck but we climbed apprehensively on board. It was the filthiest journey to date. The woman across from me kept holding her head in her hands and muttering ‘never again’ in French. The bumps meant you had to hold on for dear life, and the rising dust from the red roads coated all of us until, at police checks, we were no longer recognisable against our passport pictures. How the cop kept a straight face while scrutinising so many bright orange faces is beyond me. If you closed your eyes, your eyelids grew so heavy with dust that it was actually hard to open them again. It was impossible not to swallow the stuff, too, when you spoke to someone or coughed. We arrived in N’dende looking like complete freaks, and checked into a motel at a petrol station. After washing away an ocean of orange dirt, it was beer time, and our empty stomachs, having shifted the bug, cried out for food. Crashed out in chairs in the motel bar, we laughed about the day, and a black dog strolled up to us to be petted. When I looked down, it was actually a chimpanzee. ‘Toto, no,’ called the waitress, and it scuttled off. Strange incidents like this are beginning to feel normal.

When it comes to police bribes and corruption, we had always expected central Africa to be the worst. In Nigeria, we didn’t pay a single bribe. Cameroon was bad for it, Gabon comparatively angelic, but northern Congo proved to be something else. Our first experience took the biscuit – or noodles, even. Barely had we stepped into little Ngongo, our very first Congolese town/village when the police had us opening up our bags, laying everything out, and talking them through each item in detail as their eyes shone covetously. It was like a television shopping channel, listening to Seth explaining his GPS while eyeballs goggled. One man was particularly taken by my small collection of Nigerian movies. In his head, they had his name blazoned across them in big letters.

‘These’, he wagged a finger at me, ‘are illegal. It’s illegal to bring them here!’ He was using the fake-stern manner, pulling the fake-stern face, that we have seen so many times on greedy officials out here. I used to do a lot of acting, and I see it as an art form, so when someone is ‘acting’ with me in real life, for the sake of manipulation, I see straight through it and it urks me. I get customers like this occasionally in the bookshop, who pretend to be angry about something to wangle a discount – the faux-huffing and puffing, like little dragons – you can spot it a mile off. It’s hammy. So this official was furrowing his brow at me, jabbing an accusing finger at my petite nollywood selection, and he was about as intimidating as a tuskless walrus in a sunhat, honking along to yellow submarine, but annoyingly these people do have the power to make things difficult for you. I brushed off his talk about the DVDs and continued to unpack when he ordered me to do so, being sure to wave my packs of sanitary towels and tampons in his face.

‘Keep calm,’ whispered Seth, recognising the classic Taurean temper beginning to reveal itself, ‘don’t get impatient with them!’

Meanwhile, the other policeman was very interested in our packs of noodles. ‘You just add hot water’, explained Seth. This will make me sound ridiculous, but the pack in question was my favourite flavour and I had spent some of the morning planning devouring them – cracking a raw egg on top, stirring it in, down the hatch – so when Seth made the (actually wise) decision to give them to the cop, I stood mortified for a moment,, long enough to make my official bark at me to start packing away the big mess they’d forced us to make in their office. It was necessary, too, to hand over a token note in a handshake before we were allowed to progress to the next office. (In Congo, you run the gauntlet of different divisions and at every layer you want to bury your wallet deep in your pocket.) In the second office, we ducked out of the bribe. In the third, we bought our visas, and the officer had no interest in lining his pocket. Ngongo was tiny, dusty and inhabited by more hens than people. We asked when the next vehicle would head south, expecting an answer like ‘3pm.’

‘It’ll be tomorrow morning, 5am’ was the response. This meant a whole afternoon and night in police-ville. The local hotel was a brick block of tiny rooms under one long corrugated iron roof. Cockerels strolled in and out of our room as we made a makeshift lunch, and when we ventured out into the town… village… we found it was only a hundred metres long. Beyond it lay deserted grasslands and dirt road. Walking a little way in the late afternoon light, it was hard to understand we had reached the Congo.

‘Don’t walk as far as the roundabout,’ warned the local kids, ‘there are ghosts.’ Congo’s civil war officially ended in 2003, but security in the country was still a bit patchy. Elections had just been held and the results were widely believed to have been rigged. Ahead of us down that dirt road lay a country with a difficult past, an edgy present and an unpredictable future. I was fairly sure that the only ghosts on the road were metaphorical, but perhaps that made them no less important to consider.

At half four in the morning a horn began to blast on the road outside our room. We both sat bolt upright as someone pounded on the door. For those who have seen the movie ‘Jeepers Creepers’ (scary, but ultimately let down by the hysterically unfrightening use of the namesake song as a recurring theme); remember the first scene, in which the two teenagers are chased by a crazy truck being driven wildly down the road by an insane demon, leaning on the horn, waaaaaap-waaaap? That truck was waiting for us on this particular morning. There was no time to wake up or even to think – we ran to the lorry, were ushered away from its crowded back and into the cabin, where we sat between mike, the angry yet likeable driver, and Joseph, the bespectacled maths teacher. The hours passed and night fused into day. Only after several police checks (and one bribe) did I realise I was wearing my adidas trousers around my neck. There hadn’t been time to pack them. At one stop, loading boys heaved crates of empty beer bottles onto the roof. As though the sight of so many empties offended him, mike cracked open a full bottle and slugged down the full 600ml. Somehow, it didn’t really matter. He and Joseph warmed to us, and enjoyed pointing out oddities along the way – Joseph in the precise detail suited to his profession, and Mike in his loud Jeepers Creepers style. He helped Seth get photos of some men selling a big hunk of gazelle, and then bought it. Later he pulled over and bought a dead monkey. I watched him inspecting the quality of its sad hands in the wing mirror. Close to the town of mila-mila the scene suddenly became one of grassy mounds, very spectacular. We waved goodbye to Mike and Joseph, and looked for onward transport to Pointe-noire – our planned ‘P’ – in this tiny junction town. It lay 181 kilometres away. The policeman who checked our passports told us it would be a ride of two hours, maybe three. It sounded easy, but the town was full of people huddled in bars looking slightly dusty – not a good sign. Their luggage – typically dotted with great branches of plantains – lay by the road with half-arsed plastic covers draped across it. It had obviously been there for some time.

‘How long have you been here?’ Seth asked a tired looking workman nursing a beer.

‘Since yesterday’ was the reply. It seemed like nobody in these bars was that set on actually reaching Pointe-Noire. They’d given up. There was no public transport – the only chance you had was hitching a lift in or on a lorry, and these guys had too much luggage to squeeze into a cabin. Someone knew someone who might be leaving for P-N that afternoon. The lorry depot was a kilometre away, they could give us a lift. We agreed. Mila-mila was too depressing to hang out in, and we told ourselves we weren’t queue jumping because nobody had seemed remotely animated to get up and go. It was a logging company, and our ride would be a huge lorry loaded down with huge tree trunks. A price was debated over and the driver readied the vehicle. We waited. And waited. A kitten fell asleep on Seth’s bag and we talked with a local nurse. Kids with mad hairdos ran around while women prepared pastry puff-puffs. Finally Seth said to me: ‘Why are you wearing your trousers around your neck?’

‘It’s been that kind of day,’ I said.

It was an hour and a half before we climbed up into the cabin and hit the jungle road. The excitement of leaving in the lorry wore thin when it became clear that it could travel no faster than a trotting warthog. It had severe problems with hills and even the smoothest parts of the rough jungle roads threw the driver into overly-cautious concentration. Bafflingly, other lorries with identical loads roared by and sped into the distance, leaving us in clouds of red dust. Moussa, the driver, was a good guy, but we worried – with all the scenic twists and turns in the road, we seemed to be covering no distance at all, and we were moving as fast as a drunken slug. Pushed to explain our situation, Moussa told us that while most other lorries had ten cylinders, we had eight. While they could race downhill in third gear, we had to do so in first. Hours past. Each time we hit a pothole, we flew out of our seats. Sunset approached. P-N was virtually no closer than it had been when we set out many hours before. Moussa pulled up beside a truckers stop next to the Mayoume Forest. It was a lovely area, where patches of dark green forest filled the clefts in the valley, but the idea of sleeping over in an all-male truck stop in the middle of the Congo worried me. Nobody had said anything about overnighting in the middle of nowhere. It felt like a curveball I wasn’t quite ready to catch. Moussa reassured me that there were women here, and as we walked into the fire lit compound, I was relieved to see one or two of them, their faces lit up orange. A simple wooden hut was available for us. It had a sand floor and we had goats for neighbours. You locked the door from the inside using two big sticks and the bed was a bamboo frame with a thin mattress. From the small supply shop we bought a drink for Moussa, and pilchards, beer and luncheon meat for ourselves, which we ate by the light of a kerosene lamp. (The pilchards were mine. Too many crunchy spines…)

At dawn, the three of us returned to the lorry. Surveying the huge load as the sun rose over it, it looked almost appealing. We drove ALL DAY. I thought several times about the policeman’s claim that it would take just two or three hours. There were times when the GPS thought we were actually getting further away from Pointe-Noire. For some reason it didn’t matter and we even laughed about it. Sometimes potholes almost sent the three of us through the roof. It was sunset when we reached the coastal city. The two hours had in fact been 26. There was a sense of awesome release on hopping into a taxi, but it was short lived. Seth and the driver conducted an animated conversation in French that did not sound at all promising. I kept hearing the words ‘train’, ‘ninjas’ and ‘probleme.’ The ninjas, I knew, were a militant group. We had already discovered the crazily bad roads in Southern Congo (deliberate neglect, we were told, a political statement from a government that looked north) and had been counting on riding the train east to the capital, Brazzaville, from where to cross into the DRC. If we couldn’t take the train, we were in trouble. I looked out of the window. Our guidebook called the city Congo’s answer to a beach resort, but we never saw the sea, and the streets were covered in grey sand. Alleyways were piled high with rubbish, and pubs had great paintings outside – gorillas, crocodiles, mirrors in the shape of the Eiffel tower. Trucks carrying soldiers with huge guns rumbled past. Our hotel was bustling with wealthy Africans, and the occasional Chinese visitor, here to see family working on the national highway or near the oil plants. The Simpsons was on TV in French. We took a room and Seth translated the conversation from the cab: the train is unsafe to travel on, as it passes through the dangerous Pool region before reaching Brazzavillle. In Pool, the police have to get off the train and the Ninjas get on to hassle the travellers a little. As foreigners with valuable gear, we’d almost certainly be robbed of everything we owned, should the militia feel that way inclined. As for our physical safety, it could not be guaranteed or guessed at.

‘Perhaps the driver was exaggerating’, said Seth, ‘a lady in the lobby said she might be able to arrange an armed guard for us…’

I was not feeling inspired by any of this. The next day we went to the train station and asked the situation. They confirmed that the ninjas did indeed take over the train at Pool, and that we would be likely targets. Sassou had only been re-elected a week ago and tensions were high in the country.

‘Maybe we could hire a 4 by 4,’ I suggested, though totally unconvinced, ‘there’s still the road.’

We asked our hotel manager about it. He said that to avoid the Pool region we would have to drive all the way up to north Congo then all the way down again; days…probably weeks… He held our shoulders.

‘You are young people, with long lives ahead. These people don’t value human life. They are bad, bad people – like animals.’ We knew we had to fly. Seth cursed our map, and then our chosen route through Gabon to Ngongo, but if fate puts a bunch of crazed rebels in your path, what can you do? The next day, when we flew to Brazzaville, President Sassou was flying to Pointe-Noire. Both airports were braced for him, the armed soldiers more serious looking than ever. Politics seemed to lace life in central Africa, even in the eyes of the fly-by traveller. The flight instilled in both of us a sense of numbness. We had travelled on public transport from Morocco to Congo, and now had to break our aeroplane virginity, against our wishes. It was only a domestic flight. This distance was just 350km. We didn’t have a choice but it felt like a failure at the time. In likeable Brazzaville, even after beer and Chinese food, I felt a bit broken. Part of me thought we may as well be done with it and fly to Johannesburg, and explore southern Africa from there. Why risk travel in the DRC and the uncertainty of trying for an Angolan visa, when we could just fly? In honesty, what I was experiencing was pure nerves. We planned to cross the Congo River to Kinshasa, DRC, the next morning. I’m not a brave person. It’s a common misconception that those who travel to unlikely places are. Like most people, I get a little high from risk taking when it works out, sure, but I don’t much trust that part of myself – it’s a bit tacky, like the cheap, brief thrill you get on a rollercoaster. I don’t travel to take risks or to boast of it; I travel because the world is amazing and I like to be as much in it as possible. In many ways I am still a total softy, and so that night, I didn’t sleep. I was awake all night – seriously – worrying about Kinshasa. We never wanted to have to fly at any point between Morocco and South Africa, but the unpredictable stability of certain African countries meant that we would probably have to at some point. We were lucky it was just a domestic flight, and it in no way tarnished the efforts we had made with public transport all the way down. The coward in me now wanted to fly to Joburg, to skip the DRC and the potential Angola hassle, and to find myself instantly in sunny South Africa. But at sunrise Seth woke up, and he’s braver than me. The wheels began to set in motion, towards the Congo River, where from the banks we could see, on the far side, the city skyline I had dreaded all night.

Behind a driver in a floppy white hat, and in the company of about sixteen Nigerians and Beninois, we cruised into the huge country that had occupied our thoughts and governed our plans for some time now. It was no joyride, this first journey into Nigeria. The intense prayers led by passengers on every bus that we took (‘dear lord, protect us from the blood-sucking demons on the highway’) showed how every journey undertaken was laden with a certain sense of vulnerability and danger.
Smurf-hat had to pull the minibus over at every police check we came to, and we trooped off board to sweet-talk the officials, shuffle our way out of any bribes, and have our details entered again, and again, and again, in ledgers—the type of ledgers with mottled covers, and a box to write your school class in. These always have canvas binding, and are piled on top of one another, gathering dust and never read. We had seen these ledgers on hundreds of African desks.
The best way to deal with hints for bribes was to smile and make noises about ‘next time’, or have a little joke. In fact, we never paid a single bribe in Nigeria, despite what we had heard and read. (Not so for our various drivers, who seemed to be giving handouts every few kilometres. The road rule seemed to be that you drive as quick as you can, with your eyes forward, and you stop only when the police force you to.)
The police were often young and un-uniformed, and an intimidating sight at first, pushing out great slabs of wood covered in sharp nails to block our way. When older, smarter, uniformed police, scrutinising our passports with lofty seriousness, hinted for bribes, I found it even more galling. But with the exception of one sexist idiot near the Cameroon border, the Nigerian officials that we met were generally friendly types, fans of English football, and protectors of the road against criminal elements. Better to meet a cop with itchy palms than a mugger with a gun.
The passengers on our bus did not complain once about our presence holding them up, but all of us let out an alarmed cry when the boot popped open, and our bags shot out into the road. The thud, and crunch, and the collecting of the fallen baggage had me shaking my head and whispering to Seth, ‘that’s it for my Gameboy’…
We changed buses at Abeokuta, a town with such insane potholes that locals had filled some in themselves, and were collecting tips for their troubles. There was thick green forest along the roadside as soon as we left town, and I appreciatively watched it roll by until the colour of the sky beyond began to distract me. In seemingly no time, a pale Simpsons-blue sky became a charcoal-grey ominous haze. I nudged the narcoleptic Seth awake to see the drama of the grey cloak behind the palms, and quickly the light rain became torrential, a storm so dramatic I felt as though I’d necked a few absinthe. Lightning swung across the sky in great jagged swathes of blue-to-peach-to-white, and the hairs on my arms stood up. The streaks seemed to actually cross each other, which I’d never seen before. A silence fell over the passengers, and Seth looked both awake and disturbed. The storm leapt around us for what seemed an eternity. The boot of the bus had been crammed full, and tied in a semi-open position with ropes. Consequently, our bags—already bruised from their earlier fall—were now soaked. They were a sorry sight when we hauled them on our shoulders in Ibadan, running through the rain for a cab. It had been a mind-blowing day—one share-taxi, two motorbike rides, two minibuses, seven police checks, and one f***-off storm, and we had reached our first destination. Understandably we chose a hotel that was relatively fancy (the price tag hefty by local standards, not so much so from the European perspective) and it took our cabbie about an hour to get us there, through streets like small rivers, and narrow roads jammed with beeping wet traffic. It was worth splashing out—the hotel was anonymous, a flock of falcons lived on the roof, and our balcony looked out over a sea of banana-yellow buildings, their roofs terracotta-coloured, the city rising in little peaks (Ibadan means seven hills).
The Premier had a Chinese restaurant attached. There are few places in the world where I am happier than seated in a Chinese restaurant. The Golden Dragon was having some kind of refurbishment which meant that, though the kitchen was fully functioning, diners were requested to take tables upstairs in an empty neon nightclub, which smelled of stale beer. It was excellently surreal and seedy. Authentic jiaozi and my first cigarette in a month. ‘What a day’, said Seth, for the fourth time. We both had bags below our eyes that made us look like thugs (in Central Africa this would be a permanent look).
When applying for Nigerian visas—an angsty experience my previous blogs have dwelled on—you need an invitation from a Nigerian citizen, and the father of one of Seth’s work colleagues had very kindly obliged. We had hoped to meet and thank Professor Akande, while in his home town of Ibadan, and were really lucky that he, his wife (also a professor), and brother-in-law not only met with us, but showed us around the city, in particular Ibadan’s impressive university, where the Profs. had studied and later worked. They even invited us home with them, and had us to stay for the night. Their touching hospitality is a favourite moment from our journey. There are not many ‘homely moments’ on a transcontinental trip, but eating fish pancakes in front of the television with the Akandes, surrounded by their family photos, I felt very lucky, and thought fondly of my family.
Nigeria is huge, and we had begun to worry about time. With fourteen letters still to go, and the intention of reaching South Africa, we still had a lot of continent to cross. Thus, instead of journeying north to such places as Abuja, Kano, and Yankari National Park, we decided to stay south, to cut across the country where it was ‘narrowest’—still a 700km trip. The natural mid-way point was Benin City. The streets there were thronging. A simple quest to buy mosquito coils became a full-on assault on the senses, vendors on all sides inviting us to buy t-shirts/shoes/fresh fruit/batteries, and child beggars running at our sides, distracting us as we tried to cross roads heaving with speeding traffic. (‘Please stop!’ I said, finally, ‘it’s too dangerous!’) The historic brass-casting street the city is famous for was, at the time we visited, little more than a row of shops manned by sleepy-looking sales assistants. Any interesting work going on there must have been behind closed doors, or perhaps artisans were taking a break from the midday heat. An unexplainable profusion of young men, and a host of young women dressed in noticeably revealing tight clothes, in an otherwise fairly vacant hotel, hinted at the possibility that it doubled as a brothel. An abandoned pair of trousers, pants, and shoes in the corridor as good as confirmed it. We took refuge in our room, and watched the kind of movie you only ever see while travelling, the hysterical ‘Madonna: Innocence Lost’.
Choosing the southern route through Nigeria had one major flaw, from a foreign traveller’s perspective: the proximity of the delta region, an area now famous for the kidnapping of western oil workers by rebel militias, angry with the unfair exploitation of local resources by multinational oil companies and the government (the huge wealth generated doesn’t seem to benefit the people living in the region). One man had just been released after many months being held captive. In his description of the ordeal, he was keen to point out that for much of his imprisonment he had been cared for by local villagers, and they had been kind to him. The situation is far more complicated than two passers-by can guess at, but it certainly seemed that the locals had a rough deal in the delta, and I could understand why rebel groups had formed, however questionable their methods. This did not make the very real prospect of being kidnapped appealing, however. No use writing ‘we are not oil workers’ on our foreheads in magic marker pen. Travellers don’t really come to Nigeria. We never met anyone there doing what we were doing. Other westerners were expats, oil workers, and volunteers. In any case, our white skin would be enough to suggest the possibility of landing a fat ransom. The whole region was unsafe for us, and absolutely had to be avoided. We needed to reach the city of Calabar, in Nigeria’s southernmost corner, and in the pretty state of Cross River. There we could buy our visas for Cameroon. The question was, which route would our minibus take? We looked at the map, desperately hoping that the delta region could be avoided. If the bus travelled directly east, to the town of Enugu, then continued that way before plunging south to Calabar, it looked like we could skip the delta, and its dangerous hub, Port Harcourt. It seemed a fairly likely route. However, I’d had a conversation with our cab driver, Billy, the previous day, a disconcerting part of which went:
Me: Is this your home town, Benin City?
Billy: No, no, I’m from Delta State. It’s very nice—you’ll pass through tomorrow on the bus.
Me: …. Erm, yes! That’s great, that would be… great…
We got up at six to catch the seven a.m. bus. We shouldn’t have, it left at nine. Bleary-eyed, I asked the man who sold the tickets, ‘you take the Enugu route, don’t you? East and then south?’ He vaguely agreed and wandered off. We took back seats, and somebody made the usual prayer about blood-sucking demons on the highway, and then we were off. Seth got out the GPS, and started frowning at it. ‘Looks like we’re heading a little south… Not east…’ Fate, I thought, is going to have to look after this. (A day later we read the BBC news online, and discovered that in a town just 90km south of Benin City, the army had conducted an armed raid on suspected militia, and sent hundreds of villagers fleeing in a panicked exile.)
The road wobbled in a general eastern direction, much to my satisfaction, but then came the unexpected road sign, ‘You are now entering Delta State.’ We glanced at each other. Soon after, the bus stopped for a typical police check.
‘They are watching you,’ said an officer with a huge rifle, in a chillingly prophetic manner, wagging a finger at us, ‘the militants – they will take you.’
‘We’re not going to Port Harcourt’, I stammered, ‘we’re going to Calabar.’ (Just as well. The Bradt guidebook, in its usefully detailed delta warning section, mentioned how the army and rebels fought each other, armed and on motorbikes, in Port Harcourt’s streets. The image in my head fell somewhere between Disney’s Tron and Aditya Chopra’s biker movie Dhoom, though in reality I guess it would be less colourful, more dangerous and missing the song and dance scenes…)
‘There are militants in Calabar’, was the officer’s response.
‘No there aren’t!’ scoffed a tall, confident male passenger, and everyone started laughing. We joined in, though our giggling was decidedly more manic, laced with the nervous edge of ensuing madness. Back on board, I slid low in my seat, pulled my sleeves down, pulled my hood up. The sign ‘You are exiting Delta State’ was cheering, but was followed by the crossing of a magnificent river. It could only be the Niger. I couldn’t help but smile; we had seen it last in Gao, Mali, backed by Saharan Dunes, the water low. Now here it was, gushing through Nigeria, a month and a half and so many miles later. Another sign – ‘Welcome to Delta State’ – Damn!
The ticket seller had been wrong about the route. From Onitsha, we did not continue east long the road to Enugu, but plunged diagonally south-east on a country road. An air of resigned acceptance fell over us. We were out of control of this now and had to ride the wave. The road became narrow, the trees on either side dense and green, giving way to small villages where hens pecked around in the dust. It did not feel at all threatening. I could only hope that we would not divert to Port Harcourt to drop off passengers, and my hopes were entertained; we came as close as 90km from the dreaded oil hub, and rolled on eastward. (This was an especially big relief because I had just read about the militia’s use of rocket launchers.) It was just before dusk when we arrived in Calabar, Cross River State, the delta long behind us. We had only really skirted its edges, but the Star beer that evening went down particularly well.
Calabar was a nice city. You travel everywhere on okada (motorbike taxis), with the obligatory blue helmet on your head. (I’d read an article about Nigerians using calabash shells as bike helmets and was disappointed not to see any in use, or wear one – even better!) (How come BBC articles about Nigeria are so sensationalist anyway? Never saw any goats getting arrested for being car thieves either.) There were two excellent primate conservation centres in town, looking after rescued chimps, drills and various monkeys. There was a rather yawnsome museum but in it I found a sketch or lithograph of Princess Town fort (where we had slept back in Ghana) in 1670. It had not changed much. But Calabar’s best spot was in the Botanical Gardens around sunset, less for the flora and more for the ambience. People strolled, and ate suya (grilled meat) and bbq fish, and everyone lounged around on plastic garden furniture, looking at the sky as it turned pink behind the palms, and listening to the same old music we’d heard all over Africa -‘ Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh, why d’you have to go-oh, away from ho-ome, mi love?’
A really intelligent and interesting guy called Innocent had issued our Cameroonian visas, and we planned to head north to the border, stopping first at the Afi Mountain Drill Ranch on the edge of a stunning national park. Drills are awesome monkeys. The females and babies look like delicate, posh versions of baboons, and the huge males have shiny black faces, as dark and shiny as liquorice, as well as bright pink and purple butts. They only live in Nigeria and Cameroon, and are in serious threat from hunting. Pandrillus, one of Calabar’s primate conservation centres, also ran this ranch, where groups of rescued drills (as well as chimps) were kept in huge, wild enclosures full of tall trees and even streams. It was less that the monkeys had ‘a cage’, more like their own slice of forest, protected by a fence and poacher-free. We arrived with supplies of instant noodles and coffee, and spent a few days accompanying staff to watch feeding times, and walking through the forest to swim at small waterfalls. These were awesome days. The people working on such projects are invariably good, gentle types, and the camp had a tranquil, laid-back atmosphere, the resident parrot keeping an interested eye on our noodle cooking, and a pair of rescued Cameroonian mongeese visiting the scene from time to time. Seth took great photos, hoping Pandrillus may find them useful on their website and for promoting their work. He had a favourite chimp, Pie, whom he photographed with all the verve of an artist painting a muse. Pablo, a big chimp from Equatorial Guinea with grey fur, was another favourite, because of his habit of reclining with crossed legs, though at feeding time his shrieks sent a chill through you (a return to that opening scene in A Space Odyssey…) Another resourceful chimp stored up fruit and made sudden runs towards the fence, lobbing it at us. Twice I was almost knocked out by flying papayas. You had to admire the audacity. The drills, you could watch for hours. My favourite was Star and Stripes, a grumpy male with a habit of clapping his hands. He was a master of the classic drill warning to strangers; the mini-lunge and eyebrow wiggle. I was on the receiving end of this attitude when Seth called me over to the other side of the enclosure:
‘Look, Louie!’ said Seth, ‘This drill has a tiny baby!’
‘It looks like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love’, I concluded. It really did.
On our last night at Afi, some thieves snuck into camp and tried to steal some tools, including a chainsaw. There was much late night walky-talky action, the roaring of bikes, the arrival of security men with guns. For drama, however, our journey from Calabar to Ikom – the journey we had taken before coming to the drill ranch – could not be beaten.
As usual, we had climbed aboard the minibus. As usual, someone made the prayer about protecting us all from blood sucking demons on the highway. A young lady with a baby sang a Christian song as we drove out of Calabar and her voice was beautiful. The lady next to me was upset that the conductor had overcrowded the bus.
‘That’s why I don’t like to travel with this company, ‘ she sighed, as I helped her squeeze her bag of crockery under our seat.
Soon there was a police check. Seth was sat a few rows in front of me, and I heard the cop make a comment to the driver which sent a rippling giggle through the bus. The lady next to me explained;
‘He’s asking the driver, ‘did you kidnap this white man?’ ‘
Much laughter all around. The lady shared her packet of fresh peanuts with me, and chatted to a Malian man next to her who was heading to Cameroon. It was a normal, pleasant atmosphere. Then:
Suddenly, two or three young men, ununiformed, were arguing with our driver. It was getting heated. Passengers started shouting their opinions.
‘We have tried to be reasonable with you!’ announced one of the young men, and there was a sudden hissing – a tyre deflating.
In a fit of anger, one of the passengers at the front of the bus switched seats with the driver, took the wheel and stepped on the gas. The bus lurched off, the men at the window grabbing on tight and running alongside it, their feet just inches from the spinning wheels. Was all this for a bribe? Were they hijacking the bus? Cries of alarm from the passengers. One of the men outside leaned in and grabbed the wheel. After fifty metres of wrestling (and punching), the bus swung off the road and down a steep slope, towards some trees. Sharp intakes of breaths and screams from the passengers. My heart was in my throat, everything felt electric and vivid. The man who had grabbed the wheel fell down against the bus, and that he wasn’t run over is still amazing to me. We screeched to an emergency halt. We all climbed out, shook up, and a huge argument began by the roadside. An important looking man in a pinstriped suit pulled his car over and asked if we needed help. He was soon in the crowded debate. Seth and I stood a little way off, with a few other passengers who also wanted to stay out of the fight. We considered grabbing our bags and hitching a ride the hell out of there, but in seconds, the eruption was over, the driver returned to the wheel, the passengers filed back on board. A lively young woman gave off a victorious war cry as the idiot men who had stopped us, let air out of our tyre, driven us off the road and almost killed us, slunk off, bruised, in the direction they had come from.
‘See what human beings can do?’ said the girl with the baby, who had sung the Christian song.
The war-cry girl seemed upbeat after the drama, and returned happily to her spy novel. The lady next to me quietly took her seat, pulled a pocket-sized bible from her handbag and began to read. The Malian man beside her produced a pocket-sized Quran and did the same. I sat in a daze, wondering what the hell had just happened to us all. The lowdown is as such:
There are different transport unions for different parts of Nigeria. Our bus and driver had been from the Calabar union, and he had broken an Ikom union rule by dropping a passenger off at a ‘non-designated dropping point’ before 6pm. Big deal, right? Like it even mattered. It seems the guys who had hassled our driver were Ikom union men, gunning for a pay-off, and making noise about detaining our driver for breaking the road rules. They thought if they made enough noise about it, he would give in and hand over some money. The passengers were angry because Nigerians are generally sick of being taken advantage of by greedy money gougers, and corruption is a real problem there. Bribes to police were one thing – some people even thought of them as tips for keeping bandits off the roads, in the daytime at least – but these union guys were just plain devious, and, as we found out, perfectly willing to risk their own legs and all of our lives in a bizarre show of machismo-meets- greed- meets-insanity. They didn’t slash our tyre but went to work on letting the air out, which is when the angry, proud passenger, sick of the situation, took the wheel and drove us away in a burst of frustration. The union guys then clung on, grabbed the wheel, and ran us off the road. The situation only calmed, we think, because the man who pulled over in the pinstriped suit was some kind of important authority figure.
So, as you can imagine, it was another one of those nights when we felt we’d earned a beer.
That was on the way to Afi. Now we were leaving. The ranch staff arranged for two motorbike taxis to pick us up, drive us along the hilly dirt road through the jungle and local villages, and drop us at the main road. It was the best ride yet, high speed beneath a hot sun, racing up and down hills and round corners, and leaving our stomachs behind at every turn. At the junction, I was elated -
‘That was the best! Amazing! Like a rollercoaster!’
Seth looked green, and was grimacing, clutching his butt; ‘That was the worst motorbike trip ever. I think I might have broken my coccyx.’
We flagged down a share taxi. It was not possible to put our bags in the boot because it was full of dogs. The cage full of canines was unloaded onto a wheelbarrow at a town near Ikom, several sets of sad eyes glancing out as they were rolled away into suburbia. As in some other places in the world, there are some folks in Nigeria who consider dog meat a special treat. It depressed me here as it did in Vietnam and South Korea, but what can you do? Get too judgemental and you quickly see the many ways in which you become a hypocrite.
Our Nigeria days were unforgettable, each one injected with life and never predictable. Despite any blood sucking demons, we both came away with a really positive impression of the people and a strong urge to return some day and see more. There was a sense that you would learn a lot about Africa by staying six months just in this one country. The momentum our travel had gained, and the new level of intensity, we hoped would carry over across the border into Cameroon.