2017. április 15. írta: Zsuzsi és Tekergő

Nigeria - a pleasant surprise

You are gonna die in 5 minutes –

These were the encouraging words of a Hungarian visa applicant at the Nigerian embassy who happens to have been living and working in Nigeria for years. Admittedly, Nigeria was one of the high-risk country in our itinerary. On the North East the Boko Haram is still very heavily engaged in kidnapping and suicide attacks; on the South, the workers of the petrol companies are way too often kidnapped; clashes between the different ethnicities, tribes are an everyday issue; finally, plenty of corrupt checkpoints make the trip through Nigeria a nightmare. To be honest, we did not make life easy for ourselves, either: a wonderful smartphone application called MySafeTravel warned several times a day about conflicts leading to beheadings, lynching, of bomb attacks and bloody military interventions in Nigeria while we were on the way there. (To be honest, we kept frustrating ourselves in Nigeria also when we checked the daily route before us on the internet, and Google informed us of the deadly accidents of the last few days or, for example, that four members of the local council were just kidnapped in pure daylight, quite close to our route.)

There is no real alternative to crossing Nigeria, though: Niger on the North is even more infamous for kidnapping and terrorism, and the ocean would stop us on the South. No surprise, we had only one plan for Nigeria: driving through, as quickly as possible. Even so, we were edgy when we entered Nigeria.

Five minutes after border crossing all the fear and prejudice seemed to have been justified. A barrier full of nails was pushed before the car and a bunch of civil clothed young men were rushing toward us, one of them demanding money. We never learnt if we were almost mugged or that is the Nigerian way of taking road tolls: when we were too close to the roadblock the guy in charge pulled back the barrier confused and we managed to escape without really stopping. 2 minutes later, same same but different: barrier with nails, civil clothed young men, BUT one of them with an automatic rifle. To be honest, at that moment we were really scared that the “prophecy” comes true: in a bit more than five minutes in Nigeria we are getting mugged at gunpoint or what. It turned out that this is only a combined military and national security checkpoint. We were still only slightly relieved, concerned about the mugging by corruption.

And those who are expecting a similarly scary progress of the events may stop here reading. Everything else went OK after we had survived the first five minutes.

To avoid any misunderstandings, our personal experience does not indicate that Nigeria is a shiny-happy and peaceful country. Nigeria is indeed dangerous and corrupt, but probably more so for locals and oil workers. And of course: travelling in Africa always brings the unexpected.

We indeed had to stop by plenty of checkpoints what usually took at least four minutes, adding a lot to our total travel time. According to our statistics, in five days and 1200 km we were stopped by 30 police, 40 road safety, 20 military and 15 other undeterminable officials. In sum, everyone of them was polite and easy-going. As expected, they often asked what do we have for them, our standard answer being horses¤¤¤ our friendship. Csaba truly surprised a soldier when once he answered: a question, namely, which is the better road from that on. Another funny reply we learnt from other overlanders is that we were the guests, thus he should show hospitality and give present for us. One policeman was really resilient and kept asking for something for at least five minutes. We had the impression that he truly just want a souvenir from the Hungarian travelers. We did not want to suggest that tourists are giftgivers so he did not get any. To conclude, most of the checkpoints were quite entertaining, and, all in all, the worst checkpoint was where an over-enthusiastic soldier wanted to see all our boxes and what they contained. Luckily, even he got bored by the second box, filled with Zsuzsi’s clothes (not that she had so many pieces!)

Anyhow, in the end we had such a great time in Nigeria that instead of the scheduled five days we spent there ten.

On a very unlucky (or: precautious) way, we already obtained the Nigerian visa in Hungary, meaning that we had only three months from our starting point in Pilisvörösvár to not only reach but leave Nigeria (that is more than 13.000 km driving). For this reason and due to the bad reputation of Nigeria (see our previous post), our original plan was that we rather spend time elsewhere and just drive through Nigeria, allowing five days for 1200 km, taken into account the poor quality of roads and the zillions of checkpoint. We learnt from other travel blogs, basically every overlander has the exactly same plan. Often, overlanders join each other and cross the country together. Admittedly, we also wanted to join a convoy but it was not possible due to the different expiry dates of our visa.

During our journey, the very best experience are the unexpected ones. First, we just wanted to rush through Nigeria with a short stop-by in the sacred forest of Oshogbo, one of the two World Heritage Sites here.

The sacred forest of Oshogbo was saved and filled with huge and fantastic god-sculptures and smaller but still very awesome human/animal sculptures by Susanne Wenger. Wenger moved to Nigeria only because of her husband’s job, but after having survived an illness she converted to the local, Yoruba religion, became a priestess, and had some lucid dreams how this and that goddess looks like. Oh yes, she was nuts, but we have to admit she was a great artist. We also admit: sculptures and forests are good combination. Rambling in the forest, among the gods and other carvings helped us a lot to clear our mind tired from the trip and the bad roads.

The drill is an endangered ape, 700 of the total population of 3000 animals live in the Afi drill ranch. Its close relative is the colourful and thus much more popular mandrill. The mid-term objective of the reserve is releasing the drills in the wild, which is becoming more and more urgent as the drills happily reproduce in the safe enclosures. There is also a group of chimpanzees in the drill ranch, but they can never be released. Chimps – unlike what is suggested by TV – are dangerous animals. Their loud cries and aggressive gests had been fascinating at first, but later we actually got scared when one started targeting us with avocado pits (shooting through the electric fence) and large stones (throwing above the fence). The advice we got was squatting and begging with open palms, without making eye contact.

We visited the feeding three times a day, to see the apes near the fence, eating calmly and posing for photographs. In the evenings, we talked with the Dutch Pieter who is managing the ranch as a volunteer. He was annoyed that the drills figured out how to cross the electric fence and were trying to get access to the banana reserves, but secretly we were quite happy about this as we could see the monkeys outside of the fence. We symphatised much more when he was complaining about the tradition of distributing free alcohol to the workers whenever an animal died, this was a horrible incentive for people who could otherwise hardly afford drinks.

We walked in the rain forest several times. First, we discovered the canopy walk, a light structure built at the top level of trees. A foreign government donated it, but a few years ago, it was almost destroyed by a landslide and now only a part of it can be visited. Of course there is no money to restore it. Once we walked in the night, seeing the eyes of bush babies everywhere. We did not notice that we crossed the path of ants and later we had to remove the fighters loving us painfully with their pincers. Finally, we made a hike, tasted „African candy” – a small red fruit that tastes real artificial candy. On the mountaintop, we met a Nigerian PhD student who had been camping there for weeks to examine bats: their behaviour, size and excrement…