Nigeria

My time in Nigeria was entertaining. The Nigerians love to talk and party. It seemed to me that it was the main purpose of their lives. All the funeral parties kept them from having to wait for holidays to celebrate. The Nigerian government has since the time I was there made most block parties for funerals illegal. They have cracked down on the money making business side of the funerals also. When I was there, there were vendors at all the parties selling anything from juices or beer to kitchen ware. They were almost like a small farmers market sometimes. It is now against the law to sell anything at a funeral party I am told and the closing streets is also a thing of the past. They had to do that. It was crippling the country.

The drivers in Nigeria were all insane. The main mode of transportation was small vans that were brightly colored. There was always a central depot in every city where the vans sat around hawking their destination until they were full and then they left. Did I say full. I am sorry I meant to say when they were loaded to the tipping point with people, goats, chickens, pigs, naked children, farms goods, TVs, stoves, chairs and on and on. They overloaded them so badly I was surprised they didn't constantly break their springs and pop their tires. You would not believe just how much they could load in and on a van. Then they only had two speeds, full speed ahead and full speed ahead with the horn blowing. There were so many head on crashes with two vans both of them going flat out going around a curve or over a hill that they could not tow the vehicles away fast enough and wrecked vehicles piled up on dangerous places along the roads. The death tolls were huge. I refused to ride in the death traps. I was terrified on the roads because even if I was in a car or truck with a good safe driver we could easily be hit by one of these insane Mammy Wagons. That is why I took to walking around to get to places in Nigeria.

On Easter Sunday while I was there, Nigeria changed from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right side. I didn't even know they drove on a side. I thought they all just drove right down the middle of the road at full throttle all the time. The results of the switch over were deadly. Huge piles of wrecked vehicles were everywhere I looked. The death toll must have been staggering. Again I preferred to walk after that.

Then there was the garbage strike in Lagos while I was up in Ibadan. There is a lot of garbage generated in Lagos and the workers decided to strike. The garbage filled the city in a matter of days. There were piles of it everywhere. The place reeked. It was getting to be a serious health hazard. I refused to enter the city again. It was as if someone had taken all the worlds' smelly refuse and used a giant blower to blow it all over the city or maybe flushed a giant toilet over the city. You know one of those overflowing toilets that you have seen in a public restroom somewhere is what the entire city was like. It was gross gross gross.

I did like the food in Nigeria. I ate mostly the stews that they sold on the streets. I never knew what kind of meat was in it. It could have been rats or old dead grandma for all I knew but it was boiling away all day so at least I knew it wasn't full of bacteria. I almost never got sick except for that one case of stomach pain that sent me to the hospital. The chili in the stews would have killed anything also. A lot of them were hot as hell. Chili was like an antibiotic as far as I was concerned. The hotter the food the safer it was to eat.

There were tea houses everywhere. Being an English colony drinking tea was the norm. There were still coffee places but the tea houses ruled. I drank a lot of the tea, sweetened like they did with condensed milk. There was always bread with jam at the tea shacks too so that made a good snack. The tea servers made a big show of pouring the tea into the cup from as far away from the cup as they could stretch their arms without spilling a single drop of tea. I cracked up watching them show off for their customers.

I finally was ready to move South into the war zone. I circled around Lagos to avoid the stinky garbage mess and then headed toward Calabar and Port Harcourt. I rode a taxi near the city of Lagos but once it hit open road I jumped out and started to walk. I did not want to die by being crushed to death in a Mammy Wagon in Nigeria. I loved to walk anyway. I met lots of interesting people along the way. Most of them were very nice friendly good people. Until I stopped for some tea at a palapa near Calabar that is.