(5) Nigeria to Gabon



with Frank Butler


Into the Lions' Den

I had been using my time in Cotonou to get Visas for the Congos. Both Brazzaville and Kinshasa. I would have like to get the Cameroun Visa there also, but for that I would have to go into the Lions' Den...Lagos.

The thought of Nigeria was hanging over me like a dark cloud everytime I would mention that I was going there someone would say "Be Careful" or "You're Brave" or suck air through their lips, this just kept adding to my dread.

I was starting to feel that something very bad was going to happen in Nigeria...False imprisonment, Kidnapping, Mugging, Theft of the Bike, something horrible and the more I thought about it the worse it got and I kept being steered into Nigeria no matter what lengths I went to to avoid it. Nigeria was turning into a mental monster for me.

At first I hoped that I could blat through the place in three days. But then I found that I had to go to Lagos to get the Cameroon Visa. That meant at least five days maybe more. A lot can happen in five days.

I said goodbye to Amos and left Cotonou on a grey Wednesday morning. The weather was not much helped much by my mood. The ride to the border is a little less that an hour and the road is good.

As soon as you pull into the border post they are on you even before you get to the first check point. The first thing is about control, 'you can not park there, you Must park here.' Then the questions: 'Where are you from' and - the best one 'where are you going' ? 'Where am I fucking going ? Switzerland, you dumb prick, where the fuck do you think I am going ?' 'Can't you tell that I am not really in the mood for this ?'.

Anyway everyone that asks for a look at a document wants something tangible. Most of them you can fob off with a smile and a long winded explanation that if you had to give money to every corrupt goverment and semi-goverment offical in Africa you would have gone broke by the time you left the Moroccan port city of Tangier. With some, however, it is easier to give them a small note, have them sneer at it and eye you with disgust, than it is to sit there and argue that you no longer require vaccination for bubonic plague.

Anyway I got through, it only cost me twelve euros in bribes and the hundred euros for the visa, plus the airfares to and from the UK and Ireland, the cost of the to-ing and fro-ing and the stress; and I didn't even want to be there in the first place.

Once you leave the immigration and customs, twenty metres later you are at your first road block. 'Passport please, where are you going ? Switzerland, really, that's nice. Have a good day'. At least the bastards speak English. Fifty metres later same again just in a different uniform. You will never see a place like Nigeria for uniforms and intimidation of the general public. It's horrendous. However petrol is cheap so it's not all bad. To be honest the place is not as bad as most people would have you believe. The border is worse than I described, but once you are in the place it's quite manageable.

When I say Nigeria is not as bad as people say it is, that doesn't mean that it's any good either, it just means that people say that it is very, very bad.

The worst part of this is that everyone in the country is guilty till proven inocent, and that of course brings it own problem for the visitor. You have a tendency not to give people a fair go and just assume that they are trying to stitch you up somehow.

The first thing that strikes you are the road blocks and the gangs of men who man them sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty, and if they haven't got guns then they carry sticks or Golf clubs...what the fuck's that about. On the bike you get waved through the majority but every fith one they stop you just for the hell of it or to have a chat.

I found that the best way to approach the road blocks was with the attitude that you will not be expecting to stop and if some waves wave back and keep going. But make sure that the bloke manning the plank full of nails is not about to yank it across the road in front of you. There is quite an art to road block negotiation in Nigeria, and you need your wits about you.

One of the most memorable was the customs road bloke outside Onitsha. I was approaching it doing about sixty K's, and the first couple of blokes waved me through. Then as I got level with the main part of the block they started waving frantically and shouting 'STOP'. I thought 'what the fuck is all this about' so I hit the brakes...hard. The back wheel locked up and skidded to the left the bike veered right then I felt rather than saw something big on my left behind me I let the brakes go as I heard a screech of tyres and then saw the front of a small peugot 404 utility (pick-up) inches from the left side pannier. He was still skidding and trying to keep control. The bike rolled out of his way, he skidded to the right, and two policemen ran out of his way. He changed gear and sped away, while a couple of customs guys ran after him trying to get his number. The whole thing happened in seconds but I saw it in slow motion over minutes I came to a stop and my heart was racing. The guys at the road block crowded around me and kept asking if I was OK, and they then re-enacted the whole thing for each others benifit.

The guy with the most stickers and badges on his shirt came over and apologised and said that man was using me to sneak through and that I was not supposed to stop, but he was. Then he said that I was a great rider and that god was good.

For some reason I felt better after that near-death thing because I had figured that something bad was going to happen in Nigeria and that that was probably it, and I had survived it.

It also taught me to keeeep a good eye on the mirrors at road blocks.

Looking back, Nigeria just seems like a very long ride through hundreds of road blocks. I had very little interaction with people, I rode, I bought fuel, and I never once took my Camera out of the bag. I was there just to get through and I am glad to say that I did.

But leaving Nigeria was nowhere near as stressful as entering...in fact it was a breeze.

Into Cameroun

It happened at Ikom. I stayed in a rough hotel about twenty minutes from the border. It was the smugglers' hotel. Buses and small trucks would come into the car park and unload a few passengers and huge amounts of cargo. Then the local car drivers would negotiate with the owners of the cargo and load it into their individual cars. Then they would all get a meal and a beer and wait for it to get dark. As soon as it was good and dark they would head off in ones and twos, and head for the border. An hour later they were back looking for a second load. It was all good fun but I did triple lock the bike and chain it to the light post. There is no point in encourageing too much free enterprise.



The following morning I headed to the border they stamped the things that needed stamping and wished me well I rode across the little bridge to Cameroun.

'Bonne Arrivée, Bonne Arrivée, Welcome !' that was the first thing I heard from the three guys sitting in the little shed at the other side of the bridge I said glad to be here and meant it. The next thing I said was "hows the road" "oh very bad, very bad" was the unanimous reply. In Nigeria I had one stretch of really bad road for about fifty kilometres between Abalikliki and Enugu. When I mention this to anyone they always say that it is the wet season, and anyway 'wait till you get to Cameroun, the roads are Much, Much Worse !

And sure enough here were these super friendly Camerooniennes confirming the story. I rode up the little hill into town and got the Carnet and my passport stamped. A few of the smugglers from the night before had suggested that I put the bike on a truck as far a Mamfe and then the road would not be so bad...I asked the customs guy what he thought about that he said It was probably a good idea.

I asked around and the first price was about fifty pounds for the seventy or eighty kilometre journey. I haggled I walked away I said I would ride instead of pay such a ridiculous price. I got a ride to Kumba for Thirty thousand and that is three times the distance.

I had to pay to have the bike loaded onto the back of the six wheel drive Mercedes Truck...that was a fiver. Then we tied it down as best we could and waited for another truck to fill up. Our truck had just me and the bike, the truck's crew of three, and a rather shady Gabonese guy who claimed that he had his Passport stolen in Benin and was going to Kumba to pick up some money from his grand father...I didn't like or trust him. Just before we left we picked up one more passenger. He kept calling me 'white man' so I called him 'black man' and we got along fine.



About three hundred metres outside the village of Ecok we came to our first mud hole...IT WAS TWENTY METRES LONG AND HALF A METRE DEEP. I was ever so glad I had gone for the truck option...a kilometre later that thought was reinforced, and then about every half a kilometre after that.



It was the worst road I had ever seen, even in six wheel drive we had to dig the truck through ...what a fucking quagmire...



It took us twenty four hours to travel a little less that 300k's. I stayed in the back of the truck with the bike until it got dark then took a small bag with all the good stuff in it and went up front with Terence the Driver and Blackman. I still didn't trust the Gabonese in the back to be near my stuff.

In the dark the road seemed to get worse, and now we were having to deal with washed out bridges. We would make a near vertical descent into a raging creek bed as the lorry bucked and bounced, then crawl through the water and blast our way up the other side, each time only just making it...Boy was I glad that I had decided not to ride...but I kept thinking of Beem in the back and hoping he wasn't getting too banged about.

Terence drove all night...he lost his voice from yelling at the crew and at the other truck...I never met a bloke with a harder job, and he would make the return journey in two days time with Blackman and his load of corrugated Iron roofing...Include me out.

In the morning the truck overheated..in a big way steam and burning oil smoke in the cab sort of way. We waited two hours for it to cool down, throwing buckets of water on the radiator to speed up the process. While we waited we had lunch at a roadside diner. We had bushmeat some kind of small antelope with rice and sauce. When we started the truck again it didn't sound right, I mean in a clack, clack, clack, sort of a way...in a big end sort of a way. Terence phoned his boss the boss said 'drive on it's only three hours to Kumba and the worst of the road is behind you'. So we drove on. Three o'clock that afternoon we arrived in Kumba. We unloaded Beem with only a few minor scratches and Blackman showed me to the hotel he was staying at. The City Hotel Kumba, nice place, six pounds a night, with a decent bar downstairs and a room with a verandah so you can watch the rain fall.

I had a beer with Blackman, and then the lorry crew turned up and we had a few more beers....what a trip.

It rained for the next five days...sometimes only for a couple of hours, but in buckets, and some days drizzled all day long. Terence had to delay the return trip with Blackman as the truck needed some serious work.

So we would sit and watch the rain fall, and drink beer and see who could tell the biggest lies...Blackman won...one night he swore he was American, only over here to help his coloured brothers...American for Africa he called himself.

The rain eased and I headed for Yaounde, the first hundred kilometre of road were shit, but then the road turned into a ribbon of velvet all the way to Yaounde. I got stung at one roadblock for two quid for no insurance. In Yaounde I bought insurance and a new set of tyres for Beem and with the money I saved on them, I bought the visa for Gabon...Goodbye Cameroun.



I rode from Yaoude to Meitz in a day, it's about six hundred kilometre and the roads are good. I stayed a night at the hotel there. After Cameroun I found Gabon expensive. Twenty five pounds for a room. But the standard was higher...a meal was six quid and a beer a pound, thats double the prices in Cameroun.

At the hotel I found two Europeans, I hadn't talked to a white man for weeks. One was French working in logging, and the other a young Belgian geologist looking for diamonds or something.

The Frenchman, Jean Pierre, had twenty years in Gabon and was a mine of infomation. He even had a map that he let the geologist photocopy for me. He told me all about the route to Congo and to make sure to bring extra fuel. It was all great advice and certainly saved me a lot of heartache. He even gave me a couple of bottles of water the next morning before waving me off.

The first part of the trip to Alembe is a doddle but once you turn of that road and head west...you are really in the wild west. The road goes through some rugged mountain country and it's like a goat track for the first six hours - second gear all the way. There is next to no traffic. I met two vehicles coming the other way...but it does get better.

I got as far as Lope which is just a cluster of shops at a cross roads but has a railway station that seems to specialise in carrying logs. Before I had to start to worry about fuel I managed to buy ten litres, but I was running out of light. I couldn't make it to Lasatorville before dark so I decicded to stay at the little guest-house which was a shed with rooms partioned off, and that cost a tenner. Next day bright and early I headed of for Franceville, got about ten k's down the road when I lost the extra spare fuel which wasn't the end of the world. But the heavy duty strap that I had used to tie it on got caught around the rear wheel, and damn near destroyed the bike. If it hadn't been so heavily built I think it would have torn the back of the bike off. As it was it pulled the pannier off and wedged between the brake shoes and complety compressed the suspension. When I cut the strap the bike nearly bounced to the other side of the road. I was lucky there...

I got to Franceville with the chain groaning because of the dry dust.

I found a nice little hotel, nineteen pounds a night, not cheap but nice. I found the bank with the ATM, and I found an Internet Cafe, so I was a happy chappy. I was changing the spark plug and fuel filter yesterday, when I noticed the throttle cable nearly worn through, so that my job for this afternoon is to get a new cable from somewhere.


After that the 'Heart of Darkness', the Congo...




written in Franceville, Gabon, September 18th 2007