Author: Jeremy

Magically transporting us out of Africa with their hospitality and generosity was not the only trick that our Italian friends managed to pull off for us. Most of them worked for an Italian company called Trevi Foundations who are  based in Lagos and Port Harcourt amongst other places in Nigeria. When Alain, our main contact at Trevi, heard that we were going off to Calabar on the other side of Nigeria he offered to send us all the way on the back of one of their trucks !

You may or may not know that certain parts of Nigeria are completely notorious for their crime and are completely off limits for foreigners as the chances of kidnapping are extremely high. This is mainly because most foreigners are associated with the rich oil companies like Shell who are seen to be exploiting the Niger Delta without really investing back into the local communities. Although that has now changed, the government now receives almost 50% of profits from oil companies working in the delta, corruption at government level means that none of this money is really finding its way back into the delta communities. So for the locals little has changed.  As a result rebel groups formed and have resorted to kidnapping and holding people for ransom, or sabotaging the pipelines and so on. In fact oftentimes the rebels are more heavily armed than the authorities!

So for us to be offered a safe passage all the way through this part of the country was a godsend for us as it allowed us to travel with complete peace of mind and not have to do a bit of a circuitous route around the delta states into Calabar.

Early on Monday morning saw our bikes being loaded onto the back of the truck of our new sponsors – Trevi! It was great to be shown around the yard and to be introduced to all the bosses as if we were some kind of strange heroes for traveling through Africa by bike. It just goes to show that the Italians really are completely mad about motorbikes!

Amazingly two days later and our magical Trevi carpet had whisked us across the country and dropped us off in Calabar with no problems and our stomachs still full of excellent Italian food from the night before when we had stayed in the Trevi guesthouse in Port Harcourt.

There are no words that can fully say thank you enough for this kind of generosity that we have experienced while here in Nigeria, not only from the Africans who are traditionally so generous, but even more so by the Italians and other ex-pats that we have met along the way. They have gone the extra mile for us and we are truly grateful.

When you put yourself at the mercy of other people while you travel you can be completely overwhelmed by by their generosity, it’s something we have experienced all the way through Africa and it never ceases to amaze us both. There are definitely more good apples than bad!

Arriving in Lagos was a shock to the system but we soon got over it as we realised that rather than being the big bad city everyone painted it out to be before we arrived it was just another large city, yes it has problems, but what city with 13 million people doesn’t? Instead we found that the people in the area around our hotel on Lagos Island, where we ate and drank, were hospitable and friendly and we even had Nigerians buying us beers as sat in the street bars with them!

In fact we were overcome with hospitality in Lagos from every quarter. On our second night in Lagos we were trying to catch a motorcycle taxi or a cab when an Indian guy pulled up and asked us where we were going – he was just so surprised that two white guys could be standing in the street! Nathan then proceeded to take us to visit some of his friends and show us the other side of Lagos… the ex-pat life. It truly is something else to behold, especially when you have been traveling in Africa for so long and you’ve mainly been living near the level of most Africans, eating and drinking with them on the street where most of life happens here in Africa. To be taken to a string of night clubs where you might as well be in London or New York with prices to match is quite a shock to the system. I can only imagine how out of place we looked in our dirty jeans and flip flops alongside this cultural “elite” of Lagos.

However this was only the beginning of our escape from Africa as Keith and I were put in touch with some Italian ex-pats that are good friends of his flat mate back home in London. Within an hour of Rob phoning them Alain and Sylvia had picked us up outside of a swanky shopping centre on Victoria Island (the posh part of town) and whisked us off into another world of hidden pizza restaurants (the best pizza we have had in Africa) and bars that you just wouldn’t know about because they look like normal compounds on the outside!

The guys really spoiled us something rotten and we were overwhelmed by their generosity and openness to us! I guess we were pretty exotic fresh fish for them, but it meant a lot for us to be invited into their group and to feel part of their lives for a few days. It was just like being at home, this world that they live in, not just because they have all the modern comforts that we have, but because at home we also meet up with the same friends every weekend and eat together at people’s houses and enjoy each others company and the craic.

One of the most surreal things was to go and watch a brand new movie (Iron Man) in a modern cinema on a Sunday afternoon, sitting their in the cinema was a complete departure from everything that we had experienced in the last 4 months. As the credits started to roll Keith leaned across to me and said “Now we have to go back to Africa!” It really did feel like we had flown several thousand miles out of Africa and were just returning with a jolt into the reality of Lagos!

After escaping the clutches of the bar at Le Galion and the wonderful hospitality of Yawo and the guys at Toni Togo we eventually managed to leave Togo and head across to Benin. We were rushing out of town so that we could hopefully meet up with Rich, Sacha and Kru once again in Cotonou the capital of Benin.

Due to our late departure from Lome we only managed to get into Cotonou well after dark, it was pretty hair raising because of the sheer number of crazed motorcycle taxis there, hardly any cars, but man I have never seen so many motorcyclists with an absolute death wish! It was all worth it though as we rolled up to find Rich and Sacha and Kru outside having a beer and some great street food – we must have looked like quite a crazy lot of white people to the locals!

As the title suggests we then decided to head over to Lagos, partly because it seemed an easy days ride from Cotonou and partly I think we wanted to go there in person and see what all the fuss was about! We were in for a little shock, but it wasn’t necessarily in Lagos.

In an attempt to be smart we decided to take a slightly quieter border crossing from Benin into Nigeria a little north of Porto Novo, this proved to be a mistake as the quietness of the border crossing meant that the officious Beninese police decided to check out all of our documents… and we found out that our insurance for the West African countries had expired a week ago! This prompted Keith to say in French “How can I help you to help us?” to which the Policeman just smiled and started to haggle over how much our dash should be!

On the Nigerian side things were easier but slower, no less than 5 different ledgers had to be filled in for different government departments, it all took an age but at least the Nigerians were smiling and really nice all the way through!

At this point we had managed to cross the border, it was still early afternoon and we had an estimated two hour drive to Lagos, however dark storm clouds were gathering on the horizon ahead. Within 45 minutes we were riding through a torrential downpour, soaking wet with the bikes aquaplaning on the surface of the road which had about an inch of water on it! Needless to say we sought the closest shelter we could find – a petrol station forecourt that had about ten local bikers already taking cover from the storm.

It was good craic with the other bikers under the shelter and though we have answered the same questions about the bikes a couple hundred times already it never ceases to amaze and entertain us when we see the surprise on people’s faces when we tell people how far we have come, sometimes you have to pick their jaws up from the ground they are so amazed. In so many ways we are just like aliens from space to these guys who think their cheap 125cc Chinese bike is the latest and greatest thing, it’s a shock for them to see our “huge machines”! I don’t think many Africans can even imagine traveling around their continent like we are doing – it just boggles their minds at times to think we are not being paid and are spending our own money to do this trip. But there is always such camaraderie at these times with us showing them our bikes and all the bits and pieces we have on them!

This had to be the high point in the day, because as soon as things cleared up we were on our way again to one of the largest traffic jams in Africa! The combination of rain, roadworks and the most aggressive crazy driving made our arrival into Cotonou a walk in the park in comparison. The last 30 kilometers took us in the order of two and a half hours to get to Lagos Island!

Because we had just crossed the border into Nigeria we ended up arriving into Lagos late at night with no cash (we were holding out for an ATM, but international cards don’t work here), nowhere to stay and severely traumatised from the traffic on the way in! This was our most crazy arrival yet into any city and Lagos was looking like it was going to live up to it’s reputation of a no go city!

After hunting around a few brothels/hotels that were in our price range, we managed to find a place in the Ritz – not the kind of Ritz you imagine, but the kind of Ritz that has rooms by the hour and the night. It was reasonably clean, cheap and secure with a place to hide the bikes as well.

The thing that we both felt though on arrival into Lagos was that this place was something else, a huge sprawling metropolis with motorways and flyovers and skyscrapers, millions of people all crammed into a mess of humanity – this is the New York of Africa and we actually both instantly liked the place!

We’ve uploaded some more pictures into our Nigeria gallery here and we will be blogging again soon about the amazing time we’ve had in this great city! Unfortunately we haven’t been able to take as many pictures of Lagos as we would have liked to because for security we didn’t carry the camera much and the boys from Lagos really hate their picture being taken!

We just had to write a wee bit about the amazing Fan Milk ice creams that we have come across here in Ghana!

Picture this in your mind. It’s blazing hot outside and you are a soggy mess after riding all day when you hear a honk honk of a clown’s horn and a guy cycles by on a bike with a big freezer box on the front full of ice creams that cost between 10 and 20 pence a hit!

Can you really blame us for the orgy that follows? I think at times we are hitting between 4 and 5 Fan Milks a day and we have tried the full range of Fan Milks with Fan Choco (frozen chocolate Milk), Fan Ice (Vanilla Ice Cream) and Fan Yogo (frozen strawberry yogurt) among our favorites!

We are now in Togo having our bikes serviced and it was quite a relief for us that they still have Fan Milk here, and we have discovered a new flavor – Fan Extra (frozen strawberry yogurt with extra vitamins!)

As you can see from the pictures we’ve become quite the Fans and have resorted to all sorts of product placement to extol the virtues of our addiction!