Nigerian Christmas

All work stops for about 2 weeks in Nigeria around Christmas, this allows everyone to go home to the “village” for Christmas (even the most hardened urbanite is from a village, even if this village is another city). The advantage of this is we get to have a couple of weeks to explore Nigeria.

Around Christmas volunteers are very gregarious, desperately trying to avoid the nightmare Christmas of being stuck on your own, sitting in the dark as there is no NEPA with no food and no booze and resorting to snorting powdered Larium as the only mind altering drug available

With this desperate prospect in mind I headed off back to Abuja for a couple of days or R&R hanging around the British village. This allowed us to gather up all available volunteers for the 11 hour (on a good day) bus ride to Calabar, which is a city in the south east corner of Nigeria. We opted for the “419” volunteer option of a real minibus costing the princely sum of N5,000 (£20) rather than the slightly cheaper option of 8 of us piling into sweaty 1950’s station wagon with 5 seats and would be guaranteed to break down at least every hour.

Nigerian bus companies take safety seriously, which is why they keep a pastor on the payroll to bless the bus and its contents before any journey. There is something moderately worrying about a man beseeching the lord to cover the bus, its driver, and passengers in the blood of Jesus, just before you set off. Perhaps a quick check of the tyre pressure, brake fluid and oil level might have been a little more reassuring? Anyway the blood covering option seemed to work as we arrived in Calabar after 11 hours of some of the scariest driving I have witnessed to date (anything with less than 4 wheels simply didn’t exist, and all manoeuvres were carefully planned ahead in the “i’ll pull out randomly and then the other car will swerve out of my way, neatly creating space in the oncoming traffic for me to overtake” school of driving.)

The next challenge was locating the volunteer’s house we were staying in, turns out “new airport road” isn’t very near the airport, new or otherwise.

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Afi – Monkeys

Anyway after arriving in Calabar we still had a couple of days to Christmas so thought we would head up to a place called Afi where there is a Pan Drill Monkey rescue sanctuary. The place is completely in the middle of nowhere in the deepest darkest bush. Monkeys and isolation what more could you want from a holiday. The place is built in the middle of a beautiful area of rainforest, we were put up in open log cabins, with just netting round the side to keep the mossies out. We Fell asleep to the howls of monkeys and the background din of the rainforest, its a tough life being a volunteer. See below for pictures.

As well as monkeys the Nigerian tourist board (???) got some Canadians in and built a canopy walkway. This was also pretty good and there are some more very dull photos below. Spot the obligatory shower under a waterfall photo, which is the main purpose of any year off.

This place illustrates the Nigerian tourist problem, in any other country this place could command sky high prices and would attract people from all over the world. Being Nigeria there are a few people who have managed to find it by knowing someone who once met someone who told a story about a mythical monkey ranch in the hills and after a lot of searching managed to get the phone number of the people who can radio the lodge (it’s The Beach school of tourism I suppose).

Which is why Nigeria needs to develop its tourist infrastructure, but that would involve tackling both nigeria’s image problem and the corruption which makes it almost impossible to have a large scale business here.*insert standard volunteer rant here*



Calabar is quite tourist friendly, and attracts lots of Nigerians for Christmas. It also features a very non-Nigerian idea – Litter bins. The streets are leafy and clean, and there are even Christmas lights.

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Christmas day

Temp – 30°C
Humidity - Lots
Sweat amount – 2L/hour

Christmas Dinner!

Christmas fun and games. I even managed to get a bit of internet via my phone. Which I used to much protest to download the queens speech from Youtube (it took about an hour and all my laptop battery life to watch the first 2 mins, but it was worth it).

Calabar carnival
The days after Christmas there are a couple of carnivals. A kids one on boxing day then the main event the day after. Think Notting Hill with less health and safety. Also the Nigerian police crowd control techniques are more stick than carrot. Luckily most of the crowd find police bating one of the more amusing activities available and will be smiling and laughing away as the police whack them with sticks. Being cheeky we wangled our way into the empty press box, seeing a couple of whites get in lead to a rush of people also trying it on, and pretty soon a press box built for no more than five people had about thirty, but at least we could see!

We also had a wander about, see photos.....

From Dec-jan

As ever all the photos, plus some videos are at the link above.

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Nigerian Morris dancers

Look at this, spot the bells, and the hankies. Yes these are Nigerian Morris dancers! My trip is complete, even if i have achieved nothing I will be happy knowing that there are Morris dancers in Nigeria. Now all we need to work on is the production of some scrumpy.

Hope you all had a good Christmas, please leave comments as its the only way I know if people are actually reading this stuff! In response to Jon I will produce a blog post of what I actually do at work all day soon. Things are a bit slow starting here and a blog of me attending meetings with random government people, schools etc would be a bit dull (but very Nigerian, they love pictures of meetings).

Drink!

Nothing of major note has happened this week so I thought I’d use this week’s blog entry to cover a subject close to my heart, the Nigerian world of beverages.

Beer:- Comes in 60cl bottles, cost ranges from about N160 (60p) – N300 (£1.20) a bottle. On hearing I was coming to a state with Sharia law I thought drinking would be limited to the occasional overpriced hotel bar. I am happy to report that beer is available just about everywhere in Kaduna, and most of the time it’s even cold. Near every bar there will also be a suya vendor, who sells barbequed meat covered in pepe (dried hot pepper) for N100 a pop. Mmmm beer and meat.

Star (5.1%) – Budweiser’s less charismatic younger brother, contains at least 25% headache. The drink most volunteers start on.

Harp (5.15%) – Made by Guinness Nigeria, surprisingly not a bad larger and now firmly part of my evening schedule. Currently runs a promotion where you can win the occasional free beer. Being Nigeria the bottle caps have to be taken to a secret location between the hours of 10-4 on a Tuesday for possible redemption on payment of a dash. The ABV is quoted to 2 decimal places, I think this is simply a cunning marketing ploy to make it seem like it’s brewed to an exacting standard....


Gulder (5.1%)– brewed in the continental style by amstel, this is beer you have to chew. No volunteer I know drinks the stuff.



Guinness (7.5%)– Nigeria is apparently the 3rd biggest consumer of Guinness in the world. The story goes that when Guinness first wanted to launch a brewery in Nigeria they invited local breweries to submit their attempts at copying the iconic drink. After rejecting the entire first batch as universally dreadful they sent those tendering for the contract a case each of the original from Dublin to show them what they should be aiming for. The winner of the contract simply steamed off the Guinness labels and affixed his own to the bottles and returned them to the UK for consideration. Once winning the contact he continued to produce his original drink. If you want to get an idea of what this stuff tastes like, buy a bottle of Supermalt (or other malt based drink) then add 4 shots of vodka and one shot of lighter fuel. It’s sweet, strong and (in my opinion) completely unfit for human consumption.

Malt drinks: These are really popular in Nigeria, and come in numerous varieties all canned to look like beer. I find them sickly sweet and about 2 sips provides my entire years worth of maltyness. Worryingly the longer you stay here the more likely it seems that you will start to like the stuff. Also they are considered the “king of minerals” and “honoured guests” are always offered these in preference to coke/fanta/something i might want.




Minerals: This is the Nigerian name for any fizzy drink, Coke, fanta, mountain dew, occasionally diet coke etc. Come in 35cl glass bottles (N40 for the drink plus N10 deposit for the bottle), must always be drunk through a straw (not sure why but people look at you very strangely if you drink from the bottle). These provide the cheapest way of getting a safe midday drink. My teeth are taking a real pasting, and I’m sure I will need more fillings when I get back.




Pure Water:
This is a clever idea in principle. Its water in a plastic bag, rather than an expensive plastic bottle. A bag of pure water normally costs N5 (2.5p) and can be bought anywhere. The problem comes in Nigerians attitude to waste management/littering and the left over plastic bags cover just about everywhere, all roadsides, drains and riversides. Any possible scenic view will be ruined by the remnants of these bags, which I suppose is another reason why Nigeria doesn’t really have a tourist industry. The water in them seems safe enough, but to get into them you have to bite the corner off, exposing you to just about every disease under the sun.

Tap water:
Cholerary. No idea where it comes from, boil for 10 mins, filter, hold nose, hope for best.

This week I have also had a bash at making a solar oven, but at the moment it’s in test form and I’ll write some more about it another time.

Coming soon – Nigerian cuisine!

Dutch Santa

I've put some photos up of the crazy dutch santa claus thingy we had last weekend. And a piccy or two of my solar oven making efforts, which I will elaborate on in a later post.

From Dutch santa claus thingy

Hope everyone is well, and I will do a proper post tomorrow hopefully.