Road Trip Day 2 - Abuja to Jos

Fingers crossed, we headed out of Abuja heading towards Jos. I think Chris was glad to leave after having no luck with the car, plus he just could not get the hang of Abuja traffic (or the lack of it), being used to darting around in Lagos with one hand on the horn the whole time quite empty roads were just a little too foreign.

We had got some info off the Abuja branch of the Nigeria Field Society and had hoped to get to a small village called Nok, the centre of the 2000yr+ Nok civilisation - one of the first in Nigeria (see here or here ). Unfortunately there are no phones out there so I had left messages on the phones of a couple of guides out that way, hoping they'd head to a major town and get reception (again fingers crossed)

Unlike the south, there's no jungle up here. Just lots of dry bush and cows

Local herdsmen (probably Fulani - they have big pointy hats like sombreros)

We got to Nok without much trouble after stopping to buy some sugarcane along the road for a snack. the poor kid selling the little pieces of raw sugar cane didn't look like he'd ever seen any white people before and couldn't speak English, he looked petrified. But 40c later we had our cane and he had money, all good.

At Nok, however, there was no sign of the museum we were looking for. After driving around (and this is a village that has no cars and definitely no whities) keeping the locals interested for an hour or so, we decided to give up. Everyone kept pointing down this one road to the "museum" which we drove past about five times before realising that they were building a new museum (not even close to being finished) and that this building site was all that they knew. We had no way of contacting the guides, so decided to just keep going to Jos. It was a beautiful, quite, peaceful village and everyone was very helpful - luckily Chris could speak Hausa coz english doesn't do much around here.

Cane harvest at Nok

When travelling long journeys it is advisable to carry provisions for the whole family...

We stopped at a road junction, and after being mobbed by the locals managed to get some bananas and peanuts and other fruit for lunch, but there was no way we could have lunch there. It's hard not to be the centre of attention when you're the only two white folk for miles. So we managed to find a quite spot under a tree a few km down the road and had a nice round of peanut and banana sangos - bloody good I must say.

Once we'd driven up onto the Jos plateau, the scenery (and people) seemed to change dramatically. It's basically flat as far as the eye can see, with these granite outcrops filled with lots of boulders popping out here and there. The locals used cactus as fences, creating these quite beautiful little villages of red mud brick houses with thatched roofs surround by cactus. Down south everything is made from bamboo and raffia palm (I think mud huts wouldn't survive the wet season)

Riyom Rock outside Jos

Like so many things around this country, this rail line (which used to link the tin mining and agricultural centres of the North down to the ports in the south) is no longer in use - and probably hasn't been used since the Brits left in 1960. There's run down infrastructure everywhere that could be used to transport all the food and fruit and veg (which mostly comes from this area) down to Lagos instead of using the overloaded trucks like they do at the moment which take a day or two to get to Lagos, half of the food wasted and off by the time it gets here - a real pity.