Road Trip Day 9 - Kaduna to Abuja

Our last day on the road!!

Today was a pretty easy day - a short 2hr drive down to Abuja to catch an evening flight back to Lagos.

The fuel shortage was still holding everyone up, with crowds of people starting to loose patience at having to wait days for petrol. Unfortunately, unless they wanted to pay tow or three times the price and buy at black market prices, then everyone could do nothing but wait...

For some reason, everyone really seems to take pride in their roundabouts in Nigeria. The rest of the road infrastructure can be falling to bits and they'll be spending money on blokes cleaning concrete and planting new flowers and grass in these bloody roundabouts!! Here's a couple of architectural masterpieces in Kaduna, painted patriotically in the colours of the Nigerian flag...

they really like their football around here!

So, back on the highway down to Abuja, and no surprises, there was plenty of stuff going on...

This is a prototype of a new car run on bio fuels made entirely of grass...

Now, you see some stupid sh!t on the roads around here, but this takes the cake. We were doing well over a hundred when we caught up to these guys... unbelievable

Zuma rock is a rather imposing rock on the side of the road as you approach Abuja from the North. We'd been on our way there at the start of the trip when we started leaking fuel - but after driving 2000km we'd made it(the long way!) Apparently there's supposed to be somewhere to stop and have a look around and whatnot, but typically, there was nothing to be seen so we just pulled of the side of the road for a few snaps...

(click on the photo for the full size version)

We'd been reading a bunch of stuff from the Abuja branch of the Nigerian Field Society (we're members of the Lagos group). They suggested all sorts of villages around Abuja that do pottery and weaving etc that you could drive to. We had the instructions on how to get to a few places, but as there's no real roads - let alone signage etc - the directions only ever consist of "turn left at the third mango tree past a mud hut on your left..." Problem is, if someone cuts down the mango tree or the mud house falls down (which happens all the time), then you've got no idea where you're going.

Believe it or not, that happened to us!! So after driving through the bush for an hour or so we gave up and headed in to Abuja for lunch. We'd heard of an area that had a few places that you could get decent chop so we figured why not? On arriving there, though, we discovered that the local government in their infinite wisdom had decided to bulldose the entire area. All that was left was empty land and piles of rubble - a whole city block worth!! Luckily there was a little general store / bakery / Mr biggs near by.

Unperturbed by our complete lack of success for today, we headed back out into the countryside to try and find one of these villages that specialized in pottery. We won't bore you with the details, but it goes something like this (might sound familiar): drove around in the middle of nowhere, no signs, asked for directions, locals had no clue, kept driving around...

Anyway, we made if to small village called Ushafa, and despite it being Sunday afternoon a villager was more than happy to show us around their little pottery workshop. Unfortunately no-one else was really doing any work and it didn't look like much had been happening for a couple of months. Regardless, this guy was extremely nice and fired up his little pottery wheel to show us how it's done...

This guy was really good on the pottery wheel. In literally under a minute he'd knocked up this little pot "there you go!", sure... it's just that easy

After another wild goose chase looking for somewhere to buy some of the pots the local villages make (they didn't have any at Ushafa), we were all knackered and just needed to kill a couple of hours before the flight. Best place to do that? Why the local Hilton Hotel of course!! After staying in dingy 3 by 4 shoe boxes and having bucket showers for the last week, we thought that it might be interesting to see what expats get up to in Abuja - bad move. Covered in dust and not smelling too fresh, we ere surrounded by ultra white people lazing around pools and wasting money while the local "boys" waited on them hand and foot. The whole thing would probably make an interesting social experiment, but we were more concerned that we were now paying $6 for a beer, rather than the $1.50 longnecks we'd been enjoying.

The end of a long, but very rewarding drive through Northern Nigeria. We know we'll never do it again, and that our next break will be out of the country to somewhere slightly more relaxing. But unlike so many folk in Lagos, at least we gave it a go and saw pretty much every side of Nigeria we could - and survived in one piece!