Ikorodu backwaters

We took a trip with the Nigerian Field Society which is a kind of like an anthropological / environmental society that does cultural trips around the place (and lots of bird watching). Anyway, they get people from all over the place (heaps of Germans).

After getting up early on a Sunday (and I mean early - we had to over on the mainland to meet everyone by 8:00) we drove to the back of Ikorodu, which is about an hour out of Lagos proper on the other side of the lagoons, and went down to the local witch doctor's, checking out her wares and learn a little about what a Babalawo (priestess) does. All I can say is that she was selling some interesting sh*t!! It was basically a whole bunch of dead stuff put in old gin bottles with a bit of 100 proof alcohol/petrol added - oh yeah, and she had dead rats on sticks too! I'm not sure if they were special lollies for the kiddies or little warnings to other rats that you place around the house (or both - they did look kinda tasty...) Anyway, at the end of the day I didn't buy anything as I figured that a bottle with a dead snake in it and a bunch of strange looking "herbs" weren't what I needed.

If anyone needs anything, I'm not sure if she has a mail order service but we could probably get a curse put on someone if you need it. We did get a blessing from her, which basically involved banging on an old cow bell, a bit of yelling and then her spitting a mouthful of gin at everyone (I'm sure it was sacred gin). I'm not sure if we were supposed to duck, but everyone probably ended up catching something from her rather than curing anything - anyway, it made the locals laugh. I'm always happy to oblige.

Rats on sticks? No really, Rats on sticks!

lots of interesting stuff to make you feel better

party hats anyone?

After we'd had our weekly dose of dead stuff liqueur, we headed a little further down the road (read: dirt tract through small villages and jungle) to the swamps where we were going to have look at a Palm Wine distillery. And before you get too ahead of yourself, no this wasn't like a large factory filled with stainless steel making fine Scottish whisky, oh no.

Apparently, palm wine stills are generally illegal. Well, not so much illegal as there so much red tape and bribes to get a permit that you're better off having an illegal setup - hence the exotic swamp location, accessible only by canoe.

I must say, the mangrove swamps around here (apart from the obvious stuff like malaria and whatnot) are really beautiful. And this place was far enough from the city that the water was actually clean - not drinkable, but cleaner that normal.

swampy the swamp

canoeing through the mangroves

it was a pretty serious mangrove swamp

(I hear it's a great spot to hide a moonshine operation...)

So after a good quarter of an hour on a very peaceful and scenic Nigerian gondola ride, we arrived at a small village on the shore of the large lagoon between Lagos and Epe where they make wine from raffia palms. Now this isn't the normal way it's done where the sap is tapped into buckets of palms as they grow naturally, this was a little less environmentally friendly.

Basically, these guys don't like climbing (or something) and so they just cur the trees down, make a hole and wait for the sap to run out over a month or so.

mmm tasty looking sap...

sap then gets put in plastic bins for a bit to mature from "bloody awful"

to something similar to brake fluid

Then just to make sure it's strong enough they distill the brake fluid into pretty much pure ethanol. Interestingly, the actual still was a good couple of hundred metres from the village. I'm not sure whether it was to hide it from anyone snooping around, or because the whole thing really looked like an explosive death trap! Seriously, the place basically smelt like high grade rocket fuel - just a sniff was more than enough to finish you off for the weekend...

But we all survived and had a great time and I'm pretty sure we'll all be happy if we don't drink any palm wine for another fifty years.