Zebrafish

Wednesday Nov 27

At 5.30am at first light still before sunrise we moved into the border. The guy from Sierra Leone took longer because going through customs because apparently it is almost impossible to get passports in Sierra Leone nowadays and he was travelling on an ECOWAS identity card. Apparently the postal service doesn’t work any more either since the war.

From there on the road was tarmac, straight and dull. We arrived in Niamey (+1 hour ahead) at 5pm. On the way there were numerous police checkpoints and the driver stopped to buy huge pieces of meat. At one point I had the skinned rear half of a goat in my face in 36 degrees centigrade heat while the driver negotiated a price for a leg which got placed beside me, uncooked or uncovered in the extreme dry heat.

I checked into the heaven scent Catholic Mission Hotel, ate a huge steak & chips, bread, yoghurt and tonic water and went to bed with a slightly puffed face from mosquito bits from sleeping rough.

Thursday Nov 28

Slept soundly and took omelette and coffee on the street. Got some money and went off to the Benin embassy for a visa. Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world Niamey is very pleasant with some wide, tree-lined boulevards, the river Niger passes on the south side and if you wait around you’ll see camels being led through town carrying bales of hay or humans.

After the embassy a street vendor called me over and offered me some bbq beef joint to try. It was delicious so I took a plateful with onions and joined a couple of others at a bench on the street corner. Later spent 3.5 hours on the Internet and wrote plenty about the past few weeks on my online diary website. Went back to the same place for dinner and went to the hotel early to watch French and African TV. Niamey is not a very safe place at night for foreigners since the 1970’s drought caused the displacement of many Tuareg’s into the city for survival there are many of them of them in Niamey trying to make a new life.

Friday Nov 29

Talked to Boniface at breakfast; a friendly guy working at the Catholic school. From there I visited the National Museum and Zoo; a slightly disorganised and ramshackle place but interesting to visit. I watched people building mud walls and constructing traditional huts from wood. There were also displays on Tuareg culture and Niger’s profitable Uranium mining industry in the far remote North.

It was sad seeing animals in cages looking thoroughly pissed off with being there. The chimpanzee looked at me with mournfully questioning eyes and the lions either lay or paced up and down with blank expressions and drab fur hanging off their skinny muscle wasted bodies.

There was the remains of the famous desert tree in the museum, it used to be the only tree to be shown on the Michelin Map of West Africa and was the only tree for thousands of miles until one day a Libyan truck diver crashed into it.

I visited the Franco Niger cultural centre nearby. Here there was a good selection of Art movies, regular live concerts, painting exhibitions, an outdoor café and also the Internet. Afterwards I visited the American cultural centre where I’d read there were chances to watch daily broadcasts of CNN and ABC. But I wasn’t allowed through the steely unfriendly and paranoid security gate until a certain time and not without my passport. As pointed out to me by a German woman I met there sometimes it’s easy to see why America has very friends in this world that it hasn’t paid for.

I then picked up my Benin visa, the people there were great too me. I grabbed a quick yoghurt drink on the way and went for a long walk around town. I ended up at a really great open-air restaurant by the riverside. I ordered steak and chips with chilli and several Niger beers, the ones with famous Giraffes on the front. There are only about 40 giraffes left in West Africa now and they are in the countryside not far out of Niamey. I was joined during my whole meal by the extremely friendly staff and we spoke French for about two hours.

Afterwards they invited me to eat with them their first meal that day after Ramadan. They mixed together cassava flour, spinach, onion, cucumber, tomato and peanut butter into a doughy salad, it tasted great. Then at their insistence one of them walked me back to my hotel after the sun had gone down. In the hotel I met Andrea who is travelling from Morocco to Egypt for seven months and recording pictures and sounds for a slide show she performs. Also met three French girls working here for a few months, they baked a delicious homely vegetable crumble with fruit salad and invited us to join them.

Saturday Nov 30

I had a late start as I had quickly jumped onto the Internet first thing. But then took a taxi to the auto garé Wadata. As the taxi pulled in about four men ran along the side shouting destinations and questions through the window. The minibus was quite comfortable; I got talking to a Niger man while waiting for it to fill. He was studying to be a doctor and wanted to move to the USA, UK, Holland or Belgium but not stay here or go to France. On the journey I sat next to a deaf lady with her small boy, she’d bought some small green fruits and kindly offered me some.

Later a Nigerian man started a conversation with me. He was very evangelical about god and Christianity but seemed unable to believe that I didn’t believe in any God. I then had a similar conversation with him to one I’d had with another man from Nigeria I’d met in Kumasi. After introducing himself he tells me that I am his colonial master. I point out that I was only born in 1972 so how can this be. With no subtlety he then immediately invites me as a guest to his country. When I tell him no thanks he immediately asks me to return the favour and invite him to the UK. This is clearly because Nigerians cannot get visas for the UK without an invite from a natural but then he has the cheek to act offended in a rude obnoxious manner. We looked up his hometown in my Lonely Planet guidebook, it was described there as a virtual wasteland, he didn’t say much about this. I’ve often heard that Nigeria can be a dodgy place to visit, it was recently voted the most corrupt country in the world and besides that they charge British citizens $200 just for a visa.

I’ve found the bus stations here very enthusiastic places. At the border town of Gaya I took a moped to the border. My backpack was balanced between themselves and the front wheel and we zoomed along through town in-between cattle crossing the road and alongside the early evening river Niger.

Clothing

Since I’ve been here and especially in Southern Ghana it’s has been amusing to see so many T-shirts been worn advertising events that have happened in Europe or the United States. Olympic Games, charity walks and IT company promotions. Everything that’s been given away to charity shops in the developed world. There is also plenty of traditional clothing and thankfully I can’t see this changing much. The traditional clothes are beautiful, the designs incredibly colourful and their loose cotton fit practical for the heat and very African.