Week 11 - Jan. 20th - 26th
Day 71 - Big Milly's Backyard to Accra to bush-campDay 72 - bush-camp to Ghana/Togo border to Lome
Day 73 - day in Lome
Day 74 - Lome to Togo/Benin border to Grand Popo
Day 75 - day in Grand Popo
Day 76 - Grand Popo to Ouidah to Cotonou
Day 77 - day in Cotonou
Week 12 - Jan. 27th - Feb. 2nd
Day 78 - Cotonou to AbomeyDay 79 - Abomey to Benin/Nigeria border to to Abeokuta
Day 80 - Abeokuta to Ibadan to petrol station in Ekiti region
Day 81 - petrol station to Lokoja to bush-camp
Day 82 - bush-camp to Abuja
Day 83 - day in Abuja
Day 84 - day in Abuja
If you were to ask most of the people on the truck what comes to mind when they think of Ghana, I reckon that the most likely answer would either be 'Fan Milk' or 'funny shop names'. I'll get to the funny store names later, lets start with the marvel that is Fan Milk. Fan Milk is nothing more than a brand of ice cream and frozen yogurt that is widely available in Ghana. Not just available in shops either but on almost every street corner. Locals riding bicycles with freezer boxes on the front transport it around selling it and also advertising their presence with little horns, the equivalent of the sound of the ice cream van, and sometimes people patrol the streets on foot with a freezer bag full of the stuff. You take the small bags and then bite a corner off, sucking the treat out of the small hole. But what makes Fan Milk so great is not its staggering availability, or the delicious taste, or the fact that it costs about 0.40 Ghanaian cedis (less than £0.18 pence) but all of the above. One of our favourite passtimes when on the road and stuck in traffic is leaning out of the truck windows and hailing a Fan Milk guy to come over and sell us his wonderful frozen snack treats. Often we've resorted to yelling out of the window and screaming at Gav to stop driving because we've just spotted a salesmen on the side of the road. We then lean down as far as we can, it's a big truck remember, to make the exchange before Gav is forced to rejoin the slowly plodding traffic.
One of the other reasons Fan Milk was so special to us while in Ghana was the fact that we were suffering under the misapprehension that it was only available in Ghana. As we approached the border between Ghana and Togo we wolfed down what we thought would be our last ever Fan Milks. As it turned out it was also widely sold in Togo and Benin, and for just as little in price also! The tradition of stopping at every opportunity for a frozen snack treat continued unabated as we carried on. Don't forget that we were in some seriously hot and humid weather so ice creams were just about the nicest treats we would come across, along with cold beer and ice-cold soft drinks.I also mentioned Ghana's other charmingly distinguishing feature: ridiculously pious business names. Storefronts and shops all along the roadside in Ghana had some hilariously religious sounding names. Names like 'Jesus Loves You Boutique' or 'In God's Image Barber' were fairly standard but some names really stuck out. Two of my favourites were 'Thank You Jesus Riveting In Car Decor Enterprises' and 'God Can Weld and Fabricate Ent.' The much more scathing 'No Food For Lazy Man Supermarket' provided us all with a good laugh, along wit the absurdly long store title: 'Mama Gladys Provisions and Plastics Store With God All Things are Possible'. Other displays of piety were displayed by most cab and van drivers who usually had some kind of random motto splayed across the back window. My favourite was 'Jesus Power'. I Imagined Jesus hurtling through the air like Superman, loudly exclaiming 'JESUS POWER' shortly before smiting Satan with an almighty punch. We were almost a little disappointed after leaving Ghana to find that the Togolese weren't nearly as devout as their English speaking neighbours, or if they were then they didn't show it. Nor were the people of Benin. However we still had Fan Milk so we were all very very happy!
Togo: So narrow it's in danger of breaking in half
So here we were, getting ready to leave Big Milly's and Ghana itself, but first we had to pick up the new arrivals. We returned to the agreed meeting point, the Accra Mall once again, and I passed the time by watching Avatar for a second time (told you I liked it!). After returning to the truck we were all reunited, Dave had returned, so had New Mike and our new arrival, Martin, had also arrived without a hitch. We bush-camped that night and the next day we found ourselves at the Ghana/Togo border reasonably early in the morning. As usual the border crossing was a tedious and drawn out process and it wasn't until much later in the day that we found ourselves in the 50 mile wide country of Togo.
Our entire experience of Togo was based on its capital: Lome, and the aforementioned 50 miles of road that headed along the coast. Since this narrow but tall country extends roughly 350 miles north away from the coast I can hardly say that my experience of Togo is anything but scant. After all we barely even lost sight of the ocean. Once again we managed to talk a hotel into letting us use their pool and camp in the parking lot. We spent a couple of nights in Lome, exploring the city and eating Fan Milk. The highlight was eating Fan Milk. With little else on offer in Lome it wasn't long before we found ourselves crossing the border in the record time of 40 minutes. Now keep in mind that was the time it took to check out of Togo AND into Benin, two procedures that usually take many hours each! We found a delightful beach resort just across the border in a small town called Grand Popo. One of the tours offered was a boat tour of a nearby lagoon and the surrounding villages. We headed off the next morning with our guide and boarded our vessels, a pair of small dugout canoes that held about 8-10 people each. We glided silently around the lagoon in our punt driven miniature ships and made our way to a tiny little cluster of huts on the shore where some of the locals lived. Refreshments were provided by a couple of sprightly young children who climbed the high palm trees above us and lopped off several large clumps of coconuts for us to drink and eat. Their tree climbing skills certainly made the rest of us look bad and their machete skills even more so. They hacked open the coconuts with ease and with such speed and force that I was quite astonished that any of them still had all of their fingers attached to their hands. Later we returned to the beach and I spent the day once again lounging around on the beach. Hey just because I've been on holiday for most of my adult life it doesn't mean I'll ever get bored of relaxing!Ouidah: Most pointless town in the world
Next stop was the town of Ouidah. It seems that we had been led to believe that there were actually things worth seeing in Ouidah so we made the mistake of agreeing to stop there for 4 hours, about 240 minutes too long in most peoples opinion. First 'attraction' was the museum, quite possibly the most tedious, boring and monotonous museum in all of creation. Some of the exhibits looked like they were cobbled together in a primary school workshop, especially one rather tacky looking tapestry located in the dank and musty lower floor of the building. We all walked out shaking our heads, upset that we had all ventured in at the same time, thereby eliminating the possibility of warning the others to not bother with the ridiculously yawn-inspiring place. We walked down towards the next stop: the python temple. Kev was already getting into a furious argument with a local who had tried to charge him 1000 CFA (about 1.80 Euros) for taking a photograph of a statue by the side of the street. He eventually had to delete the photo although I personally would have just ignored him and walked off! We reached the python temple and this time sent a couple of people in ahead to see if it was worth the price. Since they tried to charge an egregious 5000 for taking in a camera they didn't bother doing so and once again they came out shaking their heads. We returned to the truck and spent the rest of the four hours waiting to leave, quite a remarkably tedious stop to say the least! We made our way to Cotonou, one of the two capitals of Benin and stayed there an couple of days in order to get some more visas. We then headed north to a small town called Abomey where we stayed one final night. It also rained again and once again I danced around like a chump while everybody else just watched!
The next day we crossed over into Africa's most populous country: Nigeria and we soon found out that, due to their excessively large population, they had quite the excess of security guards. Quite an insane quantity of security guards and military police in fact. We literally couldn't go more than three minutes without coming across yet another goddamn checkpoint where we would go through the same tedious procedure each time: they would make up some absurdly implausible excuse about how we were breaking the law and then demand a bribe. Gav's negotiation skills must have been epic because only once in the countless dozens of checkpoints did he actually end up paying any money. Gav managed to talk the fine down from 60,000 Naira (several hundred Euros) to about 500 (about 3)! Let nobody say the man doesn't have diplomatic skills! We soon found out that the police in Nigeria are totally crazy. After our first night in Nigeria, the morning after we had camped next to a small dilapidated church just outside Abeokuta, a military cop from the nearby checkpoint came swaggering along, AK-47 in hand. He asked Phil if he had any gin. Phil was torn between two overwhelming desires: the desire to obey a heavily armed military goon and the desire to refrain from getting the aforementioned heavily armed goon drunk. He lied and told them he didn't have any but perhaps it's not a good idea to be drunk and armed to the teeth. The nutter responded with something along the lines of 'hell no I love being drunk with my AK-47!' or something to that effect. He then returned to the guard post and began stopping traffic by firing warning shots at the ground right in front of them. I am not even coming close to kidding here, this is Nigeria and some of these people are crazy!Of course the majority of the locals, as was the case in all the countries so far, were that they were exceptionally friendly are were welcoming us like royalty as we drove through the crowded towns in our giant lumbering truck.
Ibadan: Chaos Personified in City Form!
Of all the things I would have recommended in Africa I wouldn't have expected to speak so glowingly of the experience we had in the centre of Ibadan. Most travel agents wouldn't slap a poster on their wall recommending their clients to come to Nigeria, get stuck in the middle of one of the largest markets in the continent and then spend hours turtling along surrounded by tens of thousands of Nigerians, not quite sure whether you were going to escape from the endless throngs of people. But that is what did happen and I'm forced to admit that it really was rather good fun. We were driving through Ibadan, a large chaotic (even by Nigerian standards) place when Gav apparently took a wrong turn and we ended up being stuck at the edge of the massive sprawling market right in the centre of town. Sandwiched in by approaching traffic it was too late to turn back so we were forced to carry on, albeit at a snail's pace. Crawling along at about two inches per minute we had quite a different experience from up on the top of the truck than poor old Gav down at the front. We all felt like celebrities, with locals waving enthusiastically at us like we were the most amazing thing they'd ever seen. Gav on the other hand had to deal with nut-jobs banging on the side of the vehicle and offering to guide us through, with the help of a big heavy stick. One crazy dude began headbutting the side of the truck, I don't know what the fuck he had been smoking/sniffing/injecting. It was all rather terrifying for poor old Gav and Summer and really rather delightfully entertaining for the rest of us up on the back.We continued on our way and found ourselves crawling along some incredibly narrow and winding roads at a snails pace. As it grew dark we were forced to set up camp in, of all places, a petrol station with kind permission of the locals! Dave proved that he possessed an uncanny ability to sniff out booze as he managed to find a tiny shack nearby that was prepared to sell us all beers! I think that the lady was actually just selling us drinks right out of her fridge! The next day we carried on, finding some considerably higher quality roads and after one last bush-camp in another church yard we found ourselves in Nigeria's capital: Abuja. We would be here for some time in order to obtain two more of our required visas for the countries ahead and so we had to find a place to stay. Of all places to stay I wouldn't have expected to camp in the employee parking lot of a five star hotel but that was exactly where we wound up! We chose the parking lot of the Sheraton, a huge ugly concrete building with three hundred dollars-a-night rooms and overpriced drinks. Needless to say most of us found other places to drink and eat since we weren't prepared to pay the kind of prices normally endured by those with more money than sense (ie. the regular Sheraton/Hilton/soulless-business-hotel customers). We would spend quite some time in Abuja so we had to find something to do there. A pity since there literally is nothing to do in Abuja unless you count such daily pedestrian pursuits like going to the Mall or the cinema. I did catch a couple of movies though: Sherlock Holmes, which was good, and 2012, which was so awful, so terrible, so utterly catastrophic that it warps all logic and reason and actually becomes hugely entertaining and unintentionally hilarious! Hey like I said, there is nothing to do in Abuja, what would you do in the same situation? We're just here for visas!
kids collecting coconuts 
lagoon trip by dugout canoe 
the crowded Ibadan market
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