JOYS OF TRAVEL

                                              JOYS OF TRAVEL

It sounds daft, but I had been planning this trip for a long time. Lagos to London, I had done by plane countless times; just once, I thought, let me try it by land. On the map, it does not look that difficult. What I was fixated on was to drive from Lagos across the River Niger to Sokoto and then into Niger Republic and Mali and then through Timbuktu to Tangiers. This would be the most difficult part of the trip. I reckoned the whole trip back to London would not take more than a month. This was in the days when border crossings were more leisurely guarded.

The vicissitudes of my job then distracted me for some months until eventually I had all but given up on the idea. I had always wanted to check out Timbuktu. Sounded like a romantic kind of place. And it is almost in Nigeria, if, that is, you count the presence of the River Niger as being Nigeria. Timbuktu must also be a pretty safe place to visit. Someone had told me that about 300 saints are buried there. Admittedly, he said they were Muslim saints. But a saint is a saint, isn’t he, in any religion?

So, one evening, on a whim, I decided to go for a walk on Bar Beach, It used to be called Victoria Beach in the days of yore. This beach is miles long and heavily attacked by the Atlantic Ocean. You need to be a good swimmer to get your feet wet here. What interested me this evening was the report that a ship loaded with cement had beached itself, its crew having tired, apparently, after more than 100 days at sea, 80 of which bobbing up and down outside the Port of Lagos. waiting, with 400 other cement-laden ships, to be unloaded.

Sure enough there it was, a vessel of some antiquity beached firmly at the back of the Eko Hotel, almost as if it were an extension of it. Normally, at this time of the day, the beach is lightly utilized, but this evening quite a crowd had gathered to relieve their curiosity. I had never heard of such an event happening before or heard speak of it.

“Well, look at that, Fancy coming all this way to see a ship on the beach,” I heard a young man say to his wife. It was his accent that caught me. It was English. They did not look like anyone I knew, and she had a Union Jack hat on. None of us goes around Lagos wearing a Union Jack. After all, those days are over. Overcome, therefore, with a simple desire to know who they were, I initiated a conversation.

“Hello, I just heard you talking to your wife; you’re from England, aren’t you? I asked inanely.

“Yes, that’s right. My name is Andrew and this is my wife, Jane. We’re on our way from England to South Africa,” he told me.

“You just stopped off in Lagos to visit someone?” I asked.

“Oh. No! Nothing, like that,” he assured me. “We are going overland. We just stopped here in Lagos, but we don’t know anyone here. We are about halfway through our trip from London to Capetown.”

I swallowed hard. What did I just hear? Of course, this conversation could not be left on Bar Beach. I invited them to the house we were staying in so that I could understand the full gist of this fabulous journey from England across to Lagos. As it turned out, they had come by a completely different route from the one I had been working on. Their route had taken them from Morocco, through Mauretania, Senegal, and along the West Coast via Ghana to Lagos. For such a journey, they had bought a Landrover and suitable equipment, in case they got stuck in route somewhere.

“When did you set out and how long had you been planning this trip?” I asked.

“Well, how long is it Jane we’ve been putting this together?”

“About 18 months. And we have been traveling now for nearly 10 weeks,” she told me.

“Ten weeks! And I was thinking a month, max.”

“No, ten weeks is probably the quickest it can be done. And if you were planning to go via Timbucktu, it would take you longer than that,” Andrew said.

“So how are you going to get to Capetown.?” I asked.

“We are going to Enugu and then into Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Angola, Namibia, and then into Capetown. This will be the longest part of the whole trip.”

They told me that the most difficult part of the trip from London was going through the Western Sahara Desert. They had got stuck a few times.”

We sat talking until after midnight and then I excused myself as I had to get up early. I told them they could stay as long as they wanted to do.”

The next day when I came home from work, I found a note they left for me thanking me for my hospitality and letting me know that they will send me another note when finally they reached the end of their long trip. I did get a note from them. It had taken them another four months to reach Capetown. But they had arrived safe and sound.

During the next few years, all thoughts of my contemplating such a journey never entered my mind. Having met with Andrew and Jane and hearing their story, I came to realize that such an undertaking was not for beginners. I managed to get through the rest of my time in Nigeria without it ever nagging my mind again.

I ended up being offered a job in Geneva, Switzerland. A great place; my kids even went to School there. It was winter when we arrived. None of us had ever skied before but we soon learned. My wife and I bought the long thin skis and started off cross-country skiing. But, man, I tell you that is work. Plowing through the snow and dragging those skis is no joke. After a season of that, we decided we would have a go at the real thing; so we bought real skis, like those the kids had, and they were enjoying whizzing about on the steepest slopes. It was the difference between sitting in a golf cart and driving a Ferrari.

So the next ski season we were out on our real skis. My wife took it easy, but I went straight down one of the slopes like I was on fire. My problem was getting back up again. I could not master the ski lifts for anything. Every time I stood ready to take off, I would fall flat on my face.

“Let’s take the ski lift,” says my wife. So one Sunday we find ourselves waiting for a ski lift to arrive. There were the four of us and another couple. It was early, so not many skiers were around yet.

The ski lift arrives and we all piled in. On a beautiful morning, like we had that day, it was wonderful looking out over the mountains covered in snow. The lift was shaking about a bit prompting my wife and me to sit for the rest of the trip up the mountain. I heard the other couple speaking about having skied the day before.

“Excuse me, but have we not met before somewhere?” I asked them. I could not contain myself because they looked quite familiar to me.

“Well, to tell the truth,” the man said,” when you were getting into the lift, and the way you said something to your wife I would say we have met. Your face looks like I’ve seen you before. What do you say, Jane?”

“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “You are Andrew and Jane. You were on your way to South Africa in your jeep, and stayed with us overnight.”

So, there we were, halfway up a mountain in Switzerland, four people talking about that chance overnight meeting in Lagos Nigeria, four years ago.

 We arrived at the top of the mountain and immediately made for the restaurant there, where we sat down while they sold us all about their trip to South Africa. The kids were soon bored and took off to do what they had come for, skiing. We spent the whole afternoon hearing about their journey through Nigeria and all the other countries they had to pass through. It had taken them nearly three months to get to Capetown. It was a wonderfully exciting trip, they said.

“I bet you did not do the return journey overland,” I asked them.

“No. You are right,” Andrew told us. “We flew back but not before selling the jeep to a couple who were planning on doing just that sort of a trip.

“It is amazing that there are people around who are so adventurous,” said my wife.

“As a matter of fact, on our trip, we met six other couples going on the same journey as ourselves. We did not all of us join up together, but it was so interesting hearing other stories about places we had passed through.”

At the end of the day, we had spent the entire time on that mountain talking about their trip. When our kids came, we all descended together on the ski lift. It was only then, after all this talk of adventurous trips, that I asked Andrew and Jane, would they ever do something like that again, Andrew told us,

“As a matter of fact when we get back to England from this holiday, we are going to make arrangements with another couple to travel to Russia on horseback!”