Post date: Aug 17, 2014 3:19:11 AM
[Of all the many weekend trips to visit other PCVs, this is one of the most memorable.]
Yenagoa is the most isolated province in the Eastern region. It has one "road" now under construction, of 17 miles length. This province is located in the delta of the river Niger—soil much less manageable than the Mississippi delta, according to a Louisiana pipe-line engineer. I crossed the ferry at Mbiama at 1:30 and got 8 miles down this road before I could go no further on my 1964 Honda CB125. [The clay stuck to the tires and jammed between tire and fenders.]
Abandoning the motorcycle by the side of the road, I decided to trek the remaining 10 miles, as a Nigerian trader was passing, and said he could reach the town by dark. About two miles down the road a rain started, and we ducked into a village for an hour. By then the road was like glue, and it was easier to walk in bare feet than sandals [which were sucked off my feet]. After eight miles of trekking, and trekking, and...my feet were too tired to walk much farther, so I borrowed a bike and half pushed, half rode into the college there. It was 6:45 when I arrived. [My hosts said they had heard I was coming. Amazing to me!]
After a good night's sleep and a chat the next morning, it started pouring (just as I was about to leave) and continued to pour for two hours. I started back at 12:30 on the bike. I had decided to get a bicycle taxi back to my Honda. Bicycles are all thin wheeled English bikes, and are used for a great deal of the heavy hauling here. Two hundred pounds of wood, yams, coffins, or people is not an unusual load. So I rode on the drier places, and walked around the muddier places for 8 miles. When I got to where I had left the Honda [locked], it wasn't there, and a villager came up from behind to say they had ‘helped‘ by dragging it to their village (on the wrong side of the mile-long mud hole) to ‘protect’ it. It cost me $2 to free my transport from these extortionists and a couple of shillings for some boys to ‘help’ me back thru the muck.
You may have heard of the naive simplicity of the natives, etc, but it is all lies, lies. They are very friendly and willing to help anyone, as long as they get good money for it. I was tempted—when the extortionists wanted $14 to recover my bike—to leave it and report it stolen and recover the insurance. I managed to talk them down only because I had only one pound in my pocket at the time.
Anyway, I got out—five hours after I started the 17 miles—and then had to drive the almost 200 miles home at night. I had promised Mick, whom I left with a friend in lgrita, I would take him back so he could teach the next morning, and we arrived at 12:45 am, Monday morning, quite tired. Say, but there is nothing like riding in the open air to keep one awake!
The week before I realized that one thing I really miss is talking to intelligent women occasionally. We rode back from Enugu to Owerri with Ellie, then in Umuahia had dinner with Johnnie and Nancy. It helps—for a couple of days. I wondered why this point didn’t come up at the conference the week before, until I remembered all the girls and married couples that were there, and realized that they had moderated the frustrations of all the lonely men enough that we forgot for a while.