Natural beauty in Nigeria

Nigeria is an incredibly fertile land, blessed with rich natural parks and breathtaking landscapes. However, Nigeria has not invested in its natural beauty and has over-poached most of its wild animals, for ivory and traditional medicine (juju).

Driving around Nigeria, I was able to see a gloriously beautiful country with steep, jutting hills, rainforest vegetation, endless small-holdings used for yam building a haphazard jigsaw of arable land, dense mango and palm trees and complex, bizarre rock formations.

However, as places to visit and spend quality, relaxed time, compared to the famous tourist destinations in Africa, such as Kenya and South Africa, Nigeria is limited. But as I said, this is to do with the lack of infrastructure at most of their national parks and lack of protection of their tender environment in the face of a huge and expanding human population.

Despite this, I was fortunate to visit a number of beautiful spots in Nigeria. I have already mentioned Gurara Falls in an earlier post; additionally, I visited Yankari National Park and the Kwa Falls near Calabar.

Yankari National Park

After leaving the Disability and You tour group, I head to the Yankari National Park. My guide book indicated that this National Park was the only one of Nigeria’s eight national parks (totalling about 3% of Nigeria’s land) with suitable accommodation and a wildlife viewing truck. It is also home to one of the true highlights of natural Nigeria, Wikki Warm Springs.

Yankari national park is situated in Bauchi State (who’s state motto is “Pearl of Tourism”), about 100km from the capital of the same name. The journey to the Park was a nightmare, read about it in the previous post, so I arrived at Yankari in a less than relaxed state.

Soon after arriving, I went straight for the Wikki Warm Spring with shorts and towel in hand. As I got near to the Spring, which is only a five minute walk from the hotel complex NEPA, in typical fashion, punished me - the power went off. A guy from the local village about 5km away had to come to the hotel to switch on the generator (commonly known as "gens" and mandatory in even the most basic of hotels). So I was standing in the pitch black, listening to baboons in the distance, and grasshoppers and locusts rubbing their legs, sweating profusely in the still air and getting bitten by any flying creature that caught my scent.

When the power returned, I followed a hotel employee down some steep, unsteady, concrete steps to an oasis of calm. The first thing you see is a huge vertical, flat, tan-coloured rock. "The water comes from underneath the rock", the hotel guide gestured, "and flows into this natural swimming pool and empties into the stream further down".

The water is calm, you cannot hear a sound, despite the fact that 4.5 million litres of water a day empties into the pool. Opposite the concrete shelf from which you enter the spring pool, is the untamed world, the jungle, with its trees and bushes creeping over the pool and the distant, but endless, noise of the animal world filling the air. Add the strip lights dotted around concrete shelf, which create unexpectedly spooky, reflections on the surface of the water and the sandy bottom, and the beauty of the spot is surpassed by its eeriness.

My guide returns to the hotel and I am left alone by the side of the pool, a baboon grunts in the background as I get changed and then gradually enter the warm pool.

The pool is kept at 31 degrees Celsius, which is not as hot as you think, but just perfect. Alone, I face my initial fears of this eerie expanse, by swimming all around the pool, even up to the overbearing vertical rock from where the water emerges. There is no life in this pool, no plant life, no fish, just me. Alone and feeling safe, I floated on my back swimming against the gentle stream and gazed into the millions of stars in the unpolluted sky.

Other people arrived, some Hausa men came to enjoy the atmosphere, some young students jumped in and a young girl sat on the side, paddling her feet in the warm water. I stayed alone, floating on my back in the deep end, feeling the physical and mental tension, which had built up from the intense travelling I had done up to this point, release out of me.

Suddenly, the girl who was paddling her feet jumped in loudly, flapped about and made what sounded like distressing sounds. I looked over her way and saw, through my steamed up glasses, that no-one else was in the pool. I listened closely, blocking the jungle sounds out of my head, and swam slowly towards the girl. I called out, the girl latched on to my English and translated her calls from Hausa and gurgled, "Help! Please help!"

So, without fuss, I saved the girl. Panic-stricken she could only utter: "thanks" and "I'm OK now, I'm OK", whilst gesturing me away, wanting to be alone during her vulnerable moment.

I swam for another 20 minutes and on leaving impressed on the girl to leave to, which she does, but only 20 steps behind me. As I get back to the hotel, the story of the incident is ahead of me. I clarified the situation; the duty manager thanked me and raced down to get the girl - one of his colleagues. Students from nearby University of Jos, who saw the life-saving incident, joined me for dinner. They told me why they didn't jump in and save the girl.

"The same thing happened to a friend of ours in Jos" one started.
"A girl was seemingly drowning and our friend jumped in to save her", another continued.
"But it was late and there were no lights."
"And after 10 minutes, we see our friend floating face down in the river! Drowned!"
"So, this evening, we froze not knowing what to do."

Later, I moved to the bar, and the story had made it there. I got a complimentary beer and some shots of Calypso (a Nigerian coconut cream liqueur). But, exhausted, I crash.

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The next morning (25th) was an early start. I made a visit to the Spring Pool, before the early morning game viewing tour at 7.30am. At 6am, the pool is bathed in the early morning light. The water is a perfect, light turquoise. Again it is empty, but this time, with my contacts lenses in and swimming goggles on, I find that there is some life in the pool. By the huge rock, the source of the spring water, are lone fish nibbling on plant growth. Across the pool insects dance on the surface of the water and fallen tree creatures, including one huge millipede, sink and walk around, before drowning and becoming food for the organisms in the sand.

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I persuaded my driver to join me for the game viewing. We were joined by the Jos students and about 10 others, most in their late teens, early twenties. The tour was a joy, less for the wildlife (although we did see a herd of waterbuck - at which point the guide told us about the polygamous ways of the male waterbuck, one male for fifteen females - and a herd of elephants, with, spectacularly, two large males fighting the in road ahead of us), but for the company of the young Nigerians. There approach to the game viewing was not very conventional. Less sincere, eco-friendly, isn't the natural world wonderful, and more of a this is like an amusement park, shouting, laughing, screaming approach. Also, they, in a very Nigerian way, threw their rubbish into the bush and even jumped off the truck to ease themselves!

A down side to the 2-hour trip were the vicious tsetse flies, which administer a nasty needle-like bite. By the end of the two hour trip, we had all slapped on a bit of my DEET and were waving branches around to keep our pick-up truck free of the flies.

Yankari was not a phenomenal experience and is compromised by the difficult journey into the central point (take a 4x4 to get there) and the poor quality of the accommodation. The Wikki Warm Springs were a delight and would have probably counted for my most relaxing time in Nigeria, if someone didn't require saving.

Kwa Falls

Situated about an hours drive north of Calabar, a small city with a sordid slave history, but a friendly atmosphere, is Kwa Falls. The pleasant drive to Kwa Falls takes you through small villages, with waving kids, and men and women looking for lifts between the local trading towns and cities on this route from Calabar up the North West of Nigeria.

The car (a share taxi) dropped me off about 3km from the Falls, from which point the road is a dirt track. I jumped on an okada (motorcycle taxi) to the Falls and arranged for the driver to pick me up two hours later.

The okada dropped me at the top of the Falls. The steep, rapid, white foaming falls are situated at the edge of Nigeria's dense rainforest, which is considered to be as dense as that in Brazil. Either side of the Falls are tall trees competing for sunlight. All forest sounds are drowned by the thundering sound of the Falls.

There are about 150 old concrete steps, that are being torn apart by the gradual, but relentless, force of nature, down to the river below the Falls. The steps are somewhat of an assault course. The difficulty in negotiating the broken steps and the rickety, rusty hand rail is compounded by the numerous biting flies and ants in this rainforest terrain. Getting to the bottom is initially a bit disappointing. The rainy season has raised the level of the water to the penultimate step and there is no decent space to sit and enjoy the view.

The river around the stairs is remarkably calm. The river is about 50 metres wide and is steaming downhill from the momentum of the Falls. But 10 metres around the steps is a lagoon-like space, where the water is sheltered by a jutting bank upstream, formed by a huge overhanging tree bathing in fabulous sunlight.

So, with biting insects frustrating me and two hours to kill, I get into my swimming shorts and jump in this river. The water is cool and immediately the insect bites are soothed. A gentle current is pushing me, safely, back into the bank. I construct a rope from a branch from a parasitic climbing tree and venture out into the river. However, this attempt to venture out to the edge of the sheltered area is frightening, due the force of the river, and, instead, I just paddle around the area near to the bank and sit comfortably neck deep on some submerged rocks.

The spot is awe-inspiring. Whilst you cannot see the Falls from this spot, due to the jutting-out bank that creates the lagoon effect, the river roars past like a rapid. You can just see the top of another waterfall downstream and the white mist rising from it. Dense foliage is all around, with trees jutting high into the sky, with their precious energy-transforming leaves sitting only at the top of the long tree trunks. Birds occasionally swoop down and sit on a nearby rock or low-lying branch to take a sip of water. Dragonflies dance around looking to eat the smaller insects walking on water.

There seemed to be no river life in my part of the river. Although sand and fine plant and tree debris was being thrown towards me in huge quantities making the visibility in the river nil. As such, the river, through swimming goggles, was a dark mass and my mind occasionally wandered to think about the possibility of nasty creatures, such as crocodiles, salivating nearby. I cleared these thoughts from my mind and enjoyed the time I was there and before I knew it an hour and a half had passed.

The walk back up the 150 steps was gruelling; I had exhausted myself in the river - mainly from the energy spent keeping warm in the cool river. At the top I found my okada driver waiting at the top enjoying the view of the Falls. We paused together, me gasping, to catch a final glace at the beauty of Kwa Falls.