Caboose

When I move to a new place I like to walk around to get my bearings and develop a feel for where I am. So on Saturday I decided to go for a stroll around Kaduna.

After a morning of washing clothes I took a car to Kawo junction and then a minibus to the French Café. I had lunch there as a little treat after last weeks illness. They have a lovely bakery and even real coffee. The prices for the bakery products are reasonable, NGN 120 for a cheese croissant and NGN 150 for a mini-pizza, but they charged NGN 200 for a Sprite (usually NGN 35 in Kaduna) and NGN 300 for an espresso. Nearby was this sign:


Then I walked into the city centre, stopping at various bookshops to look for a street map of the city. Bookshops in Nigeria are one of those things that seem odd to people coming from the UK. Most of them sell only religious and management books, so unless you want advice on how to live your life or run your business you are out of luck. I got lucky and found one shop selling a poor-quality and out of date map of the city.

My other task for the trip was to find out prices for bicycles. I’ve been thinking a bike would be a good way to get around the NTI campus and the surrounding area and even for the occasional trip into town. I spotted a few bike shops and even checked the prices of motorbikes (NGN 62,000 for one of the standard Jincheng 100cc things). I miss my motorbike and keep having to resist the temptation to buy one here.

As I kept walking south out I realised I was getting close to the railway station and decided to go there. The main building at Kaduna Junction station is quite new, opened in 1990, and there were quite a few people hanging around but no sign of any employees. Fares to various destinations were chalked on a board above the empty ticket office. I was very surprised when, as I sat drinking a Coke, I heard a train coming in.

I eventually discovered that some of the people hanging around were in fact Nigerian Railways Corporation staff. The train that had come in was bringing a load of empty flat wagons, to be loaded with new Peugeot cars at the assembly plant in Kaduna and taken to Lagos. It seems that there have been no passenger services for some time but they’re hoping to start again.

Walking back into town I found some bicycle shops, it seems that a basic Chinese single-speed bike will be NGN 10,500 and one with gears is NGN 15,500. Of course those are their first prices so should come down with a bit of haggling.

The central market in Kaduna is impressively big, stretching all the way from Ahmadu Bello Road down to the railway lines, with illegal stalls across the lines. It seemed quite quiet on Saturday afternoon but there were still lots of people asking what I was looking for and greeting me.