Caboose

Had to get up in the night because of mosquitoes and then a bit later with gut cramps, it seems that Club beer may not agree with me.

We had breakfast at the guesthouse, scrambled egg with toast and Laughing Cow processed cheese plus fresh orange juice for ¢16,000.

After collecting Karen from her hotel round the corner we found a bookshop just off the ring road nearby, seems to be mostly second-hand American books and too many self-help titles. We took a taxi to the National Museum to meet Leo (from Kabba), Sarah (a former VSO in Nigeria) and Pat (another priest working in Nigeria). The museum itself was quite small and probably not worth the ¢45,000 entrance fee, although there was an informative section on slavery. The best part of the museum is the restaurant in the grounds, where we had lunch. This was where Leo introduced me to Castle Milk Stout, a very nice local beer.


After lunch Marebec, Dave and I took a taxi down to Jamestown, one of the older parts of town. The lighthouse didn’t seem especially interesting so we went for a walk down to the beach and fishing harbour. This is obviously a pretty poor part of town, the beach and harbour wall were covered in human excrement. The atmosphere was actually vaguely threatening but I’m not sure why. A young guy called Samuel appeared and started chatting to me, he then guided us through the fishing boats. Some of the fishermen were shouting comments, especially at Marebec. Samuel was probably hoping for a dash but he didn’t ask and disappeared when we didn’t offer straight away, I’d have at least invited him for a mineral if he’d hung around a bit.

We walked along the road to Fort Usher, originally a trading post, then a slave fort, then a prison and now being renovated as a tourist attraction. The caretaker showed us around, giving an interesting but occasionally confused tour. He seemed to think that it had been a slave fort right up to independence and that Nkrumah had been held there as a slave rather than as a political prisoner of the colonial government.

The fort had many small cells that had at one time held twenty prisoners, or even more slaves. Sudanese refugees had lived in the fort for a while after the prison was closed, leaving their graffiti mingled with that of the prisoners. The caretaker showed us what appeared to be a former motor workshop where apparently Jerry Rawlings had coup plotters killed by a short drop hanging over the inspection pit with a bit of electrocution to finish them off.

As we strolled east along High Street we passed the Nkrumah Mausoleum park and stopped for fresh coconut. Marebec has been missing this in Nigeria, they only have old coconuts and don’t go in for drinking the juice. I’m not so keen on the jellyish and tasteless fresh coconut flesh but the juice is very refreshing.

We stopped off at the Cultural Cente, which is mostly a large craft market. There was a football game going on in front of it. Lots of stalls with people hassling you to buy things, Dave and I just kept telling them that we were accompanying Marebec and not buying.

The road continued through government buildings to Independence Square which, as the guidebooks all warn, is quite dramatically ugly. After that we’d had enough walking so we took a taxi back to the guesthouse.

After a rest Dave and I went out for a walk and found a little bar at the side of the ring road where we had (very nice) sausage on a stick and Gold Arrow beer. Later on we met Leo and Sarah at Ryan’s Irish Pub. It’s a slightly strange place but it manages an Irish atmosphere, much less horrible than most Irish pubs abroad.