Caboose

When I was at the skillshare workshop in Akwanga the other week, Tracey was talking about a trip down to the South-South she had been planning and said she was looking for people to join her. A few weeks later Tracey, Jenny and I met up in Abuja to start the two-day journey to Akassa.

We took the ABC Transport coach to Port Harcourt, much more comfortable than the bush taxis we normally use. The coaches are the same ones most of the companies in Chile used, made in Brazil by Marcopolo, with air conditioning and reclining seats. They even served us a meal on board and showed videos recorded from satellite TV.
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My colleague Tayo got married to his girlfriend Bisi at the weekend and I was invited to Akure to attend both the traditional engagement and the reception the next day.

One of the staff buses from FRCN picked us up outside Radio House on Friday morning and we all piled in for the (roughly) six-hour journey down to Akure, in Ondo state. The bus was much more comfortable than public transport, we had a seat each and it didn’t get too hot. We even stopped for a while at Lokoja, so I managed to get some fried yam and akara for lunch.

We arrived just in time to get changed into Nigerian traditional dress and walk over to the engagement ceremony with Tayo (the pictures were all taken by Jonah):

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The College of Education in Akwanga has three VSOs working there, I’ve visited them before. Sue had organised a two-day workshop for the education volunteers and their counterparts (the Nigerians they work with) to share skills and experiences. I was invited along to provide IT support, producing a CD with all the documents that people had brought along.

Accomodation had been organised for us at the Roma Z guest house in Akwanga and we even had our own armed guard from the (in)famous Mobile Police (Mopol). Tracey did an excellent job of chasing up the staff at Roma Z to make sure everything was OK, especially the water supply.

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I spent the weekend up in Kaduna, a couple of hours north of Abuja. We were visiting Paul, a Canadian volunteer who has been training teachers at the school for the deaf there. He’s finishing soon so he had organised a leaving party. Here’s a picture of Paul in his house and a random street scene from Kaduna.

Mary and I set off on Friday afternoon, took a taxi out to Jabi motor park and quickly found a bush taxi going to Kaduna. It was a pretty comfortable journey, they only put three of us in the middle row of seats rather than the usual four. As we approached Kaduna one of the windscreen wipers broke (it was raining a bit), so the driver switched them off and obviously couldn’t see very well. When Mary complained his solution was to speed up so the water was blown off the windscreen.

Paul met us at the bus stop and walked us back to the school, where he is living in a converted office. Tracy (from Gindri) and Karen (from Jos) arrived shortly after us.

Friday night was quite relaxed, we headed out to a bar called PDP (the same as Nigeria’s dominant political party, not sure why), had very spicy fish and chips and washed it down with a few beers. At the bar we met up with various other people, including Joanne (formerly VSO with FRCN, now with the BBC in Kaduna) and Henrietta (working with Marebec at FRCN).

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Just in case anyone is thinking of coming out to visit me here in Nigeria I’ve added a page with some advice.

Let me know if there’s any other information you think should be on that page.

On Easter Sunday a few of us Abuja-based VSOs travelled up to Usuma Dam for a picnic. This is the main water supply for Abuja, but is actually quite a pleasant place to go.

Update: added the pictures…

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After a late lunch with Mum and Dad at Edinburgh I said goodbye and got the 1610 shuttle to London Heathrow.

I’m now stuck in Terminal 4, my flight to Abuja doesn’t leave until after nine. I’m very, very bored. I’ve wandered round the shops, I’ve had a coffee.

There aren’t enough seats, it’s too hot and the keyboard on this BT internet terminal is atrocious (but at least it’s cheaper than using the WiFi hotspot).

Time for some more wandering and maybe a pint…

As today is a Bank Holiday in England I thought I’d better do something with my long weekend (other than sit around the house watching DVDs). I got on the cheap airline websites a couple of weekends ago and the only place I could get to cheaply was Oslo.

I got back this morning.

Apart from the horribly early starts to catch flights in each direction it was quite fun. I’d have preferred if it didn’t take about 1h45 to get between “Oslo” Torp airport and Oslo, but that’s what you have to put up with when you’re flying with Ryanair.

It’s a nice city, although (as anyone can tell you) very expensive. I stayed at the Haraldsheim youth hostel, which is only about 15 minutes from the central station by bus or tram. It seems to be a very quiet and family-oriented youth hostel, not an Australian to be found anywhere!

The thing I had to see in Oslo was the Fram Museum, the ship used by Nansen, Sverdrup and Amundsen for various voyages of polar exploration.

It’s an interesting museum, with lots of artifacts from the voyage and (refreshingly) it barely mentions Scott. It would be nice if the building was a bit bigger so you could actually see the ship from a bit of a distance but that’s more than made up for by the fact that you can wander around the Fram itself.

More photos…
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I was in Barcelona last weekend, visiting my friend Peter. I took a few pictures but haven’t yet got round to generating an HTML album of them, the image files are in this directory.

I’ve also been playing around with software for creating panoramas from multiple pictures, here’s one of the Sagrada Familia:

Update: Several people have been linking to this picture from their own sites, using up my bandwidth. If you want to use the picture feel free but make a copy in your own web space and credit me (it’s only polite).

Update 18/5/07: I tried being polite but idiots (usually on Blogger) keep linking to the (very large) panorama but displaying it at thumbnail size, using up lots of bandwidth on my site. So I’ve replaced the image with one that lets people know that it’s my picture. I’ve also had to remove the full-size panorama from this site, if anyone wants a copy please contact me.

I used a program called Hugin to create the panorama, not the easiest thing in the world to use, but I got there in the end.

I just got back from a week up in the northwest of Scotland today. It was Cat and Hen’s 30th birthdays and to celebrate a large group of us spent the week in a former hotel now converted to self-catering.

The main activities were drinking, eating and a bit of walking. It was lots of fun. More later…