{"id":543,"date":"2007-01-29T19:09:49","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T19:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/archives\/2007\/01\/29\/lagos\/"},"modified":"2007-01-29T19:09:49","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T19:09:49","slug":"lagos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/archives\/2007\/01\/29\/lagos\/","title":{"rendered":"Lagos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the way to and from Ghana we passed through Lagos.  I found it much less chaotic than its reputation had led me to expect.  Maybe if it&#8217;s the first place you see in Nigeria it&#8217;s a bit overwhelming but to me it&#8217;s just like any Nigerian city but on a larger scale.<\/p>\n<p>One odd experience was visiting the Palms shopping centre, which is packed full of very wealthy Nigerians.  It has shops just like you&#8217;d see in Western Europe, including a supermarket.  I thought it was interesting that a lot of the prices in the supermarket were actually lower than in ordinary Nigerian markets.  Of course, the people who&#8217;d benefit most from these lower prices probably can&#8217;t afford transport to get to Palms and might not be allowed in even if they reached it.<\/p>\n<p>Transport was easy, although Marebec and Dave had been there before and knew where to get buses to various parts of the city.  We took one very scary <a href=\"\/_static\/site\/NGglossary#okada\" class=\"glossary\">okada<\/a> in the night, weaving in and out of traffic at speed and hurtling over potholes.  I wouldn&#8217;t mind if I had any confidence that the riders were in control of their bikes but they&#8217;re pretty poor, always either on full throttle or the brake, on sandy roads that means you keep sliding about.<\/p>\n<p>The bridges are one of the distinctive features of Lagos, especially the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Third_Mainland_Bridge\">Third Mainland Bridge<\/a>.  This is the one we took to the airport, it is (or was, not sure) the longest in Africa and is apparently deteriorating badly due to a total lack of maintenance.  It&#8217;s quite strange to be in a bus, hurtling across a dual-carriageway concrete bridge and looking at stilt houses in the lagoon on one side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the way to and from Ghana we passed through Lagos. I found it much less chaotic than its reputation had led me to expect. Maybe if it&#8217;s the first place you see in Nigeria it&#8217;s a bit overwhelming but to me it&#8217;s just like any Nigerian city but on a larger scale. One odd [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","category-vso"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}