T A B L E+T A L K How do you bridge cultural gaps overseas? Share your methods in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Road Warrior By Dawn MacKeen Frequent flyer guru Randy Peterson shares his secrets (01/12/98) In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great By Michael Wood Tracking Alexander the Great through the Hindu Kush (01/08/98) The Inuit Olympics By Mary Roach Inuit Games: Head Pulls, Knuckle Hops and other madness (01/07/98) Mayan dreaming By Douglas Cruickshank Mind-bending visions in the Yucatan (01/06/98) History and hallucination By Jan Morris Gdánsk stands as a symbol of enduring truth -- and stirring resurrection (01/05/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Wanderlust feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		N I G E R I A N +N I G H T M A R E ++|+P A G E+2+O F +2 Within half an hour, we had left the city behind and were sailing along on a smooth, double-lane highway cutting between groves of low rain forest. The engine emitted a high whine that gave our ride an Indy 500 feel. According to the dashboard, however, we were stationary: The speedometer arrow drooped flaccid; the gas tank read empty; the engine's revolutions per minute were zero. None of the indicators was functioning. Ayos, it soon became apparent, felt no need to pass cars as long as he was on wide, straight stretches of road. But when he sighted a blind bend or, better yet, an oncoming cattle truck bristling with horns and thousand-pound steers, he was suddenly seized with the desire to overtake the vehicle ahead, which he did while leaning on his horn and despite howls of protest from the passengers behind me. The wreckage of four head-on collisions -- which included corpses -- that we roared by in the first hour of our trip did nothing to temper his lust for speed. At times, in fact, so irresistibly did he feel the need to overtake that he passed the car in front of us as it was passing the car in front of it, thereby turning the highway into a three-vehicle-deep wall of death for anything approaching from the other direction. Only the police compelled him to slow down. Every dozen kilometers a checkpoint arose, usually marked by a branch tossed across the road and manned by a pair of flack-jacketed officers. Ayos would decelerate, extend his hand as if for a friendly shake, pass the lead sergeant a balled-up 20-naira note (about 25 cents and popularly called "beer money" in Nigeria), then speed up. We might have been a busload of notorious bandits armed to the teeth, but the police never looked carefully enough to see; their only concern was collecting funds for their evening tipple. Near the city of Ibadan, we came upon a succession of toll booths. As we slowed for them, hawkers would rush forth from their spots at the roadside to run alongside us, shove their wares through our windows and shout "Bre! Bre!" or "Bisqui! Bisqui!" or "Wata! Pure wata!" Ezekiel would lean over me and, glaring superciliously, stab with his finger at a plastic-wrapped bunch of apples or a loaf of bread and bark "How much?" then grab the item and squeeze it. If the price was right and the goods fresh, he balled up a bill and tossed it to the vendor, who usually missed it and had to drop back to snatch it from the ground, evading cars and the stampede of his besandaled colleagues as he did so. After a while Ezekiel had amassed a veritable market's worth of road-bought eatables and sundry other items, including Air Mail envelopes, a Bic pen and a counterfeit Sanyo calculator. After several such melees, near Ilorin, a gang of youths wielding squeegees and orange buckets and wearing fluorescent yellow MR CAR WASH windbreakers stepped into the road. Furrowing their brows, they blocked our path, weighing their implements in hand as if itching for a rumble. Trouble was in the air. Ayos sucked in his gut and maintained speed. The youths dived out of the way at the last minute, but one left behind a nail-studded board. Ayos swerved wildly and missed it, then exploded into Yoruban vitriol. Hanging out the window, driving forward but shouting backward, zigzagging in and out of the opposite lane, he berated the squeegee thugs until they were beyond the reach of his voice and we had scared several oncoming cars off the tarmac. "Pikin chop here," Ayos later announced as we pulled up to a restaurant. The pikin, or toddlers, tumbled out of the back seat like rag dolls, one after another, squatted on the shoulder of the road and loosed a series of tiny yellow rills into the red dust. I walked into the restaurant. Three beautiful and kindly waitresses smiled at me and told me that their only dish was rice. In the meantime, the mothers had unfolded a feast of fruits and bread and cassava on their laps and were feeding their pikin. Noon passed somewhere near the Niger River. Soon after, on the outskirts of a village, we saw a hand-painted sign that read MECHANIKING. Ayos, following its arrow, turned off the road, pounded down a muddy lane, and pulled over a pit next to a shack. "Bearings," he said to me gravely. A half-dozen urchinlike mechanic boys came running out, the leader of whom was brandishing a can of axle grease. He and Ayos began an animated colloquy in pidgin. The other urchins dived into the pit and, with Ayos shouting instructions, started disemboweling the vehicle, tossing its innards onto the concrete, slathering axle grease here and there, hammering and torquing and oiling everything they could lay their hands on. Within 30 minutes whatever had been broken had been properly mechaniked, and we were off again. The road after that deteriorated from smooth asphalt into stretches of craters alternating with mud wallows. Rather than observe the basic bi-directional order of a two-lane highway, Ayos -- and every other driver -- appeared to have decided that it would be best to veer madly from right lane to left and back again to follow the most pothole-free venue, regardless of oncoming trucks, buses and jalopies. The acceleration and deceleration involved made necessary constant gear shifts; Ayos would yank the stick between Ezekiel's legs, time and time again elbowing him in the stomach as he up- or downshifted. "Listen, we must stop for chop," Ezekiel said around 6. Ayos ignored him. We had been on the road 11 hours. Even counting the repair stop, this was too long. I leaned over to Ayos. "What happened to 'eight hours to Kano'? We should have been there by now." He looked resolutely ahead. "To Kano eight hour." Night fell in a rush. Ayos turned on the headlights, which cast forth a feeble yellow glow, flickered, then died. We stopped. A ruckus of advice on what to do erupted from the back seats. Ayos jiggled some wires under the dashboard; the lights flicked on. But after a few more miles they failed again and we were plunged into darkness. We lumbered through a few potholes and halted -- in mid-road. "Don't you think you'd better pull onto the shoulder?" I said to Ayos. He blinked at me, opened his door wide, then climbed half out to get under the dashboard. Seized by a presentiment of danger, I disembarked. The mothers grabbed their tots and did the same. Soon we were all standing on the shoulder. The tots, as usual, squatted and peed. I listened to the chorus of insects and owls and croaking frogs. A truck horn blared from up ahead. Then a horn blared from behind. The mothers hoisted their children off the shoulder in mid-stream and jumped back. We shouted to Ayos: One truck was bearing down on us from the north, a second from the south. Ayos, however, had crawled all the way inside and left the door swinging open in the middle of the road. The headlights flickered on just as the two trucks converged at our minibus. "Hey!" one of the drivers shouted, swerving violently to avoid the rear of our bus. An explosion of glass and tearing metal followed: The truck tore Ayos' door half off its hinges, dislocating it and leaving it wrapped around the nose of the vehicle. Both trucks hurtled on ahead and Dopplered away into the night. The lights then failed for good. Ayos, unhurt, raised his head above the dashboard. He clutched at his sparse hair, and surveying the wrecked door, began a low moan, interrupted with babbled supplications in Yoruba. I joined the other passengers in bending the door back toward something like a closed position. We bound it with rope and climbed inside. "Just manage like that," said the big-headed man to Ayos. "Just manage." Ayos boarded from my side and started up. The passengers showered him with Yoruban abuse, tossing in the choice English phrase for my benefit, I assumed. "You mad man ... You not a sensible man ... Stopping in de road like a fool's fool ..." And so, in utter darkness, down the potholed tarmac we rolled, creaking and scolding. When we reached Kaduna, at 11, in the 16th hour of our eight-hour trip, an odor of sheepshead, cow's hoof and goat guts wafted in from the roadside food stalls. We pulled up to them. A small crowd, many members of which were absent-mindedly chewing on a hoof or sucking on a hank of intestine, gathered around to gawk at our demolished bus. I got out and, wobbly with fatigue, thought about spending the night there. The other passengers were tired, too; they took seats at a food stall and nearly nodded off into their entrails. Ayos finally gave up trying to fix the door and lights. He talked to a nearby station wagon driver, handed him a fistful of naira, then, without explanation, hurled my bags into the wagon's trunk. When I asked him what was going on, he said, "Sorry," and motioned me to get in, which I did. On the way out of Kaduna, I dozed off to dreams peopled by the now snarling and helmeted policemen of the checkpoints we were slowing for and, during my hazy waking moments, tried to forefeel the soft hotel bed awaiting me in Kano. At 1 in the morning we finally reached the outskirts of Kano. The station wagon turned off the road at a MOTOR PARK sign, sloshed across some puddles, rambled past a steel gate and stopped in a mud flat surrounded by the ghosts of old buses and ramshackle trucks. I stumbled out, grabbed my bag and turned to ask the driver where I might catch a taxi for the two-mile ride into the center. He muttered something about it being too late for that and, to my fatigue-numbed consternation, drove away. A soft, warm wind whispered around the lot. There was a tug at my arm. An old man wrapped in a blue Tuareg turban and robe was standing at my side. He leaned into my face. "Taxi? Taxi no," he hissed. "I tink dese hour no moto. Too danger now to commout. But we see." He took my hand and led me along a winding route between puddles silvered by the half-moon and rippling with the breeze. Five taxis stood just outside the gate. He rapped on their windows, but the drivers inside would not answer. "No moto now. Dey no fit to commout. You sleep here." "Where?" I asked, exhausted and exasperated, thinking only of the hotel bed and a hot shower. He grabbed my hand and turned left down a pitch-black alley. I resisted, suddenly fearful, unable to see the sky because of the overhanging roofs, bumping into black slimy walls, feeling his hand tighten around mine. "Come! Don't 'fraid!" There was a shimmer of indigo silk in a doorway. We emerged into an empty lot surrounded by storefronts that were lit in places by flames wavering above kerosene tanks. The silk shimmer fell in beside me. "As salamu aleykum!" it said. I saw the whites of eyes under a turban. "My name is Abdurrazaaq. I am a student. I come here too late, like you. You see, we have danger now. No lights in the city. The police can rob you, the taxi can not be true taxi. Even I will stay here now. What can we do?" We all three stopped under the awning of a storefront. The old man pulled out benches and urged us to recline on them. The wind, warm from the Sahel but pregnant with rain, fluttered the flames of the lanterns. We lay back on our benches. I bundled up some laundry beneath my head and dozed off. At 5:30 in the morning the old man and Abdurrazaaq roused me; they had found a taxi. The driver, still sleepy, welcomed me into his creaky Peugeot. I gave him the address of my hotel. Abdurrazaaq leaned into my window. "I will check up on you later today. Welcome to Kano. Ma'a Salama!" I did feel welcome, after that, and even somewhat rested, thanks to the old man's bench and the warm winds. We set off down the pitted road for town, with the sun blushing a soft pink into the sky behind us. SALON | Jan. 13, 1998 Jeffrey Tayler is a writer who lives in Moscow. He has previously written for Wanderlust about adventures in the Sahara and on the Congo River. T A B L E+T A L K | Have you ever had a similar adventure in some far-flung place? Share your tales in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Thirsting for a Nigerian adventure? Check out your travel options in Wanderlust Marketplace.