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On 8th April we set off from Cotonou in Benin to Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. We had arranged to rejoin the overland tour in Kano in northern Nigeria. After considering our schedule carefully we decided that we would fly from Lagos up to Kano since the journey sounded boring and time consuming. On arrival at the domestic airport in Lagos we found that there was a flight to Kano leaving in twenty minutes. We frantically rushed around to change money on the black market and buy the tickets. A few minutes before the scheduled departure time Paula and I were running across the tarmac to get to the waiting jet before they pulled away the boarding stairs. Exhausted we rushed up the stairs, the crew closed the main door behind us and before we could find our seats the plane was taxiing to the runway - only in Africa!
1992 Diary - Africa (Part 2)
Gjcmcclurg2005-12-23 14:25:40
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on the rim until the sunset to see the lava lighting up the evening sky and then returned to camp for dinner. We bedded down about 9.30pm as we were due to leave at sunset. Suddenly at around 11.30pm we were awoken by three fairly violent earth tremors and a roaring sound. While Pulling on our boots we clambered out of the tents to find the sky lit up by a new volcano which was erupting only 500m from us. We all marveled at the new volcano for an hour or so and then retried to our tents to get some sleep. The guides seemed to think that we were not in any real danger, which was hard to believe given our proximity to this latest volcano.
Our next adventure was to track the Gorillas! It took us a day or so of driving through almost impassable muddy tracks to reach the village of Rumangabo. At 5.00am we organized our group of 5 and began the three hour trek up to the station where we would meet our guide. It was an arduous climb but we were rewarded with good open views of the countryside and volcanoes in the distance. The guide led us into the dense rainforest on the Zaire/Rwanda border. The forest floor was a mattress of rotting vegetation, and at times we were clinging to branches as we scaled steep slopes and pushed deeper into the forest in our search for the Gorillas. After a hot, sweaty and exhausting 2 hours we spotted our family of Gorillas. We spent over an hour just feet from these spectacular animals and saw some of the huge male Silverbacks and a mother with baby - quite unforgettable. It was incredible how close we were to them!
The trip next took us to the town of Goma on Lake Kivu. Paula and I discovered there was a ferry leaving the next morning for a 9 hour sailing down to Bukavu at the southern end of the lake. The other guys on the trip didn't seem to interested so we arranged to meet the group in Bukavu and took the ferry the next morning. Not surprisingly our ferry, the 'Kanzimbi', was
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See photographs from:
Zambia Gallery
,
Tanzania Gallery
,
Malawi Gallery
,
Kenya Gallery
,
Zimbabwe Gallery
,
Cameroon Gallery
,
Burundi Gallery
,
Botswana Gallery
,
Nigeria Gallery
