Hello,
Today started with a cold shower as there was nothing at all coming out of the hot tap. A change from yesterday when I had hot water out of the cold tap as well as the hot. Don’t know how this could happen but bound to be due to lack of knowledge and lack of maintenance.
I went to site first to meet with the fifth and very last minute entry into the tender process. Showed them the site and talked them through the job then checked on progress on the toilets/showers which is good.
Spent a bit of time in the office then Abdulrahman, our driver, and I decided to go for a bit of a drive in the country after work so we set off east on the road to Zinder.
We travelled along dead straight sections of road punctuated by the odd village or broken down truck. The scale of the countryside is immense and there were sections where I couldn’t see the end of the straight it was so far away and flat.
The odd gentle rise but mainly just scrub, dirt and trees.
No speed limits out on the open road so we cranked up the stereo (listening to rap music from Mali and Burkina Faso) and wound up the land cruiser.
It was good to have a change of scenery as so far I’ve only been either in Niamey or out on site.
We went past termite mounds, dead trucks and the usual Toyota hi-ace taxis which are designed for about 12 but carry about 20 and normally have a huge stack of stuff on the roof- sometimes as tall as the van itself. These crash with alarming regularity as they are mechanically completely rooted and driven generally by people who shouldn’t be allowed to walk down the road let alone drive down it.
After about an hour or so of driving through the bush but on a sealed road, we got to the edge of the national park, not that you’d know it as there is no fence, just an old village and what they called a visitor centre.
We would call it an old and unmaintained hut made of block with a round and pointed thatched roof.
Here I was relieved of 5000fcfa for a guide as well as 4000fcfa for park entry fee. This should have been 10,000 but I managed to get him down as we were only one foreigner and one local. We drove for about 20 minutes, the first 5km on the road then we turned off into what looked like no-where and drove through the bush. No track, no GPS, no compass, no map, no idea how the guide knew where to go.
Eventually turned up next to a small rise and we got out of the car, walked up it and I found myself staring at two young giraffe about 10 or 20m away.
Not sure who was more interested in who but they were completely unfazed and we stared at each other for a while before they wondered off to join the rest of the herd of about 30 animals.
We walked behind them and watched for about an hour or so- never more than about 100m away. Just incredible. I got photographic diarrhoea, and burnt through a 2GB memory card. Better that than actual diarrhoea I guess.
Until next time,
Patrick
