TRAVELS w/P: Tales of Adventure Here & There

14/04/2013 No Nepa Sunday

Am I getting used to the heat or is it actually cooling? A bit of both most likely.

 

Today is a quiet day of sleep-in til 9:00; read until eyes blur, hand launder a few garments, sweep and mop floors. A much needed reprieve after Akamkpa Okyong, Easter Sunday, Afi Mountain and Drill Ranch, Obudu Plateau and yesterday’s journey to Kwa Falls. Call it location scouting for much welcomed! genuinely encouraged! visitors from afar. Yes, that means you.

Kwa Falls is another stunningly gorgeous location a short and easy hour from Calabar (and 30km from the Cameroon border). Framed by towering palm trees and stands of bamboo, vine and jungle brush, the water bubbles and froths and falls in not too threatening end-of-dry-season rapids. It’s a good swimming workout; the current gives some resistance. But it’s the company that makes this adventure especially entertaining. Kim invites her colleague Ally, an Australian who manages day-today operations at Pandrillus Monkey Sanctuary, the Afi/Drill Mountain headquarters located just down the street and around the corner from my place. In turn, Ally invites her friend Ivor, an eccentric 50-something academic anthropologist from Massachusetts, USA.

Ivor is researching the Leopard People (?) a group on his radar for decades. This interest spawned in Cuba where he somehow learned long-ago ancestors arrived on slave trade ships from Nigeria. You can still find their kind in the Nigerian outback, described by Ivor as a simple ritualistic practicing people. Incredibly some of their shamanism reveals itself to us on our outing.

As we head to the falls, Ivor, on spying a couple of unusual flags, commands our driver to stop! Behind the bamboo flagpoles sits a small street front building plastered in Pidgin English biblical quotes; gloomy-doomy excerpts about blood and redemption. While we’re looking at this in stunned awe, villagers gather, giggling. A man comes toward us from the other side of the street. “This is mine,” he beams, eyes gleaming like a crazed evangelist. His name is “Mose’s Son.” Come, come inside he says as he unlocks and opens the door to an even more bizarre interior. Everything is coated in red or blue paint with white or black inscriptions and drawings. A prevalent message reads: “Woman cannot with pants go here.”  I’m the only woman wearing pants.  “No no, is okay. No problem. Come, come.” Like the others I squeeze through a narrow slot into a third cavern-like chamber, passing an unusual sculpture, if you can call it that, made of salvaged metal bits, candles, painted boulders and plastic water bottles. “Holy water!” Mose’s Son asserts. A worn and tattered bible rests on a small alter. It’s dank, dark and warming up with body heat. Our host wants to put on his religious vestments and share insights. We thank him graciously and beat it out of there as fast as we can. Villagers run alongside our cab, waving and smiling. Juju voodoo and Christianity sure make quite the pair. 

                                                                                                                                                       
“Best to stop in at the chief’s home,” Ivor recommends. The news of three oyibo women in town is big news and we must pay our respects. He’s vaguely familiar with this area, having done some research here in past. We pull over at the chief’s home. Turns out he’s travelling, away. Next door is a building roped off; strands of gathered palm fronds dangle from the rope, here and there. “They’re a warning from the Leopard People,” Ivor explains. He asks our driver, Friday, to go look inside the house and tell us what he sees. Gripping the driving wheel and shaking his head, Friday says “No, no! That is not possible. It is not good to go there.” Point proven.

We drive a little further then stop at the edge of a collection of mud, tin and thatched roof houses. “Come, I want you to see this,” Ivor says, taking lead. We come to a group of men wearing top hats and bowler hats and traditional patterned knee-length shirts and loose fitting pants. After an exchange we’re led into a house just across the way. An elder sits in a beat up upholstered chair flattened with time and wear. Following Ivor’s suit I cup my hands and hold them up to the bloodshot, jaundiced eyed elder. He blows into my hands…once…twice…a third time. I lift my hands to my chest to acknowledge and accept his blessing. Ivor talks with the elder about ancient maps. The two promise to meet again sometime in the future. Maybe these maps will be shared then. Maybe they won’t.

Refreshed after hours of bobbing at the falls, we head homeward. “Driver you remember I show you road we pass?” Ivor asks in Pidgin. He wants us to taste the finest palm wine, ever, “from a real Nigerian man who lives the real Nigerian farming life.” We find ourselves jostling down a rutted road and pulling into a poor farm house in the middle of compact jungle. The man of the house comes forward immediately with a huge smile and ready laughter. He grabs a bunch of plastic chairs, seats us under the shade of an umbrella tree, then disappears into the bush to tap a palm tree. Nigeria’s version of maple syrup I guess. While he’s gone his daughter Eunice brings out a bottle of kai-kai; distilled palm wine roughly described as homemade gin. She pours and downs the first shot to prove it’s not poisonous. Ivor goes next, then me, Ally and Kim.  Holy crap this stuff is real firewater! It burns all the way down to my belly.

Mr Host returns within fifteen minutes sloshing a 20 litre plastic container full of fresh tapped wine. Like Eunice, he pours and drinks the first cup. We use empty gourds as our drinking vessels. The cloudy liquid smells wretched but the taste is sweet and smooth.  Mmmmm. It’s rather good. I have a second cup then settle into the late afternoon in mellow mindlessness. All is good.