Welcome to Abuja

We arrived in Nigeria in the early hours of Wednesday morning after a pretty awful overnight flight. The BA flight to Abuja is the last departure out of Heathrow (although given the amount of luggage we were carrying with us, it was no bad thing that the airport was deserted), departing at 10.40pm and arriving in Abuja just before 6am – and is perfectly timed to allow passengers minimal sleep. By the time one has been served drinks and a meal, been asked three times about duty free, arisen twice to allow one’s neighbour to access the bathroom and the lights have been dimmed, it is 2am, allowing a maximum of two hours' sleep before it is time to wake up for breakfast.

We had the additional challenge of this being 2-year-old Freya's first time on a plane. 

By the time Alex was 2, he had visited 17 US states and had travelled to Mexico, Canada, Germany, France and Australia. Freya has been to France on the ferry. So Alex took the plane trip in his stride, proudly donning his headphones and tuning into the storytime audio channel, before falling asleep just as his meal arrived and sleeping for the rest of the journey. Meanwhile, Freya ran riot for the entire flight, taking her seatbelt on and off, climbing on to my lap and then Simon's, standing on her chair and spreading her meal all over her clothes. She finally settled down to sleep just as the plane was coming in to land. Consequently, as we sat in the Arrivals hall awaiting our baggage, I was met with a succession of Nigerian ladies enquiring ‘what’s wrong with your baby?’, ‘why she crying like that?’ and ‘is she hurting?’.

In an attempt to avoid meeting anyone's eye whilst I waited for Simon to collect our 85 pieces of luggage, I flicked through the Brandt guide to Nigeria a friend had given us before leaving. It begins:

“Nigeria is far from the most pleasant west African country to travel in – it’s impoverished and the majority of the population lives on under US$4 a day. It’s dirty and an environmental nightmare, with piles of rubbish literally everywhere, and its natural resources have been stripped bare. Nothing works and everything is seriously dilapidated, the infrastructure is totally inadequate, there are frequent shortages of fuel, electricity and water, and vehicle traffic and human congestion are tremendous.”

Not feeling hugely encouraged, I turned to the section on Abuja.

"There’s hardly anything to see or do and it’s not a city for walking, as everything is very spread out along wide freeways”.

Great. Welcome to Abuja.