Nigeria - About the Country

Nigeria is a large country in West Africa, extending form the deserts of the Sahel Zone in the north to the Gulf of Guinea in the south. So there is some tropical climate at the coast and some desert climate in the north, but most of the country has subtropical savannah and monsoon climate. It is a former colony of the UK, and has more than 250 ethnic groups speaking 500 distinct languages. The three largest ethnic groups are the Hausa in the north, Yoruba in the west, and Igbo in the east. While theri three languages are National Languages, English is the official language.

There are no developed caves which we would call show cave, nevertheless we listed two caves as show caves. They are at the border to being semi-wild, but they have at least a good trail to the entrance, there are no difficult climbs inside, and it is high enough to walk without stooping. There is no cave with electric light though. And most caves have at least a shallow river, the locals typically visit them with bare feet, obviously because they tend to wear flip-flops all day. But numerous caves are full of bats and insect, there may be snakes, and while there are reports of lions in caves, the number of such animals is quite low and it is extremely unlikely to see a lion at all.

A word of caution: tropical countries unfortunately have tropical diseases, especially in caves, and water may contain bacteria and parasites. You may catch an annoying gastrointestinal infection, but also dysentery or billharzia. The locals are resistant to most diseases, but this does not apply to foreigners, who may spend the rest of their vacation in a hospital room. We strongly recommend gum boots for walking in the shallow water inside and outside of caves, and do not take a shower in the waterfall either. A bat colony in a cave is a source of histoplasmosis, and if you have, wear an FFP2 mask, you probably have some lying around since Corona. Also, there are numerous insects in the cave (obviously the food source of the bats), so a repellent is quite important.

Now for the weirdnesses.

• It seems there are never coordinates for caves, even for popular ones. Only a small part is listed on Google Maps, the rest is found by asking locals. But even those which have a poi on maps, are actually somewhere else.
• There are no survey data, no geological information, not even a basic classification. If they say the gorge or cave is in limestone its normally nonsense, they just read somewhere that caves develop in limestone and so the copy that fact.
• They tend to use wrong pictures. Quite spectacular is one of the "semi" show caves which actually had a spectacular picture which was used on a dozen websites and on at least 10 Wikipedia pages. Unfortunately it was the entrance of Hang Son Dong in Vietnam. The uploader stated that he personally took the photo, but if he had taken the photo he would not have mixed the caves up. He obviously stole it, we have no idea why, but he did not realize that a 100 m high entrance portal and an 8 m high entrance portal are easily distinguishable. And it is quite obvious that this was indeed intentional: three different images of Hang Son Dong are used on various websites. Clearly, the same man stole and distributed them. Nigeria has obviously earned its bad reputation as a country of fraudsters through hard work.
• But that’s not all, they also use the same picture for different caves in scientific publications. We are not aware if they just mixed up or if this also was deliberate. The problem is, when we have the same picture for different caves and no valid location, we can not determine if they just reused the picture or if this is actually the same cave just with a different name. It’s quite common that caves have multiple names.
• Major roads are paved and of good quality, but in rural areas the roads are not paved, and soon there is no road any more. Several caves we listed are pretty hard to reach because its necessary to drive the last kilometers by bike because the road is too poor for a 4WD. Then there are trails to the cave but no signs, its always essential to hire a local guide. And they tend to rip off foreigners.
• They plan to increase tourism, both domestic and international, so there are a lot of plans to develop caves as show caves. Unfortunately the country is not rich, despite the oil and gas export, and the main problem would be the construction of roads. The locals are willing to develop their local cave with the goal to have visitors, earn money with fees, guiding, refreshments, b&b and much more. If there was a certain number of visitors, shops, gas stations and cafés would develop automatically. But this all depends on being accessible by car, and that will be the reason why those projects will fail.

• Additional Information about Nigeria
• Search Google for "Nigeria"
• Nigeria - Wikipedia