Across the Bridge

Across the Bridge

A friend going out of town a couple of days ago had asked me to go get his car from his office (where he had parked it and taken a taxi to the airport). It wasn’t quite convenient for me to do so due to the location of the office. Anyway, I had decided I was going to go pick up the vehicle yesterday night but closed from work quite late (about 10PM). So I made up my mind I was going to go get the car this morning. I had more or less decided I would take a cab to his office though I must confess there was the beginnings of an idea that I might just walk there instead.

So this morning I got up and  hadn’t quite made up my mind which mode of transportation to take to his office (also I had to keep in mind that I had an appointment in a couple of hours). But while Whatsapping as I walked to the main road, I told a “friend” that I had issues with my car and that I was walking on the road and the friend commented that it was good and that I needed the walk since I was lazy (there is a background story to trhat so don’t take it out of context :-). At that moment, I made up my mind to walk to his office. So I walked all the way from a street off Bishop Oluwole in Victoria Island, across the bridge into Ikoyi to the old NNPC Building on Alfred Riwane Road. It took 50 minutes and I usually walk briskly. I guess I could knock off about 5minutes if I hadn’t stop to take pictures and admire the scenery.

I was basically walking on a workday in the opposite direction to the heavy traffic flowing into Victoria Island. I was in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans and I could see that some of the people in the cars looked at me curiously (I suspect some of it had to do with my taking pictures with my phone). There was also the fact that I was walking along the side of the bridge and at some point on the bridge itself since there was really no pedestrian walkway (does that count as jaywalking? I guess so. So is it a misdemeanor or something more serious?).

It also served as my exercise for the day.

Below are some random pictures I took along the way. Makes me wonder during the olden days when people walked from the “interior” of the country to Lagos (the Ocean). Some of the distances were 200Km to 500Km or even more. They were never really in a hurry though. Stopping at villages along the way and were usually received with respect that was typically awarded to strangers or road travelers in those days. They can usually be assured of meals and shelter. So if I covered say a kilometer or two in an hour, I can only estimate how long those trips took. That was the happy scenarios, but I am sure some people didn’t make the journey so willingly because they were freemen (and women and children) who had become slaves by virtue of their villages having been pillaged by stronger neighboring villages and they were on their way to be shipped across the oceans to foreign lands (a lot of them didn’t even survive the inhuman conditions of the journey itself and they ended up as food for the fishes).

Time changes everything.

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