Abraka Springs is a clear water tributary located in the Niger Delta area, about an hour north of Warri. It's a popular weekend getaway for expatriots and locals alike. There is a group of oilfield divers in Lagos that hold their open water certification in Abraka and this is where I first learned to dive.
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For a few Naira, one can hire a canoe, be paddled upstream, then swim back with the current. These local canoes are burned and carved as one piece from a large tree trunk. To me, there was an obvious lack of wildlife and fish along this waterway. Since the first oil discoveries in the 1960's, there has been a tremendous population explosion in the Delta. Masses of West Africans seeking work have migrated to this area. Crops have replaced the rain forest and the animals have long since been eaten. |
The final destination is this old wooden footbridge. From here, it's takes about 45 minutes to drift downstream.
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Visibility is almost infinite - like swimming in gin - and the current is strong enough that swimming upstream takes considerable effort. The many fallen trees make for an fun ride. |
Sand mining is the local industry in much of the delta. Most of this sand becomes cinderblock or concrete, the building blocks of West Africa.
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The miner dives with his bucket to the bottom and fills it with sand. The water is about 25 feet deep and they have considerable lung capacity. |
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The heavy bucket is hoisted up the ladder. |
They repeat the process until the boat is fully loaded.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in the delta but British traders, shopping for slaves, soon followed. They traded with the coastal Ijaw society, who delivered Igbo captives, their immediate neighbors to the north. As demand grew, Igbos came to control the trade, bringing captives from the deep interior. With the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 19th century, palm oil became the commodity of choice. The machinery of the industrial revolution needed lubrication and the Niger delta was the biggest source of palm oil.
How did the British pay for slaves and palm oil? With millions of gallons of cheap gin. Crates of gin arrived on incoming vessels, stacked atop broken-down oak casks. Once in Africa, the gin was offloaded, casks reassembled, filled with palm oil, and the vessel reloaded. Today, these old gin bottles are popular souvineers and, apparently, somewhat valuable. Most of these bottles originated in Holland and came to rest in the trash heaps of Nigerian villages. Over the centuries, the trash was scattered, buried, and/or swept away in floods. As rivers change their course and villages migrate, these trash heaps become pockets of buried treasure.
With each season, the ever-changing rivers carve new channels and erode their banks. In the process, gin bottle caches are exposed and scattered along the riverbed. In remote locations, where the water is clear and the current swift, there are hundreds of bottles. Because Abraka Springs is so popular, few gin bottles remain. However, an occasional tourist gets lucky - I found two such bottles. This one was in about 30 feet of water.
