25-Jul-2004 -- After working for JBN in Abuja for nearly 9 years, Jimmy, being one of the founder members of the Bush Riders Abuja, decided that he wanted to participate in one of the confluence explorations before relocating to Lagos to work for another company.

I had several visits already in the planning stage and took the most suitable, which was confluence 10N 6E. Originally five of us had planned to make the trip but somehow Wolfgang K. did not get out of bed and Babsi C. did not recover from a cold which left me with the unwanted task of writing this narration.

On Sunday 6:40 am, Jimmy, Armin, and myself left the JBN camp, the vehicles with the trailers carrying our Enduro machines having been loaded the previous day. We headed for Suleja in the Niger State. From there we followed the road to Minna by-passing the Gurara Falls to Zungeru. After Zungeru we crossed the Kaduna river which was very full (we are in the middle of the rainy season).

Shortly afterwards, we reached Garun Gabas where we stopped and off-loaded our bikes. Then the fun started, we drove with our bikes through beautiful green bushlands and maize fields heading for a village called Gulangi. We had no difficulties in finding it. As we reached Gulangi, we checked the GPS and were approximately 1.5 km from our destination. Judging from the surroundings, we thought it would be easy to arrive at this Confluence, but we were proven wrong.

800 m from our destination we found that the river Mariga, which was in flood, had to be crossed and the Confluence was on the other side of it. My general road map of Nigeria however indicated that the Confluence should have been on our side of the river. None of us have any extended experience with the GPS, which made the double and triple checking of the co-ordinates a nerve-consuming task. After some discussion we agreed that the Confluence must be on the other side of the river. The locals who were very helpful, helped us organise a boat for the crossing of the river. On the other side of the river we had 700 m through hilly bush terrain full of wasp nests hanging in the bushes. I managed to avoid most of them but unfortunately ran into one, which resulted in me being stung quite badly. Nevertheless, the Confluence was only around the corner and at 0:30 pm we arrived at our destination. It took us quite some time to get the right picture from the GPS co-ordinates.

We went home the same way and arrived back in Abuja at 6 pm. We had a small barbecue and talked about which Confluence we will tackle next.