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In the rainforest of Cross River State, monkeys have been hunted close to extinction. Afi Drill Ranch protects the drill monkeys and chimpanzees by keeping them in enclosures. One of the ranch keepers, a man called James, led Sonny and me to the spacious ape enclosures, fenced with electric wiring. The first enclosure contained several galloping drill monkeys. Despite their name, drill
monkeys resemble baboons, except that their fur is silver and their backsides are covered in phenomenally bright pink and blue fur. Ninety per cent of the world's wild drill monkeys come from this part of Nigeria.

‘Can't they climb up the trees and jump over the fence?' I asked James.

‘No, drills can climb high, but they don't move from tree to tree,' he said. The animals were depleting the foliage, however, so the ranch was making plans to move them to a new enclosure.

We walked through the trees towards the area where the chimps were kept. The forest hummed with life, and large multi-coloured butterflies bounced incessantly off our faces. En route, James pointed out the mahogany, ebony,
okasi
and iroko trees stretching towards the sky.

‘You no go see tree like this in Rivers State,' Sonny said in amazement. Our village, Bane, is highly deforested. Most of the trees were chopped down for farming and oil, or to make canoes, doors and furniture. I was hard for me to imagine that Bane was once like Afi, with a canopy blocking out the sunlight, the forest floor teeming with natural medicines, bush meat, mangoes, avocados, pawpaw, wood – all the necessary ingredients for subsistence living. No wonder Afi's local population had outgrown its natural surroundings.

‘A bag of small seed like this will cost
1,000 in Port Harcourt!' Sonny picked up a cedar seed. Cedar wood bark is used to treat malaria. The bark is peeled, mixed with a hot drink or soaked in water for a day. Also abundant were the coin-shaped seeds of the
achi
tree, used in cooking. One cup fetches
160 in the markets these days, its high price the result of diminishing supplies. But in Afi, the seeds virtually carpeted the ground.

At the chimpanzee enclosure, a chimp beat her chest and stretched out her arm to us, demanding food. She threw banana peel at me, but showed Sonny more respect by doing a press-up in front of him.

‘She's greeting you,' James explained to Sonny. He told us that the vulval swelling of the chimp's backside signified that she was in heat and therefore receptive to males. In another part of the enclosure I watched a long-limbed, long-faced chimp with silvery-white fur enjoying his own company. Unlike the others, he was a lowland chimp, native to Equatorial Guinea and Central Africa. He reclined on his back and gazed into my camera lens, a poseur on a photo shoot. A few feet away, a baby lay on top of his mother. She fondled his toes while he pulled savagely at her eyelids and scraped out flecks of dirt.

For the first time, I noticed how closely the soles of the chimpanzees' feet resemble human feet. The texture – the leathery, faint brown swirls – were identical to mine. Seeing it kindled in me an intense affinity with these animals, stronger than I'd ever felt before. The possibility that they may become extinct within a century or two was too catastrophic an outcome to contemplate, the near-equivalent of losing an entire race of humanity. Liza said that roughly 200,000 chimps are left in the African wilderness. Numerically, this was no disaster but, she reminded me, most of the apes live in disparate, isolated teams with no chance of mixing their genes with other groups; each gene pool was tiny.

‘We don't want a brother and sister to be sexing, but what can you do?' James shrugged.

After looking at the enclosures, James's colleague Peter took Sonny and me on a walk though the canopy. We filed along a narrow, elevated steel bridge that swung 20 metres or so above the forest floor. It was 450 metres long. Peter strolled along it, walking incredibly quickly without breaking a sweat, but Sonny wasn't so nimble. When we reached one of the viewing platforms built around a tree trunk, he asked to take a break.

‘Go ahead, I'll wait here,' he said, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. Anxiety lined his forehead. He hadn't told anyone he
was afraid of heights. Unfortunately for Sonny, the canopy walk was a one-way system, meaning he had no choice but to shuffle behind me and Peter, not knowing where to look.

‘My hand dey shake, o,' he stammered. ‘I don't look down . . . It will turn my brain.'

Peter smiled. This wasn't the first time he'd escorted someone who was scared of heights. He once took the governor and his entourage on a walk along the canopy bridge during a state visit.

‘It took them
hours
, not minutes!' he grinned, imitating the governor's jittery, mincing steps.

Back at the base camp, I excitedly told Liza about my deepened love for chimpanzees. She lamented that the state showed little interest in the animals. ‘We don't get any money from the government,' she said. All her cash was raised during her annual three-month returns to the US. Nigerian zoo curators were corrupt and indifferent towards the animals' survival. In 2002, the woman in charge of Ibadan University's zoo was sacked after illegally selling four endangered western lowland gorillas to a zoo in Malaysia and pocketing $1 million.

‘Nigerians have been cowed into submission,' Liza said from her wooden cabin office overlooking the mountain face. ‘They prefer to do nothing and live under this “contractocracy”. People like you should come back here and help this country.' I gave her a donation for the ranch before saying goodbye. Walking back to the car, I was simultaneously buoyed with inspiration and freighted by obligation.

Sonny and I continued on the highway north towards the Obudu Cattle Ranch, close to the Cameroonian border. I was looking forward to this portion of the trip. The cattle ranch was the jewel among Nigeria's few tourist resorts, an upscale hotel set in the rarified heights of the Cameroon Mountain range. Spending a night here would be my one concession to luxury on this trip.

Towards the foot of the mountain, the road became less
congested and was obsequiously surfaced with better tarmac for the Obudu Ranch guests who travel along it. Other guests prefer to skip the road and arrive by helicopter. Sonny and I wound higher and higher up the mountain, into white mists that clung to the grassy slopes, rising around us like sleeping green giants. Palm trees gave way to a scattering of temperate trees covered in beautiful red leaves. We were leaving behind the heat, humidity and mosquitoes of the tropical lowlands and ascending to heaven. I immediately felt invigorated by the drop in temperature. No longer was I bullied or suffocated by tropical heat; there was space to take stock and think.

The ranch started life as a colonial farm established by Scots in the early 1950s. It then expanded to become a retreat where ruddy-faced expats could escape the heat. Now it was a getaway for well-off Nigerians.

At the main hotel, I offloaded my bags, said goodbye to Sonny and checked into my room. I did a quick tour, ecstatic at the power shower, the patterned wallpaper, the soft clean carpet, the TV and the remote control with – praise be – functioning batteries!

Lunch was a solitary affair in the emptyish dining room. The silence was surreal, and so was the decor – three haystacks with wine bottles perched decoratively on top of them, and a large model cow standing beside them. The menu was limited in its range but not in the audacity of its prices. I had to take a deep breath when I saw that the main course cost
5,000.

After lunch, I took a walk outside, past the tennis courts, down a sloping path and into a bucolic picture book. The green hills and valleys were reminiscent of the English Yorkshire Dales. Fresian cows munched on the yellowing grass; horses grazed by fields of potato, cabbage, lettuce and carrots. Feeling serene, I walked down a path to a leafy grotto where a small bridge arched over a river that bubbled beneath a 3-metre waterfall. Behind me, a golf course undulated into the distance, its trees looking fresh and ghostly in the mist. It was glorious, almost unreal.

A chilly late-afternoon wind picked up and sprinkled goose bumps over my arms. I hurried back to my room and listened in a vegetative state to the hectoring yap of CNN reporters. After dinner, back on my firm bed and staring at the carpeted, wood-carved comforts around me, I felt faintly uneasy. Wasn't all this quiet, cleanliness and cool air what I'd been craving these last few months? Solitude was partly to blame, but there was more to it. Dare I say it, I think I was missing the chaos, the
jagga jagga
of Nigerian life. The term jagga jagga, slang for ‘messed up', was made famous by hip-hop artist Eedris Abdulkareem in his song of the same name, which criticised contemporary Nigerian society. I half longed for the infuriating but amusing lack of protocol I'd experienced on my journey so far: room service staff lingering in the doorway for conversation; the receptionist asking for my telephone number; hotel cleaners arguing with one another along the corridors (‘Don't talk to me as if I am your boyfriend. I have not requested a co-wife, so stop bothering me.'). At Obudu, everyone was perfectly compliant and dull. The place felt too clean and quiet. It reminded me of Ewell in England, where I grew up. Nothing ever happened there: no dramas, serious crime, water shortages, robberies, glamour, excitement, flavour – nothing that might affect one's equilibrium. Its dullness was the trade-off for material comfort and stability, and so was Obudu's.

 

After breakfast the next morning, I strolled in the dewy morning greyness and exchanged greetings with a passing old couple, who were one of the few pairs of guests at the ranch during this post-Christmas period. At the top of a hill I sat on a bench and watched cows chewing the cud on the grassy slopes, and the sweetest kid goat bleating forlornly for its mother. Within minutes, the mist rolled in amazingly quickly, erasing the hills, cows and trees, and wrapping me in a sea of white oblivion. I strolled down to the ranch's Beehive Natural Reserve, a wedge of forest at the bottom
of a hill with a tropical microclimate all of its own. In a matter of minutes I went from the Yorkshire Dales to a humid rainforest rustling with dewy, hundred-year-old ferns.

The afternoon sun vaporised the mist, allowing me to take a ride on the cable car, the ‘longest in Africa'. The car floated above the hills and cows grazing next to a precipice I hadn't realised was there. As I moved above and past it, the ground plunged into a valley hundreds of feet deep, giving the impression that the cable car was taking off vertically. Yellow-grassed mountain peaks jutted in every direction, interspersed with red-leafed trees. And it was deathly quiet, the cable car moving along as if propelled on silent wings.

Three maintenance workers passed me in the opposite direction and waved hello, nonchalantly reclining in a shallow metal crate and looking perfectly at ease with the frightening altitude. Suddenly, my cable car stopped. Perhaps the electricity had cut out. My car hung noiselessly, suspended in mid-air. Fighting an urge to throw my notebook out of the window, I eyed the valley floor through the glass floor. For three minutes I sat back and daydreamed in the cool, tranquil air. Stillness of this kind was hard to come by in urban Nigeria; I inhaled deeply, savouring every moment, amazed at the restorative power of a few minutes of dead air. My mind was made up: this is what I ultimately needed, to be away from the commotion of people and okadas, and away from the oppressive sterility of quiet hotels – hanging in the middle of absolutely nowhere, in a mist of white nothingness. Sometimes, changing altitude, not latitude, was the best way to find peace.