Camping Tales | Omo Forest Reserve
Scary stories by a camp fire, roasting marshmallows, listening to the crickets and watching the fireflies pretending to be constellations. These fireflies however can’t beat the actual stars in the sky and the moon throwing down its light. What is it about starry nights and pitching a tent directly underneath makes the camp life so appealing? Could it be the closeness to nature? Getting away from the hustle and bustle of the city, the rustic feel to it or just the beautiful scenery that comes with choosing the perfect campsite?
If you’ve been following Unravelling Nigeria long enough, you’ll recognize the paragraph above from when we first toyed with the idea of camping in Nigeria in 2015.
A year and 5 months later, we’re incredibly proud to have pulled off a camping trip at Omo Forest Reserve, Ogun State. You can watch the video here.
Omo Forest Reserve is part of the Omo-Sasha-Oluwa Forest Initiative which covers three states in South West Nigeria – Ondo, Ogun and Osun States. Several mammals, over 125 species of birds and over 200 types of trees can be found there. They are under the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) and they are playing their part (even though difficult) to conserve the wildlife and biodiversity in the country. The reserve is located in Ijebu (close the waterside area).
Omo Forest Reserve is best known for its Elephant trail as many have been caught on camera/seen to pass through. Unfortunately, due to hunting these Elephants continue to hide especially as one was recently killed in January. Luckily we spotted a couple of Elephant footprints during our visit. All this made it the perfect spot for our camping location. (Did we mention there was no phone service too? It was just us and the great outdoors).
Our Mission – To organise a proper camping adventure at the reserve.
How? – We worked closely with the NCF to put the trip together. What we would do, costing, essentials needed, where we would sleep, how we would feed, safety precautions, possible alternatives to grueling tasks and more were discussed. A lot of emails were exchanged and I would like to say a big thank you here especially to Mr Clifford and Stella for indulging us.
We also had to rent tents from a company in Lagos as the reserve didn’t have any.
One of our guides – Mr Clifford
The Trip
Sat – We set out for Ogun state through the Epe route as this was the quickest way. We picked up our guides in Epe and this also helped us navigate our way easily. 2 hours later, we were at the reserve. Stella (one of our guides) ushered us into the office and gave a brief but educative history of the reserve. One could easily tell that Stella and Clifford are passionate about their job. Clifford informed us that about 2 years back, he was the only one living in the reserve before more people were deployed.
Elephants were painted on the office building in honour of the ones that were killed in January.
After a brief history lesson, lunch was served and then we were off to set up our tents which would be our ‘rooms’ for the night.
