niamey: dust, millet beer, and that one bridge everyone takes pics of
man. niamey. i don’t even know where to start. this place was built in 1926? that’s basically yesterday for a capital city. feels like it too-like someone plopped down concrete and mosques in the middle of nowhere and called it a day. here’s the map because you’ll need it:
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first things first-i just checked and it’s about 25°C there right now, feels like 24, with 18% humidity. hope you like breathing dust and feeling your sweat evaporate before it even bothers to drip. someone told me the grand mosque was built with saudi money back in the 70s and honestly it shows. shiny minarets towering over streets where kids sell phone credit.
this city started as a zarma farming village, got picked by the french in 1926 because they wanted a river port, and apparently built the whole thing with forced labor. cool cool cool. now it’s got skyscrapers from the uranium boom next to clay brick stalls selling soro (millet beer that tastes like fermented grain soup) and 24/7 jollof rice carts. festival tip: if you see tuareg guys in indigo robes doing the gerewol thing, just go with it.
the niger river’s the only permanent water around, so everything revolves around it-fishing, washing motorbikes, praying. markets? chaotic. grand marché smells like dried fish and existential dread. petit marché’s slightly less overwhelming but still a maze of plastic buckets and fake chinese headphones. someone told me the museum’s got 6000-year-old giraffe petroglyphs which sounds rad but they close randomly so good luck.
if you get bored, zinder and maradi are a short drive away or whatever. zinder’s got hausa traders, maradi’s got peanuts, but honestly you’ll be too busy navigating niamey’s honking 1970s taxi vans to care. most people speak french or hausa or zarma, and yeah it’s 90% muslim but nobody blinked at my dumb tourist shorts. food tips: eat millet. everything’s millet. millet porridge, millet pancakes, millet existential crisis. also try to find the guy near kennedy bridge who sells grilled goat at 2am. bring cash and patience.
things they don’t put on brochures: niamey ain’t easy. most folks are hustling in informal jobs-tailors, brick makers, guys selling single cigarettes. sanitation’s… creative. the presidential palace looks like a space station but half the roads turn to soup when it rains (which is never, except when it does). stayed at a cfa10k dorm where the fan sounded like a helicopter taking off. worth it though. at night the bridges glow orange and you forget the sewage smell.
distinctive features? uranium skyscrapers rising out of the sahel like misplaced legos. the fact that this city swallows 10% of niger’s entire population. and that everything-everything-comes back to the river. even the hippos in the w national park downstream seem to know it.
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