I lost track of how many wrecks I saw on the way from Ilara to Calabar. It was well over 50. Maybe 75, probably more. I would motor past and shake my head at the spectacle of a horrifically twisted truck or tractor-trailer lain on its side or upside-down, or the cannibalized carcass of a car or a small bus. I would think of the irony of how a couple of weeks earlier, in lightly trafficked Ghana, I had rhapsodized about the joy of speed.

Before Nigeria, I had counted coastal Route 101 north of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as the most dangerous road I had ever ridden. Racetrack 101, I called it. Traffic there was thick and fast and reckless; tailgating is a Brazilian sport second in popularity only to soccer. At police checkpoints, the Brazilian authorities had assembled dozens of crashed vehicles as a means of encouraging drivers to slow down.

Our route through Nigeria was worse. Vehicles in Nigeria raced at astonishing speeds with little to no regard for others, nor for themselves. There are no speed limit signs. No police cars lurk off the road with radar detectors. It is entirely ruthless. Motorists seize the smallest advantage to gain time and space.

The four-lane sections were bad enough; two-lane sections posed their own perils. Parts of the two-lane sections would be clean and fast, but then another stretch would be badly potholed, or pavement destroyed completely. To negotiate these subpar sections, vehicles would slalom back and forth between enormous potholes, aiming for pavement that posed the least disturbance to speed.

This slaloming also presented an opportunity for the enterprising motorist to gain ground. If a vehicle ahead had chosen a line to the right, a vehicle behind would often opt for the left side. Then each would accelerate through the rough in a hellbent race to get ahead of one another. More than a few times, I would find myself stuck in the middle … or angling to gain ground myself.

An awareness of vehicles behind you is a principle of sound motorcycling. On an open road in the U.S. and its generally civilized traffic, it’s often a point of mere curiosity. In Nigeria, an awareness of what’s behind you is essential. Migo’s near collision had proven that. Weaving back and forth between potholes on my motorbike, I had always to pay attention to whatever fiend lurked behind me.

The blue and white cars were egregious offenders. So were small, white Toyota Hacia buses. They are sleek, late model vehicles and packed with passengers. You would think that a bus full of passengers would proceed at a judicious pace. Twenty or more lives are at stake.

But they did not. They tore past me at 85 and 90 mph. Or worse, they tailgated me at most uncomfortable proximity, and paid no heed when I pivoted my head around and gestured for them to back off. That technique had proven effective in Brazil and elsewhere, but it seemed only to antagonize the Nigerian. The traffic was so furious and reckless that I resorted to using my turn signals in an attempt to give pause to those vehicles racing up behind me.

And there were the trucks. The putative expressway was clotted with tractor trailers and mid-size trucks. They were old and beaten and creaky from the thousands of punishing miles they had endured. Despite their unsuitability to run at high speeds, their drivers used a leaden foot.

They barreled past me at 75 and 80 mph, and I observed with mounting scorn the colorful religious inscriptions that adorned these trucks. The inscriptions are schizophrenic. They suggest piety, but there is no piety on the highways of Nigeria.

Redemption Never Fails

If God Doesn’t Care, Who Does?

Jesus Is Coming Repent Your Sins

Repent YOUR sins, I thought, your speeding sins, you lunatic bastard! Would Jesus drive a beat-up old tractor-trailer at 80 mph, carving through traffic like a madman, running the wrong way against opposing traffic? A more appropriate inscription on these trucks, it occurred to me, would be Hammer of God.

Not long after spotting the crashed blue and white car, we tore up a long hill. I watched Migo dart from the left lane into the right, as a tractor trailer came heaving down the left lane, going the wrong way against traffic.

A few days before I left for Toronto and the plane flight that would take me to Lisbon, I had lunch with a pair of favorite cousins. They had driven more than a half-hour to see me off, and we enjoyed fish sandwiches and salads at a comfortable drive-in. We got to talking about travel and its inevitable difficulties.

Jim and Eileen are well traveled around the U.S., but not in foreign countries. In the winter, they often motor from their home in chilly upstate New York for warmer climes in the south, or hop a flight to Las Vegas. They have a TomTom GPS in their Ford Explorer, but nevertheless, became disoriented on a freeway that cuts through Wichita, Kansas.

It was quite an ordeal, Eileen said. They had missed the freeway exit at which their hotel of choice was located, and had driven down the interstate through Wichita before turning around and heading back. It was nighttime, and they began to get anxious.

I could picture it vividly: A well-marked U.S. interstate with civilized traffic, illuminated exit signs every half-mile, and colorful billboards advertising the comforts and convenience of Motel 6 and Denny’s and Applebee’s and the Radisson.

“Oh, it was horrible,” Eileen said. “I was so glad when we finally found our hotel!”

I thought of my cousins now. I thought of how they and other Americans of refined travel sensibilities would react if they were to be beamed down into the middle of the insanity in which I found myself in Owerri, a city of more than 225,000 people on the northern lip of Nigeria’s Delta Region.

Massive piles of stinking, rotting garbage lined the middle of Owerri’s main road. These half-dozen piles were the size of tractor trailers, and now a bucket-loader was laboring to remove them. The odor was piquant and nauseating, like diapers and death. The thousands of people crammed in proximity to this Third World urban landfill seemed oblivious, or at least resigned, to the stench.

Migo and I were crushed all sides by traffic, barely inching forward. A cockeyed old truck would lurch in front of me from the left. A grimy mini-bus crammed full of people and baggage, sitting on the roof and hanging off the sides, would be stuck in front of me. To my right, dozens of whining little Chinese motos angled for the slightest opening. These openings would often be extremely slight, because to the right would be a rubbish-filled open sewer, carved a foot down into the earth and roughly parallel to the road.

The asphalt had been destroyed long ago, tortured and chewed by ceaseless traffic. Instead, we crawled over huge undulations on an earthen surface. Potholes brimmed with garbage and debris. I had to watch where I put my feet down, because chances were fair that it would be into a hole, or in the path of a bus tire. I was sweating profusely.

Exhaust belched, choking us with noxious fumes. Horns blared incessantly. Motors idled and roared, many of them ungoverned by mufflers. People hollered and chattered. Peddlers of bananas and phone cards and bags of water stepped gingerly through the clotted traffic, shoving their wares towards motorists. On each side, hundreds of people congregated around shacks and stalls. Music screeched at ridiculously high volumes from huge old speakers set up in at storefronts.

I had never seen anything like it. The anarchic density of vehicles and people and noise and exhaust was outside of my experience. The poverty was grave and arresting. You could see it in the hard and haunted and hollow faces and filthy clothing of the hundreds, the thousands, of people jostling and yelling and shoving through these African Calcuttas.

Nothing in Morocco or Burkina Faso or Ghana, nor any Latin American city through which I had ridden, was comparable to the chaos of a Nigerian city. It was unreal, and made all the more unreal by the incongruous sight of Migo and his sleek, loaded adventure bike inching along in front of me, traffic and people crushing him from all sides. He looked as out of place here as a supermodel in a leper colony.

People stared at us. Young men, swarthy and broad-faced and shirtless, their muscular black torsos glistening with sweat, hooted at us with a macho verve I had not heard in countries past. Men on motos gave us leering smiles, as if in satisfaction at the shock we were experiencing. Some wore the silliest little blue hardhat helmets, which, unstrapped beneath their chins, would fly off at the first hint of a collision. “I want your bike!” a moto dude would holler. “We trade, huh?”

I felt as if I was in an alternative universe devoid of sense and reason and order and decorum. It seemed imperative to get through and get out of this vortex. Though I would regret it later, I took no compelling photos of the chaos I observed in urban Nigeria. If I did so, I reasoned, I would have lost Migo, and we would have the hassle of reuniting. I would be instantly surrounded by people; the idea of taking of my camera seemed wholly inappropriate, to do what – document the miserable conditions in which they spent their days?

It wasn’t just Owerri. It was each large Nigerian through which we passed – Abeokuta and Ijebu Ode and Benin City and Onitsha and Aba. I had read guidebooks that even average-size Nigerian cities were monstrosities, but that benign description did not prepare me for what I would see.

In Abeokuta, I looked in vicarious horror at hundreds of people jammed onto a narrow strip of pavement, between a wall and an open sewer, and the absurdly coagulated traffic at sewer’s edge. The people just sat there, perhaps hoping for a coin to be tossed from the stalled traffic. My God! I thought. Why are those people crammed together like that, so wretchedly, in such filth?!

Leaving Onitsha in a preposterous snot of traffic, a mid-size truck elected to maneuver through vendors off the right side of the road. The truck inched ahead of me to my right, and I watched with escalating dread as its left rear wheel sank into a deep depression and the tall rear trailer canted over far to the left, nearly at 45 degrees.

Omigod! I thought, suddenly fearful for my life. That truck is going to fall over right on top of me! Migo, just behind me, was equally alarmed. The truck lurched upright from the concave surface and crawled ahead.

Outside Abeokuta, I saw a man sitting in the middle of a huge pile of garbage. Just sitting there. I saw another man, naked and slack-jawed, sitting at the edge of a city street. Cars and trucks and buses and motos edged uncarefully around him. His expression was completely vacant, catatonic.

It wasn’t just the highways and cities of Nigeria that didn’t make sense. The whole country was a knot of contradictions -- upside down and inside out, like the black and white negative of an old Kodak filmstrip. Nigeria is crisscrossed by more power lines than a Godzilla movie, yet electric service is sporadic across the nation. It is Africa’s largest oil-producing nation, yet fuel stations were often empty of gasoline and diesel and kerosene, or jammed with long queues of waiting vehicles.

Nigeria is infamous in the Western world for email scams that promise millions of dollars, yet I spotted just one Internet café in our crossing, in Calabar (compared to the abundance of Internet cafes that one finds in most African nations). And we had expected to be stopped and extorted at the police checkpoints for which Nigeria is notorious, but we passed without incident through more than 300 checkpoints, being stopped just once (by an immigration officer, not the police), despite officers’ fervent entreaties that we pull over.