Experience the Megacity Lifestyle in Lagos, Nigeria

When you think of hot tourist destinations chances are that Lagos, Nigeria doesn’t come anywhere near the top of your list. Just because the city isn’t in all the travel magazines doesn’t mean that there aren’t people traveling there. In fact, thousands of people arrive in Lagos each day looking for the opportunity to live a better life and to provide for their families. The result of this mass migration is a city that is bursting at the seems, full of problems and promise. A recent article in the New Yorker magazine begins with this haunting description:

The Third Mainland Bridge is a looping ribbon of concrete that connects Lagos Island to the continent of Africa. It was built in the nineteen-seventies, part of a vast network of bridges, cloverleafs, and expressways intended to transform the districts and islands of this Nigerian city–then comprising three million people–into an efficient modern metropolis. As the bridge snakes over sunken piers just above the waters of Lagos Lagoon, it passes a floating slum: thousands of wooden houses, perched on stilts a few feet above their own bobbing refuse, with rust-colored iron roofs wreathed in the haze from thousands of cooking fires. Fishermen and market women paddle dugout canoes on water as black and viscous as an oil slick. The bridge then passes the sawmill district, where rain-forest logs–sent across from the far shore, thirty miles to the east–form a floating mass by the piers. Smoldering hills of sawdust landfill send white smoke across the bridge, which mixes with diesel exhaust from the traffic. Beyond the sawmills, the old waterfront markets, the fishermen’s shanties, the blackened facades of high-rise housing projects, and the half-abandoned skyscrapers of downtown Lagos Island loom under a low, dirty sky. Around the city, garbage dumps steam with the combustion of natural gases, and auto yards glow with fires from fuel spills. All of Lagos seems to be burning.

Why, you might ask, would you want to visit such a place? The answer: because you can and because it will be an experience. Let’s face it, a trip to Lagos isn’t something that most people would want to endure. It is for that reason alone that you should consider going there. Lagos is emblematic of many megacities in the developing world and it represents the future to some degree. Now is the perfect time to see what lies ahead in the future as more and more people cram into cities in search of a more promising life.

Opodo will fly you from London to Lagos for £434.

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