My latest piece for Men’s Journal is about a pretty unorthodox travel destination – Nigeria. But bear with me, because in the southeastern Cross River state, butting up against the Cameroonian border, is one of the most incredible conservation projects I’ve ever encountered:

A promised encounter with Nigeria’s rarest apes and monkeys may sound like a come-on from a particularly inventive email scam artist, but a rainforest camp run by a pioneering primate charity can guarantee a mono a mono encounter with one of the princes of the forest.

A four-hour drive on red-earth roads through the forest southeast of Calabar, an old port, the Afi Mountain Drill Ranch is a dedicated wildlife center-cum-tourist attraction that hosts half a dozen troops of drills, baboons’ rare cousins. The white-rumped apes live independent but structured lives under the watchful eyes of Liza Gadsby and Peter Jenkins, an American couple that arrived in this verdant part of Nigeria on an overland tour in 1980 and have been trying to protect this endangered species ever since. The habitat serves as a sort of halfway house for animals affected by the bushmeat trade.

You can read the complete article here. For more information on Pandrillus, check out their website and Facebook page.

Pandrillus are a living example for both conservation and development organisations that if you want to effect real change, you need to be in there for the long hall. When Peter Jenkins proudly recounted to me that one of the organisation’s proudest legacies was making it socially unacceptable in the area to eat primate bushmeat, I asked him how long that had taken. His reply – nearly two decades. There are no quick fixes.

I’d first come across Pandrillus on my very first trip to Nigeria for Lonely Planet back in 2005. Although I didn’t make it up to Afi Mountain Drill Ranch until much later, I covered that trip as part of one of LP’s early blogging experiments. You can find that blog (hosted by MyTripJournal), to read here, written in a slightly breathless fashion, mostly because I was scrabbling down my thoughts in some slow and sticky Nigerian internet cafe. I like the entry about recreating the gleeful anarchy of Lagos in the comfort of your own home best, although it’s sad to note the entries about northern Nigeria – Zaria, Kano and Maiduguri – as the activities of Boko Haram have left these places decidedly unsafe for visitors. The new edition of LP West Africa (out in a couple of months) mentions them only in passing, as it was deemed unsafe to send an author there. A travel piece about the Kano Durbar will have to wait for happier times.

When I was writing my Haiti guidebook for Bradt, I was often asked which was my favourite place in the country. It’s a tough call, and always depended on my mood at the time. The view from the Citadelle? Swimming in Bassin Bleu? Sunset with rum sours on the beach at Port Salut? All good contenders, but I often plumped for Môle Saint-Nicholas, because it took me so long to get aorund to visiting, and was such a revelation when I did.

I’ve just written a short piece about its joys for the Adventure section of Men’s Journal:

Môle Saint-Nicholas, at the tip of Haiti’s northern “finger,” sits on a wide enclosed bay, fringed with a long strip of creamy sand. When Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas here in 1492, he noted the area’s “beauty and graciousness.” He neglected to mention that the entire region was thick with caves, hills, and reefs, making it an irresistible destination for future adventurers.
The area around Môle is rife for exploration. The low forest is threaded with miles of goat paths that are perfect for mountain biking. Some paths lead along the cliffs and down to the sea, while others plunge into enticing limestone caves as yet unexplored by spelunkers. Tracks too rocky for wheels offer further hiking possibilities, such as the 600-foot summit of Morne Cabris (“Goat Mountain”), with its ruined fort and dramatic views over the Windward Passage. Locals claim that on a clear day, it’s possible to see Cuba, just 52 miles away.

You can read the complete article here.

Welcome to the home page of guidebook author and travel writer Paul Clammer. Since 2004 I’ve written or contributed to over two dozen travel guides for Lonely Planet Publications and Bradt Travel Guides, including first editions of guidebooks to Afghanistan and Sudan. My most recent book is Haiti: The Bradt Travel Guide, published in November 2012, and the first standalone guidebook in English to Haiti since the 1980s. You can find out more on the book’s very active Facebook page.