I Planned A Getaway Trip to Ibadan With My Friends
I’m writing this post because I’ve gotten a lot of questions from various people asking for details about my group trip to Ibadan and how it was planned. I hope this answers all questions you might have and is helpful to anyone who’s interested in planning theirs xo.
There’s a much longer story to how this trip was planned but I’m going to fast forward to the parts where everything started to come together.
Let’s begin!
The Planning Part
Just gonna put this here: The entire budget of this trip was N55,000 per person. It’ll definitely vary depending on where you plan to stay, what activities you have planned and how many people are tagging along.
Planning this trip began simply because I wanted to experience the train ride to Ibadan. So I mentioned it in my friend group chat — which I call The Social Club — where we plan trips and hangouts and the likes. A couple of people signified their interest, I created a group chat for the trip and we got to planning. It wasn’t this straightforward but, like I said, I’m just going to fast forward to the part of the story where the whole planning process started to come together.
The first thing we had to figure out was accommodation. For certain reasons, we couldn’t stay at IITA (this is part of the much longer story but I’m not going to get into it) so I started looking for alternatives. The initial plan was to stay at a hotel. We had narrowed it down to two options when a friend suggested we do an Airbnb instead. It sounded like it would be wayyy more convenient so I decided to check it out.
We found a couple of nice-ish Airbnbs in Ibadan and narrowed the options down based on what locations were closest to the places we were likely to want to visit. We finally settled on this really really lovely place in a beautiful small estate called Three Palms. There were 7 of us and we were staying for 3 nights so we split the total accommodation cost between the 7 of us.
You can check out the Airbnb here: https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/29213138?guests=1&adults=1&s=67&unique_share_id=876432bf-25a9-4684-acd3-68ef64062c0a
I just want to take a moment to gush over the Airbnb. It was soooo lovely. I didn’t want to leave. We didn’t stay in the one in the link above despite it being what we booked (not sure what happened) but it was absolutely beautiful — both indoors and outdoors.
For extra context, there are three houses in the estate. Two of them are available for booking on Airbnb and are managed by the same host. So despite us not staying at the specific Airbnb that we booked, the experience would have pretty much been the same if we had stayed at the one we booked. The one we stayed at had 5 rooms so it was pretty cool (as opposed to the 4 that we booked for).
The next thing I did was calculate the cost of everything else — transport, food, groceries, activities.
I calculated the cost of transport once we had figured out the places we wanted to visit (we only ended up going to two of these places lmao). I used the Bolt app to get an estimate of the cost to these places from the Airbnb and back and added it all up. I also included the cost of the train tickets to and fro as well as the ride cost to get to the Airbnb from the train station and vice versa (on our way back).
#Dee’sTripTip: When selecting your accommodation location, consider its proximity to the places you plan to visit. So you should definitely decide on your planned activities first so you don’t end up lodging at a place that’s an hour away from the places you want to visit.
For food, I honestly expected us to eat KFC all through our stay there for lunch and dinner lmao. So I went on Jumia Food and got an estimate of how much we’d spend on food. We also planned to visit the Amala Sky Restaurant so I calculated an estimate for that too.
I budgeted the cost of groceries too for our stay at the Airbnb. We got Bread, Milo, Milk, Sugar and Cereal so we could have stuff for breakfast. Other groceries I budgeted for were Dishwashing liquid, toilet rolls, plastic spoons, cups and plates, and goodies (cookies, candy, juices). We ended up not needing most of these because the Airbnb we stayed at provided some of them for us.
For activities, a friend of mine who was coming on the trip — Daniel — did some research on the places we had planned to visit and got an estimate of their respective entrance fees.
Basically, once we were done with calculating it all, I divided the total cost by the number of people on the trip and got the budget per person.
Everyone transferred the funds to me and we paid for mostly everything from there.
The Going Part
Our train was to leave at 4pm so we planned to get to train station by 3:20pm so we could buy our tickets and sort out whatever we needed to sort out. That didn’t work lmao. A couple of us still came quite late and two missed the train (so they ended up going by road instead). The train leaves on time, not a second later, so you should definitely push to get there on time.
You need cash to buy the tickets. The train station has people with POS’s around so you could get cash from them if you don’t have. Daniel bought the tickets for the rest of us and gave us before we boarded.
Dee’sTripTip: When you get on the train, don’t throw away your ticket. Keep it with you cause, during the trip, the officials go seat to seat checking everyone’s ticket to make sure nobody snuck onboard or anything.
The Ibadan Part
When we got off the train at Ibadan, there were a couple of taxi men waiting for customers. I should warn you that they price high. The guy we used told us it would cost N10k to take us to our Airbnb. It took A LOT of back and forths but somehow, we ended up beating it down to N5,500.
Dee’sTripTip: Bolt drivers in Ibadan are very…weird. They tend to charge higher than the Bolt cost estimate and prefer to do off-the-record trips. So you should definitely budget extra for transport just in case.
Also, depending on where you’re staying and how close it is to the hotspots, you should plan for the extra time it would take drivers to get to where you are. It was such a frustrating experience because these people seem to have something against using the map.
We stopped to buy dinner from KFC on our way to the Airbnb. When we got to the Airbnb — amazing place once again, we split the rooms between ourselves (I ran for the master bedroom and won lmaoo) and settled in.
Some of the places we planned to visit were Agodi Gardens, UI Zoo, Mapo Hall, National Museum and Oke Ado Awaye Mountain. We only visited Agodi Gardens (which was extremely underwhelming in my opinion but that could have easily been because it had rained earlier and some pathways were messed up). Before the trip, I had told my friends that if it was up to me, we’d spend our trip indoors watching Netflix and playing games. So when we ended up doing exactly that, I had no problems lmao.
Going to take a minute to rant here. These guys wanted to go mountain climbing soooo bad, they were willing to go on a TWO HOUR ROAD TRIP just to get to the mountain site. The cost estimate to get there was N10k but these guys were still willing to go. It would have been a two hour trip to get there, a two hour climb and a two hour trip back. Nawa o.
It took weeks for me to finally dissuade them cause I don’t know why you’ll leave Lagos stress to go and be climbing mountain in another city. Avoid the mountain guys. It’s not in Ibadan at all so it’s not worth it IMO.
I took some games along so we had a games night the first night with just ourselves. On the second night, we invited some of our various friends who live in Ibadan over and had a mini-party. We did karaoke, played games and watched movies. It was super fun and I made new friends.
I had an amazing time tbh and I’m planning to do it again soon (different location).
We left Monday afternoon. The initial plan was to leave Monday morning but it’s an almost two hour trip from our Airbnb to the train station and there’s no way we would have all woken up and gotten ready early enough to get to the station before the train left at 8am. We were meant to check out of the Airbnb by 12pm (which is the standard time) but we spoke to our host and asked if we could leave later and she said we could at no extra cost. She’s such a sweet soul. Note that this doesn’t apply to every Airbnb. A friend of mine who had lodged in an Airbnb in Ibadan the week before said she had had problems with the host about being out of the space by 12pm. So we were just lucky tbh.
I hope this at least helps with your planning — if you’re planning a trip.
Time for picturessssss 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩
