Meet the First Woman to Drive Solo From London to Lagos

25.09.2024 - 14:45 / matadornetwork.com

Near the start of 2024, Pelumi Nubi started a solo overlanding trip from London to Lagos, Nigeria. The 4,000-plus mile trip included ferries, long desert drives, and a train that doesn’t run on an exact schedule.

“London to Lagos was inspired by me wanting to connect to a place I consider home,” Nubi told Michael Motamedi on the Matador Network podcast No Fixed Address: The World’s Most Extraordinary People. Nubi was born in Lagos and grew up in the UK. When she told others about her trip, the first thing that typically came up were reservations about whether it was even possible. “Then I went down the rabbit hole. Has any woman done this before? And per usual, there was nothing,” Nubi explains when describing her inspiration as she started planning.

She documented her trip on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and quickly built up a following. Today, with the trip behind her, Nubi has a list of accolades: Lagos tourism ambassador, the first woman to complete the solo drive from London to Lagos, the car she drove is now a museum piece, and there’s a list of more than 80 countries she has visited in her life (not to mention 311,000 followers on Instagram alone).

Photo: Pelumi Nubi

“It’s absolutely changed me in terms of what I believe is possible or not,” Nubi says on the podcast, adding that “you just need to trust yourself because I got a lot of naysayers. I’m traveling solo, I’m Black, and female. It doesn’t get harder than this.”

It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Nubi would take this route in life. She majored in biomedical sciences, and earned a Phd in cancer research and human genetics. But she has always been a curious person — and one interested in breaking stereotypes and boundaries through representation in travel. At university, she would regularly take weekend trips to explore parts of Europe, and later cofounded a publication called The Black Explorer during the height of the pandemic.

Photo: Pelumi Nubi

Nubi’s travels don’t come without difficulties, of course. She recalls on the podcast times when people in Eastern Europe would touch her skin as if they had never seen a Black person before. In Morocco, she was offered a discount on a room if she allowed someone to give her a massage. A 12-hour ride on the notorious mining train in Mauritania dubbed the “Snake of the Desert” had no shortage of scares. She was often met with questions about a husband and why she was alone on her drive to Lagos, because “there’s that expectation that a woman cannot go on adventures,” Nubi says.

There’s no denying that stereotypes and racism affect travelers, no matter the destination. Nubi, however, is helping to change the narrative of who travel is for — whether backpacking, overlanding, or taking a luxury