Hoerikwaggo (Table Mountain)

Cape Town and environs - I don't have time for text (being at a conference and all), so I uploaded pictures on FB (here: http://tinyurl.com/Hoerikwaggo)

via Frankfurt to Lima - and home

I go to Frankfurt from here. There’s a mandatory stop for at least 24 hours there (this is in the fine print of a “Round-the-World”-ticket), so I visit my sister who lives there, and my parents visit while I’m at it. It seems I’m the first person on whose arm my niece is willing to spend some time away from the immediate vicinity of her parents. I am unaccountably pleased by this.

Then it’s off to Lima, via Caracas. Caracas has a very, very small airport. And the rolling staircase which is supposed to allow us to disembark is broken and so we wait in the airplane while it’s being repaired. This has me slightly anxious, because the flight left Frankfurt an hour late and I’m worried about my connection. But they have it repaired in a few minutes and I find thereafter that what little infrastructure they have here is entirely appropriate for the traffic they have. They can’t issue e-tickets, but I get my transfer ticket, and pass through security in the transit area, within ten minutes. And shortly thereafter, I’m off to Lima.

I arrive a day earlier than necessary, but the home office has sent enough work my way that I spend most of that day in the hotel room, working. I take a brief walk through Lima searching for a guide-recommended spot for lunch, which I don’t find. I choose a random hole-in-the-wall for lunch, which is decent, and dirt cheap. Everybody speaks Spanish here, and I feel somewhat out of my depth. After French, Spanish is definitely next on my agenda (French lessons at the World Bank start next week).

It turns out that the delegation we were supposed to meet here the next day isn’t available, so the only things being handled are the run-of-the-mill working group issues that my colleague who routinely handles GAFISUD is comfortable handling on his own (and to which I honestly cannot bring any added value by sitting in on the meetings).

So I have another day! Technically, it was two days to myself. Everybody who’s been to Peru from our office indicated that I absolutely have to see Cusco (and, by extension, Machu Picchu). But the flight is 400 USD, by the time I’ve added all the other expenses involved in getting from Cusco airport to Machu Picchu and spending a night there I arrive at a figure of around 800 USD to what would be something like a few hours there at best, with enormous attendant hassle. So – thanks, but no thanks.

But I do find (thanks, Lonely Planet) a guided mountain bike tour to Pachacamac. Which is awesome.

First, though, I’m invited to go to dinner with an international mix of other attendees to the plenary, with people from Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina and Costa Rica present. Dinner comes with a Pisco Sour, which is the signature drink of Peru (I had my first Singapore Sling two days earlier, in the aircraft about to leave Singapore). I’d describe a Pisco Sour as “Caipirinha meets Tequila”. Not bad. Been there, done that. It’s an enjoyable evening, though some participants appear to have been pregaming, which makes one of the conversations a bit strained.

We relocate, after dinner, to another place for drinks. The pregamers leave us to our postgaming. A Brujer Sour (“Brujer” means Sorceror) is made with coca leaves, and I am told that if I were to take a drug test tomorrow, there’s a risk of failing it. I am not introduced to all of the drinks I am presented with, but decide that I have had a sufficient amount, when a few hours and one establishment later I am drenched in sweat from quite a bit of dancing and find that it’s four in the morning. The (diminished, but still active) group appears to be inordinately impressed by my self-restraint as I head back for the hotel (and, I’m told, continued until the place closed around dawn).

I drink a bottle of water and set my alarm clock for three hours later, telling myself that this is the burden I bear in order to network, which is after all one of the reasons for me being here… ;)

Pachacamac is a town just outside of Lima, and part of greater Lima. The drive there (in a jeep, with the bikes in the back) drives home what I read in the guide: Lima sits in a desert. You don’t notice it in central Lima – they seem to have enough water, what with three rivers meeting the coast there. But all the green you see in Lima is the product of artificial irrigations. All, and I mean literally all, the trees, flowers, lawns etc. are regularly sprinkled with water – else they wouldn’t be there. In Lima proper you see buildings, blacktop or planted greenery. The moment you’re outside of Lima proper, you get to see open ground – which is a light grey, silt-like substance. Nothing grows there. The poor shantytowns (some with access to drinking water and sewage, some, further out, without) look like favelas built on the moon.

Our trip begins on relatively level ground. I’m grateful for that, as my legs shake and my knees hurt (ever so slightly)*before* I get on the bicycle. I munch on local – well, munchies – and continue to drink a lot of water as we make our way through plantations and a bit of jungle-like wild growth close to Rio Lurin (which is otherwise nearly invisible, this being the dry season). We pedal across rough gravel roads and singletrails, with the occasional branch bouncing off our helmets, until we come to a pre-Inca ruin.
Pre-Inca, to me, sounds like “pre-ancient”. But, pretty much all the ruins here are pre-Inca. I thought I knew that the Spanish had conquered an ancient civilization here, and had thought that this had been the Incas. I am told that yes, there had been a civilization here for a thousand years or so before the Spanish came, but it had consisted of a smattering of rival city states. The Incas had been only one of these, and limited to Cusco (Machu Picchu) and its (inland) environment for most of this time. They had conquered much of current day Peru (including Lima) only about 60 or 70 years before the arrival of the Spanish. So they’d thought they were top dog for a relatively short time, before the Spanish came and allied with their former subjects to overthrow them (and then turned around to enslave their erstwhile allies).

From here, the trip takes us up into the foothills. I’m sweating out some of yesterday evening’s (or rather, this morning’s) effects as we go, and a good thing it is, too – my ability to handle what’s coming seems to increase in step with the demands of the tour.
The hills are almost scary, forbidding landscapes reminiscent of moon or Mars. They are light grey, or dark grey - the darker grey is a dried moss, which turns green once it gets moist.
This is how most of it looked:
Dry on the left, and a few seconds after having been “watered” ;) on the right.

The hills above Pachacamac have an eerie quality to them, like bicycling on the moon or Mars.

The pattern is that during summer, the clouds are high and sail over these hills, to rain down in the Andes proper, further inland. In winter, they come in low and the moisture clinging to the hills makes the hills erupt in greens. At the same time, a lot of wildlife migrates from the now drying Andes into the foothills, which teem with life for a while until the next summer. It is July, and winter is just beginning here. Some of the higher, sea-facing hills are beginning to green, and we see the tents of the first nomadic herders higher up in the hills.
We also catch some of the first blooms of “Amancae”, which is the signature flower of Lima – it is endemic to the Andean foothills around Lima, and grows only during winter.
(see picture at right)

One part of the trail we follow has been “improved” – it’s pretty even, and otherwise pretty as well – too bad I can’t look at the stunning scenery much, but they did add rails or anything of the sort to the half-meter-wide trail, and it’s a steep drop to one side. They did add trash cans every 200 meters or so. We see some of the people charged with cementing these things into place. The trash cans themselves were shrink-wrapped for transport. The workers set them up inside their wrap, then tear the cover off their opening – and drop it on the ground.
Sigh.

We have a very local (and somewhat late) lunch out in Pachacamac, then head back into town. I’m roped into a football game between a number of the attendees here, organized by the secretariat in a local football (& cricket !?!) club. Our side loses 6:1 (or maybe 7:1), a result I find particularly displeasing as I was our goalie (couldn’t run much after my day). I’m happy everybody seems to agree the other team had a lot more shots on goal, too – so my quota of saves doesn’t seem to have been any worse than the other side’s. And my colleague from the “Banco Mundial” scores our side’s only goal, so at least the World Bank’s participation in this event wasn’t a total washout.

I’m dead tired after this – so much so, that after my shower I go straight to bed, even skipping dinner. The next day is remarkably uneventful for being the main reason for my coming. We present the Brazil report, have a productive side meeting, go to a reception (to which I bring my suitcase, leaving from there to the airport). There’s a lot of cabs coming by, few of them empty. Of those, the first five (!) refuse to go to the airport.

The driver who does agree to take me there explains that you need an official badge with a picture around your neck to be allowed to take passengers to the airport, and that those are hard to get. When I remark “ah, and you’ve managed to get one of those” (which seems counter-intuitive, he looks a bit dodgy in his hand-welded security cage), he indicates that no, he’ll drop me off very nearby and I’ll have to walk the rest.

Which is only a hundred meters or so. BUT it requires getting out of the car in a somewhat tricky spot, and in a bit of a hurry. And after he’s gone, I realize my cell phone is still in the taxi. Sigh.

Check-in and security take a little over an hour (for me, armed with a Star Alliance Gold Card for “Elite Access” and a UN passport) – it must take ages for everyone else. The lounge is hard to find, and internet access is ridiculously slow. Getting useful contact information from the t-mobile home page seems to have been made intentionally difficult to boot, and my first attempts to call someone (via Skype) are defeated by the poor connection. In the end, I manage to have my number suspended about five minutes before boarding. Phew.

I’m on my way home. Via the “George Bush Intercontinental Airport” in Houston, Texas, which comes across about as sympathetic as the name suggests (to me). I’d asked not to be woken for breakfast, given that the Continental flight had full-flat seats and this might allow me nearly six hours of sleep (it did - yay!). I thought I could eat a little breakfast in the lounge while checking my email. It turns out they don’t have a lounge in Houston, so I pay for breakfast at McDonald’s. And the only WiFi option they have requires downloading an executable file (on top of the charge). And my work laptop won’t even allow that.

Sigh.Can’t wait to get home. Just a couple of hours now…

I'm flying around the world ...

… again.

Unbelievable how quickly one can get jaded in this job. My last trip literally around the World was in March, when I went westwards to Vietnam, and for slightly complicated reasons spelled out here http://nebelwald-worldwalker.blogspot.com/2010/03/viet-nam-2010-return.html went westwards from there on my return trip (whenever facing a twelve hour time difference, which way around you travel tends to be decided by which carrier currently offers the lowest airfare). This time, I’m going to Singapore.

Again.

Notice a pattern here?

Nevertheless, some of the experience still feels exotic. Being informed during descent, for example, that importing chewing gum into Singapore is illegal (I kid you not). I’ve seen the nighttime approach to Changi airport before, but the sheer number of ships at anchor (hundreds) is still amazing. The Singapore Straits is one of the major shipping routes in the world, and its harbor continually busy.I don’t have such a good view of it, because I sit in the aisle. I generally do, because – that’s what I asked for. I admit I like the view on departure and descent, but … that’s just a couple of minutes while I spend many hours on these flights. And not having to climb over someone else every time I want to go the bathroom is a major convenience.

I’m travelling as part of a team this time – there’s four of us getting out of the airplane, the World Bank contingent of the team which did the Solomon Islands assessment – presenting, discussing (and defending) that report at the plenary meeting of the Asia-Pacific Group on Money Laundering is what we’ve come here for. Of course, we each also pursue a number of side meetings. One might doubt whether the work done at the plenary justifies the resources involved in shipping all the attendees halfway around the world (literally, in our case). But the primary utility of these meetings is the ability to grab a few key players in a coffee break and come up with an agreement of how to move forward.

But that starts tomorrow. We land just before midnight local time (Saturday evening), having started our trip roughly 24 hours earlier, at noon Friday. Travelling West, as we did, we gained 12 hours in time difference, but lost a day crossing the date line. FYI.

Germany plays for third place two hours later. I didn’t sleep much on the flights over here (DC-Tokyo-Singapore), so I’m tired, I’m jet lagged, but still … I stay up. And what a game it was! I get three hours of sleep before we meet for breakfast the next day.

As is usual before plenary presentations of an assessment report, we start working on Sunday. Unusually, none of our counterparts show up, so we break early. I feel like going back to bed, but I’ve seen people at meetings who gave in to that particular temptation, and their zombie-like state does not recommend it. So I check the website of the gym I went to last summer for the schedule, and it appears that there’s a “Mixed Martial Arts” class in a branch nearby that I might just make if I hurry.

It’s an hour of drills – punches, takedowns and the Straight Arm Bar (Juji-Gatame). It’s highly motivating and I am very quickly thoroughly drenched in sweat. I decide to jog back to the hotel for a dip in the pool, but after about 300 m decide to walk (!) to the subway (!) instead. I’m spent. It was great, though.

I do go for a quick dip in the pool, though it’s really more in the nature of paddling around a bit than any actual swimming workout, before meeting the team for dinner. After that it’s about three hours of sleep before getting up again for the World Cup Final. Which is shown from 2 to 4 in the morning, local time. With my apologies to any Spanish and Dutch people who might read this (whom I assume are the only ones whom might disagree), I could have skipped that one in favour of getting more than another three hours of sleep before the next day’s work.

Bjarne says lack of sleep is just lack of caffeine, and I manage to live by that creed until about 1500, at which point jet lag, exercise and sleep deprivation score a technical knock out. This is the first night that counts as such, and as usual I manage to sleep very well. After nine hours of sleep (pretty much doubling what I’ve had in the last three nights) I am ridiculously upbeat at breakfast the next day – so much so, that a team member (herself clearly still suffering from jet lag) inquires as to what I’m on. “Sleep,” I reply, “it’s awesome, and really cheap – you should try it”. ;)

Again, we’re here for work, and that’s not what this blog is about. Suffice it to say that the progress I make in the side meetings on matters not directly related to this plenary are easily worth the price of the ticket to get me here. The plenary, by comparison, is uneventful to the point of boring.

We go out to dinner with the Solomon Islands delegation. I end up having seafood on Clarke’s Quay in Singapore, and remember a dinner meeting I had in Tokyo a little over two years ago.(http://nebelwald.livejournal.com/2008/03/15/ under 6.5)

Then, this sort of meeting seemed unbelievably exotic to me – I recall how envious I was of the casualness with which the others swapped accounts of exotic cuisines in faraway places. Well, I’m there now. I am equally casual about it, because it doesn’t seem special anymore. That’s sad, really. But thinking back I realize that I had decided then that I wanted this, and I got it. I worked hard for it, and it’s gratifying to reap the reward. Though I wonder what it means that next to the somewhat higher standard of living we now enjoy in DC, the next strongest feeling of achievement I get is from having casual dinners in the far corners of the world.

And while the scenery somehow didn't seem all that special to me at the time, it certainly does seem unique to Singapore:

They make custom suits here in Singapore, for a fraction of the cost they would be in the US (or Germany, for that matter) – about 400 USD for a suit. But I’m told they are even better, and much cheaper to boot, in Bangkok or Hongkong. I guess I’ll wait until I happen to go there on business. Should be any year now. ;)

It rains really hard one day – Bjarne complains that the hand wash he did in the hotel room sink which he hung up to dry on his balcony was completely soaked the next day. The Phillipines complain that the hard rain we had here was the side effect of a typhoon which killed nearly two hundred people there. I choose not to complain about my hand wash (I’d done the same as Bjarne).

This hotel has a gym, and a pool. Its opening times are disappointing, but its size is good – swimming has become my number one antidote to the sort of crink in the back I get from enforced inactivity sitting around conference rooms all day and sleeping in aircraft chairs.

A colleague of mine and I also go to Evolve again – she does TaeKwonDo, so we choose a Muay Thai class. Which is great fun. My arms are about to fall off when we Feed The Punching Bag, I’m not used to that. What turns out, in the days thereafter, to have been much worse is the time we spend skipping ropes – I’m really not used to that. I am limping (ever so slightly) for three days thereafter. But you can have good food very close to the hotel, too - and cheap:

Then pretty soon it's time to leave. Home - in a way.

Paris 2010

There are several direct flights a day from DC to Paris, on Air France. Therefore, I fly to Frankfurt and from there to Paris. Because Lufthansa gives the World Bank better prices.
This sort of thing has been remarked upon rather a lot by my colleagues. It seems rather counter-intuitive. But – the World Bank’s mission is to eradicate poverty. As usual, with really big public policy issues, this is being done by throwing money at the problem in the hope that it will go away. Only they’ve been throwing large amounts of money at the problem for quite a while now and it doesn’t seem to be quite on its way out the door yet.

So they’ve been looking at their programs for a while now, attempting to get higher efficiency out of lending and knowledge programs, or more colloquially put, trying to get more bang for the buck. Less of the sprinkler method, trying to deliver the needed – ahem – liquidity to more specific targets. The FPD-FI unit (Financial and Private Sector Development – Financial Integrity) that I am now proud to work for, in this metaphor is the semi-buried hose with tiny holes where water trickles directly to the root of the plant. The yearly budget for the whole team is smaller than most lending programs. The idea is that by delivering knowledge straight into the hands (or, rather, heads) of those who will be making important decisions for a country’s financial stability, we get a lot of leverage. But we, too, need to look at where we can do “more with less” (which wouldn’t be asked of everybody quite so often if the Pathfinder mission hadn’t been such a spectacular success, thus raising rather overblown and unfortunate expectations). And the travel budget of our unit is big. I assume our staff salary is a higher total, though I know the total cost of my travels for the unit so far already rivals that of my first year’s salary, and I haven’t even been here for half a year yet.

In fact, I’ve been here about half that – the rest I spent traveling. I notice that a lot, lately. Here is how you know if you’ve been traveling too much:

When the plane touches down and suddenly decelerates, you reach out and stop the closed laptop from sliding off the empty seat next to you without looking up from your book.

The first thing you check on the long-distance flights is whether there’s an electric socket at your seat, and if so, whether it has juice.

You not only know your passport number by heart, but also its issue and expiration dates.

Of the movies on offer during flight, you’ve seen every one that might be remotely interesting – and did so while flying.

You not only grab just the right number of trays at the security checkpoint to smoothly pass through that process, you get annoyed at people who don’t.

You don’t mind the small room, the ex-broom-closet bathroom or the lack of a gym or pool in the hotel, because hey – it’s got a stable WiFi connection.

For ten or more cities, you not only know the name of the airport, but its three-letter acronym (today I’m flying IAD-FRA-CDG).

But I digress. This trip to Paris is – weird. At first glance, it feels much like a vacation. The weather is simply gorgeous. After arriving on Sunday, knowing how good sunlight is to get into a different time zone, and needing some caffeine to keep me awake after a very short night on the transatlantic flight (sleeping in the afternoon would increase jet lag), I sit in an outdoor café with a cappuccino – strictly to make sure I can work the next day, right, no hedonism involved. ;) I also jog for a bit, down to the Seine and the Tour d’Eiffel and later spend an hour of the evening reading a book at the Seine.

Of course we work on Monday (and I’ve had a good bit to read up on – again – on the way over here to make sure I’m up to speed), but we only start at 9 and the OECD is only a 15 minute walk from the hotel (which is why I picked a small hotel way below the maximum rate for this trip). So I sleep until 07:30, which is practically a week-end for me. And I’m still back out of work by six in the evening or so. On Monday evening I go to the Tour d’Eiffel – I’ve never done this before. It really is quite impressive (though the flashing lights they put up there for the last celebration and re-installed after locals protested their removal don’t really do it for me).

The Seine at night (from the river bank)

and from higher up...

Tuesday we have a team dinner after our work – we meet at eight, which allows me to go for another small bit of jogging before we do. And dinner is nice. And fun.

And on Wednesday we’re done early as well, so I manage to write up all my changes (and hand them to our team leader) before leaving the OECD, and still manage to spend two hours with a book at the Seine before – supposedly – meeting two of our team for a well-deserved decompression beer in the Hard Rock Café. Sounds great. What’s to decompress, I wonder?

The talks actually went well. There was very little antagonism, lots of useful information. We had our stuff together, and when somebody needed to look something up for a bit, somebody else could smoothly step in so we never wasted time. When the other side asked for a run-down of everything they’d asked to be changed in the report that was NOT changed even though they requested it, and why it wasn’t, I could even do that – with enough clarity so no questions were left open, with enough firmness so no one started arguing the points, with enough diplomacy no one got angry (much) and with about five minutes preparation time. I actually impress myself and it seems I wasn’t the only one that was.

So everything worked just fine, like a well-oiled machine doing its thing. But I guess the lack of friction (which allowed us to get so much done so quickly) is due to intense preparation and focus, which is also pressure. I note my gut is more tense than it should be given what little obvious stress I feel (at home everything seems fine as well, yay!). And one of the two I was supposed to meet in the Hard Rock Café doesn’t show up because his back cramped up. I take it that’s a stress symptom, too. I don’t know what became of the other one, but I don’t find either one of them. I do find two people from the other delegation, and have a pleasant evening (and a few beers and a tequila) with them.

I get another dose of stress when I choose to take public transportation to get to Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle airport, rather than a taxi. I mean, 8.50 EUR vs 50 EUR – that’s just stupid. I’m not so spoiled that I need to be chauffeured around at the unit’s expense, now am I? Though even the tail end of Paris rush hour in the metro is no fun with luggage. Nor are the many stairs for the two train changes (no moving escalators here). Nor is the local train which brings me to CDG – slowly.I’m just lucky that I start this journey with the intra-European leg, and the concomitant shorter check-in and cutoff times. Everything’s all right. I’m coming home. J

The Gambia - Impressions from the Ground

We were picked up at the airport and brought to what shall be our hotel for this week. It’s a beach resort hotel. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Which brings to mind, as I walk towards the little building which contains my room, how much one’s perception is coloured by one’s needs. Apparently some people find this place nice enough to have their weddings here (there are two during the couple of days we’re here). And if I was on holiday, the signs exhorting me not to feed the monkeys might get a different reaction from me. There is a pool with a bar next to it, but the pool closes at sundown. Given that we work for most of the day, a pool that’s open 24/7 would be much nicer for me, even if it wasn’t outdoors. Heck, I’d trade most of the amenities for a fast internet connection. I can’t get one with my laptop. WiFi access is so spotty that half the time (I don’t try it that often) I can’t even get to a log-in page. This has been recognized by hotel management, so they rent out USB sticks that operate as cell phone modems. One of these should work anywhere in the Gambia, we’re told, which is really neat – only that it requires installing a program, and my system will *not* let me run executable files. So I’m stuck with the “business center” near reception. Internet access is slow even so, but I can check to make sure I stay on top of the more urgent stuff from work, and chat with my wife a bit every day. So far, so good. But it does mean we’re rather cut off from the real world.

Now that’s not all bad – mentally, it tends to happen to me on these trips anyway – enough stuff to focus on. We do a whirlwind tour of the institutions and quickly rack up a meeting record that would befit a full-fledged Mutual Evaluation. Of course our point, this time around (Horst was here during the last ME) isn’t to find all the possible flaws in the country’s anti-money-laundering system, but to find out which of those can best be addressed with a bit of help from the World Bank. And we make good progress. People absolutely do not work much past four in the afternoon here, so we tend to be back in the hotel by five. The standard day has me finishing my notes for the day, then swimming in the pool for a bit, followed by us having a beer near it and later (after I’ve had a chance to shower and get dressed again) meeting up for dinner in one of the restaurants close to the hotel. Which are dirt cheap and serve okay food. Except for the Bennechin Chicken to which Horst introduces me, which is a local specialty, way better than “okay” and hereby strongly recommended. Really good stuff.

Then it’s another day full of meetings. Work progresses apace. Our counterparts from the central bank have been (and continue to be) very effective at securing meetings for us. I realize on Tuesday afternoon that the Ministry of Finance isn’t part of the meetings we have scheduled so far, and ask if that could still be arranged? And on Thursday morning we meet the Permanent Secretary to the Minister of Finance. Good stuff.

We are so fast, in fact, that we should be able to finish a day early. I’d asked our counterparts to frontload our meeting schedule – to keep Friday, and as much as possible even Thursday, free so that we could schedule additional meetings or make-up meetings for some that fall through (generally something one needs to expect in the region). But we seem to be lucky (and have sufficient support from the Central Bank) – the (very few) people who don’t want to meet with us and claim other urgent appointments send a clueless stand-in, which just makes the meeting that much shorter. Remember, this isn’t an ME, we don’t need that many answers – really only the answer to how can we help? And you can’t help someone who isn’t interested in help.
So I realize on Tuesday evening that we can almost certainly get out of here on Thursday. Which is nice, because you can’t get out of Banjul on a Friday – our original plan therefore had us flying back on Saturday evening. Back when I was working at BaFin (certainly in the early years), needing to stay another day at a Beach Resort (maybe compiling a few notes and drawing up a Concept Note by the pool to ease the conscience) would have seemed quite the cool thing. These days it seems poor compensation for another weekend spent without the family.

So I ask AmEx to shift our departure to Thursday. It’s a little more expensive, but once you subtract the hotel expenses thereby saved, not so much. Still, it’s Wednesday afternoon before I know we can go home on Thursday.

Only on Thursday, during a meeting with the police, my cell phone rings. What the … ?! Noone here has my number. And the number that’s calling me isn’t one I know. So I suppress the call and get a text message shortly thereafter. When I check it the moment we’re out of the door, it’s my wife asking whether the volcanic ash would interfere with my return? What? The Gambia has a couple of hills way upriver. Senegal, which surrounds the Gambia, doesn’t even have those. The closest volcano I’m aware of is Kilimanjaro. What is she texting about? I compile a brief answer that I’m not aware of volcanic activity and currently not expecting delays.

Back at the central bank office, Horst checks his emails and notices, as a number two news item in small print beneath the headline of “how to dress slim” on msnbc’s website, a volcanic eruption in Iceland. If I hadn’t mentioned my wife’s text message to him, he wouldn’t have clicked on it (agonizingly slow download speeds having the effect of severely reducing curiosity) – and I would not have been on the phone minutes later. A *long* overseas call later (at least I’m not paying roaming charges on this one – the cell phone calls from Ha Noi came out to over 260 USD) we are now supposed to take the same flight, but only to Dakar, where it stops before continuing to Brussels, and take a United flight from there into DC. Phew.

We get back to the hotel after our closing meeting, where I ask hotel staff to call the airport and make sure that Brussels air will go as far as Dakar, if it can’t go on to Brussels. The answer is that the plane in question didn’t even make it out of Brussels on its way here.

Another *long* conversation from the hotel. Only 40 USD this time, which end up on the hotel bill (the Bank reimburses these costs without fault) and now we’re scheduled for a Virgin Nigeria flight, after midnight, to Dakar, going on to JFK with South African at 2:45 in the morning. I go on from there to DC, Horst has to take a taxi to La Guardia airport to take a plane to Toronto and then to Ottawa. Phew.

Our plane is late leaving Banjul (and unkempt and uncomfortable and not reassuring in appearance at all) – the lady at AmEx did mention that they usually don’t use this airline. I can see why.

And we get into Dakar late. Dakar airport is not nice. And we’re in a hurry. And spend some time arguing with the airline guy, because we get to the check-in desk only 40 minutes before scheduled departure, with 45 minutes being their scheduled cutoff time. They want some form of confirmation of our e-tickets, which is rough, seeing as these were issued over the telephone only a few hours ago. I asked whether a confirmation could be texted to my cell phone, but AmEx isn’t equipped to do that (which I consider a fault, text-to-mail and mail-to-text conversions are very much solved problems these days). They did email confirmations, and Horst’s blackberry finally finds a network it can work with. Which it couldn’t in Banjul. Which means that now the 170 emails or so of the last week (he’s officially retired, so doesn’t get as many as I do) are being pushed into the unit, while he’s trying to scroll through all that to show the confirmation to the airline guy. While I stand behind him and check the Lonely Planet guide for accommodations in Dakar (it seems the likelier option at this point).

But lo and behold, he finds it, the airline guy is happy with it, we spend some exciting time running after the guy through the airport (with all our luggage) (which is hand-searched), jump into a nearly empty bus which takes us across the airfield while two airport employees fill out manual baggage tags, hand luggage and boarding passes to the crew and get on board. And off we go. Phew.

South African has full-flat seats. And they’ve served dinner on the way from Capetown to Dakar, so the moment the seatbelt lights are off I go to sleep (it’s three in the morning local time, after all). And get what feels like a full night’s sleep and still wake up at six in the morning local time where we land. Going West sure is the easier direction of transatlantic flights. Supposing you manage to get on the flight in the first place. ;)

The Gambia – West Africa for starters

Monday’s my first day into Banjul (the hotel is in Serrekunda, a small town very close to Banjul on the Atlantic coast). Banjul is interesting. The streets are dusty (rainy season is still a bit off), but in relatively good repair (though of course only the major thoroughfares resemble streets as we know them, mostly cars turn off these streets onto dirt paths). The population is colourfully dressed and we do not see anyone in the time we’re here that would appear to be desperately poor.

There are a couple of goats in the streets. Here, and then again over there a block over. This intrigues me – I do not see anyone who appears to be herding them, yet surely livestock would be too valuable to let it run around on its own? The newspapers are usually a couple of days old, and do not evidence a desire to gainsay the government. On the first day I read an article that a leader of the opposition was arrested for Possession of Loudspeakers (without a license) and find an editorial next to it which attempts to point out to the reader that this shows how the law applies to everybody – a triumph for the rule of law in the Gambia. Aha. Shows you how valuable such an editorial is, because it wouldn’t have occurred to me to interpret the facts quite that way. ;-)

Then there is the usual West African experience of people trying to bum some money off us in one way or another. Most start with a friendly “conversation”, which seems hard to avoid – tell someone you don’t want to talk to them when all they’ve done is wish you a good day and maybe (usually) ask where you’re from. Then, after the young man has told me (in passable German) of his time in Germany, he presses into my hand a little necklace that he tells me they make for tourists around here and even sell in the markets, but he wants me to have it as a gift. I know, even as I take it, that taking it is wrong because it’s got to lead to the next stage, and sure enough it does. He would much appreciate if I had maybe just a tiny little token of appreciation for him as well. Just a few Euros, or maybe just one dollar? And of course he doesn’t immediately take the “gift” back when I shake my head, creating the difficulty that I can’t give it back (certainly don’t feel like throwing it down, I don’t want to insult) but don’t want to keep it either (not without paying, and I don’t want to pay).

This is when I realize something that’s been dawning on me for a while: Polite honesty works. “Look, my friend, I only took the gift because I felt bad about rejecting it, but now that I realize you expect a gift in return, it doesn’t feel like a gift at all, more like you’re trying to sell me something – and I don’t want to buy anything.” “Yes, I realize that in the market I’d have to spend money for something like it – but only if I really, really wanted to have it, which I don’t”. One can take this method further:

“No, I don’t.” ... “You don’t believe I don’t have money? Well, excuse me, I thought when you asked me if I had any money you meant do I have any money that I feel like giving to you, and the answer to *that* question would be ‘no’.” ... “Well, because it’s *my* money and I’d really rather hang on to it”. Etc. Not easy to stay polite while on the other hand honestly saying all those things that politeness would usually make us not say, but very much worth the effort. It seemed to create an impregnable shield against several touts desperately probing my defenses, without ever giving rise to aggression. I think I may be on to something here.

KL 2010: The Return

Of course, I get to spend some time in Delhi airport again first. Sheeesh.
I walk out of the airplane and straight towards the transfer desk, but am stopped by an angry soldier who, in barely intelligible English, tells me to go back and contact the airline. Going back I am waved down the rolling escalator towards Immigration with everybody else, and after some asking around, told to “wait here”. With a bunch of others. “For whom, or for what, were they waiting?” Apologies to Manowar for the quote from “The Warrior’s Prayer”, and of course the answer proved much less interesting. What we were waiting for turns out to be someone else, with a handwritten note on which there were the names of some, though not all, of our group. We were told to follow this person, who, via a different route, though past the same soldier, takes us to the same transfer desk. At which, again, and predictably, we are told to wait. I’m used to this now, so just remark that I prefer to wait in the business lounge and walk off.
This time I’m outbound on Air India, so told to go to *their* business lounge. Which, I am sad to report, compares unfavourably to any I’ve seen so far, including Malawi and Papua New Guinea. Of course, the floors are marble (if in need of cleaning), but even cheap carpet reduces noise. They’ve got a telly on, of course, and it looks as though it’s the same stupid cricket game still going on. Sunday to Wednesday – that’s actually possible, I guess.
A young attendant practically forces his help on me to get an internet connection established and then, predictably, asks for a tip. I pass him a dollar note, seeing as I know I couldn’t have gotten one established without such help, though his vocal disappointment at the size of the tip fails to move me. This place is just as loud, and cold, as the other lounge was, but it’s smaller, the restrooms are decidedly unappetizing and the food on offer isn’t much better. I’m glad I don’t actually have to get something done, these are not conducive circumstances.
When nearly an hour before the flight no one has come to issue me a boarding pass yet, I go up to the front to inquire and meet an apparently recently arrived gentleman in the process of accosting random strangers to find out if they might be the individual whose name he’s got on yet another handwritten note. Which proves to be mine.
I am, again, asked to follow and duly do so – our way takes us past all manner of other travellers, half of which this person seems to know well enough to chivvy in one direction or another. One man stops us to (apparently) shout abuse at my guide (something about his bag, which looks alright to me) and after a number of similarly strange intercessions I am brought back to that same old transfer desk (I had suspected this by now). Where a heated conversation ensues between various people, sounding a lot like “^vS@fg$% ;"#[\ boarding pass hjx&” going back and forth in various shades of hostility. I am, in the end, issued a boarding pass, and, along with another woman we’ve picked up at the transfer desk seemingly at random, brought to yet another gentleman who compares my name to yet another handwritten list. He’s asked the woman in front of me for her name (while looking at her passport) – I’ve got a snide answer to that on my lips when, instead, he asks me where I’m going. While looking at my boarding pass.
They then take us to identify our baggage (I had found it worrying the first time around that they’d ask me to describe my luggage, which the Air India personnel in DC had assured me was checked through to Kuala Lumpur). Sure enough, in an unsupervised corral of baggage sits my trolley, with the KL-issued bar code tag on it that says “KUL - IAD” (IAD for Dulles airport in DC). My guide is happy about this and produces another bar code tag which he attaches to it. As it also says “IAD” (though preceded by “DEL”), I don’t object. He then tells me that now I am “free”. It’s half an hour before boarding time, so I head back to the lounge for a snack and to begin writing this down. Shortly thereafter, on my way to the aircraft, I am made to go through scanners twice, hand-searched twice, my hand luggage is scanned twice, and my passport and boarding pass are requested and regarded by five separate people with attitudes varying from intense scrutiny through boredom to cursory neglect.
What strikes me about the whole process is that in the end, all of these handwritten notes were produced somewhere ahead of time, before the individual in question had actually met me. Which proves that the e-ticket booking had in fact created a representation of all the necessary data here in Delhi before my arrival. That they could (and did) produce a bar-coded baggage tag for my suitcase means that there are machines somewhere that handle bar codes, and that they knew about my bag beforehand. So why, in the Hindi thousand (or thereabouts) gods’ names, do a dozen people have to consult handwritten notes? This is where we outsource our IT development to? Really?
If this was a place busy dragging itself out of abject poverty, I wouldn’t complain. And now that I’m in my almost full-flat seat for the return flight, I’ll stop complaining.