Heading off on a business trip is always so exciting. Guidebooks to read, objectives to review, meetings to prep (ok, I really just sleep and watch movies on the flight over).
Going home is the most miserable experience ever. You start totally exhausted because you are basically working 24 hour days while traveling. It also seems to work out that I have the craziest return itineraries.
On my way back from Niger the first time the flight was cancelled. Except at first we just got weird reports from Air France like "it's a bit windy, so the plane is going back to Ouagadougou for a little while, hold tight" and then eventually "okay, the plane isn't coming back, get in a van and we'll take you to a hotel". See, it's not like there are that many flights leaving Niamey every day, so we couldn't exactly get rerouted. So we had to wait until the next night for a flight. Problem there is that the flight the next night was also totally booked and now had twice as many people who wanted to be on it. We were offered so many bribes to stay an extra 3 days but seriously, three extra days in Niamey? There is nothing there! Plus I WANNA GO HOME. Made it on the flight and thanked my stars.
On my way back from Niger the second time, I was routed Niamey-->Bamako-->Dakar-->NYC. Now this didn't seem like a bad deal. 3 hour layover in Bamako, 6 hour layover in Dakar. The problem is that layovers only work if the airport is open. It totally makes sense that if there are only 2 flights a day that come into a particular airport, that it wouldn't stay open all day. However, the problem arises when there is a passenger with a layover between those two flights. Where does one go? I cannot be the first person this has happened to.
Both the Bamako and Dakar airports are only open right before a flight (and you might imagine the number of flights leaving these hot locales). So when I disembarked in Bamako, there was literally no where for me to go. I didn't have time to go into the city at all and the ticket counters were closed so I couldn't get a boarding pass to go to the gate. I had this conversation with a security guard that descended to "this MUST happen to people, what do THEY do?" which made him think for a while. Then he just lead me past all the security and told me I could sit at the gate until the airport opened at which time I'd have to go back down to the counter to get my ticket. So I sat at the empty gate for 2 hours, but at least I had a chair.
I figured I was in for the same trouble in Dakar. I was supposed to arrive in Dakar at 1am and at first I had this grand idea that I was going to use the last of my currency to hire a taxi driver to take me around the city and show me the sites for a couple hours and then go back to the airport. However, when 1am came I was done-zo. I met a South African man who had a car waiting to take him to a hotel and I hitched a ride and hired a room to sleep in for 4 hours before going back to the airport. Best money I ever spent.
So, lesson learned is that layovers in West Africa are terrible and I should keep them as short as possible.
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