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Yeah, for years we were restricted to travel in the summer due to kids in school and sports. Unfortunately, we got into that habit and didn't think it through when we made the trip to Tybee Island and Savannah a couple of years back. (I was thinking it was last year, but apparently it was in 2022). We have now decided to head north in the summer and save the south for the cooler months. 

Come visit Florida in July. Savanah would be a dry heat.

Yeah when we went to Pensacola last summer the locals kept apologizing for the heat.  It felt about 15 degrees cooler than Austin was at the same time of year.

Currently on a layover at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport - very nice. From here work is sending me into the Third World. To a region where the Travelex agents just told me they don’t carry these particular nations’ cash because their governments are too unstable to dependably rate their currency.

Our working group is supposed to have armed Marines assigned from the Embassy escorting us, but that might only be for when we’re transiting between the cities. Otherwise, not allowed anywhere alone.

So far, so good here in West Africa. FIRST TIME TO AFRICA! For workdays confined to the very large Capitol City, it is not unstable enough to require armed escort, but for the onsite visits we’re scheduled to make out into the greater coastal region that might be a different story. Probably safer than it sounds, but nevertheless quite a chaotic area.

Our hotel property is more like a compound, charging western prices for rooms behind high walls topped with barbed wire, and heavily guarded at the gates. The amenities are of a Vegas level resort with pools, fountains, spas, sports bars, gyms, shuttles, and room service. In the most impoverished of nations it’s common for leading hotel brands (like Marriot and Hilton) to build a luxury property at the international airport (like in Delhi) or at a tourist sight (like Luxor), and as mentioned above, charge prices unaffordable to the local population for rooms that are walled off from the local population.

As our flight lands the other night, the cabin is fumigated as precaution against the regional spread of malaria and Yellow Fever. At customs I’m sent through the diplomatic line. It is midnight. Outside the terminal a large, vocal crowd waits in the thick humidity. A taxi driver takes my luggage through the crowd. He wants to know where? I ask if he can take credit cards. He walks me to a 24-hour currency exchange where I trade out cash. At the first large intersection outside the airport, a pack of boys, ages 10 to 12, walk up to idling vehicles, hawking everything from bottled water to phone chargers to animal crackers to wild birds. They crowd my passenger window, about eight of them, once they recognize a white guy is riding shotgun. In the morning I am awoken by an exotic hornbill rapping on my room window:

Yeah, for years we were restricted to travel in the summer due to kids in school and sports. Unfortunately, we got into that habit and didn't think it through when we made the trip to Tybee Island and Savannah a couple of years back. (I was thinking it was last year, but apparently it was in 2022). We have now decided to head north in the summer and save the south for the cooler months.

Ah Ontario/Quebec good choices

Wow. Where exactly are you, and what is the visit for?

He can’t say for security. 

Wow. Where exactly are you, and what is the visit for?

it's double secret

The Embassy is laying off the armed escort requirement unless business requires us to venture over into its borderline failed neighboring states. Instead our group has been given a full time driver entrusted by the Embassies to chauffeur foreigners.

As for the Capital City, the international airport district is modernized with glassy office towers and well known business outlets like Pizza Hut, Shell, Best Western, Burger King, Marriot, Illy, KFC, DHL, and Nike – brands mostly unseen across the rest of the nation. The Capital City is also built up and modernized in its central area of Embassies, the Parliament, the National Universities & Museums, and along a strand of beachfront dominated by resort hotels catering to foreign travelers. I say “built up and modernized” as in wide/paved streets cleared of squatter settlements, operable traffic/street lights, and powered buildings with fenced off parking.

Outside of that though, the streets of West Africa are as visibly destitute as anywhere among the world’s poorest areas. I mention our local driver, because when driving us he hears our reaction to some of the shanty sights we’ve never encountered before – sewage runoff in the streets, livestock crossings whose cattle and goats stall traffic, people walking out in en masse everywhere, children lacking shoes and full clothing, people living out of plywood structures, and trash mounded in the streets. For our driver, this is his native land – the neighborhoods he grew up in – so after yesterday’s long day visiting a jobsite, we ask him over dinner whether some of the sights we’re unfamiliar with are reactions he’s already heard from other foreigners he’s chauffeured. He tells us that he finds us foreigner’s unfamiliarity mostly humorous. In return, by chauffeuring us he gets treated to restaurants and properties otherwise unavailable to most of the local population.

I didn’t have a lot of success taking pictures yesterday, though did capture glimpses of the widespread practice of head-carrying, especially by women balancing dish pails of bottled water and ice for selling to passing traffic – notice our driver reflected in the window: