Niger River Project

Well, there’s no going back now. This is it, the last night on British soil for three months and a day.

Sorry for the prolonged absence. The past few weeks have a been a mad whirl of embassies, passport photos at 5am and bureaucratic bungles. I could fill this blog for a whole month with tales of visa nightmares, but I won’t bother. The only one worth relating was the Nigeria embassy (there’s probably some Nigerian stooge monitoring this now, ready to pounce on me when I try to cross the border). Without going into too much detail, it was utter mayhem – a West African mob, a 5 1/2 hour queue, only to be told we couldn’t apply because we were too early!! I later discovered that the poor chap, Kenny, who was trying to keep control had been told he would have his throat cut by some irrate visa applicant (neither Dan nor me, I hasten to add!).

Anyway, all’s well now and we’re fully visa-ed up.

Which is just as well, as tomorrow morning is the Big Off. Everything is planned is as well as it could be – which, knowing West Africa will mean that we end up doing nothing that was on the itinerary (except land in Conakry, hopefully).

Dan and I will probably be out of touch for two or three weeks while we locate the source then hit the water. But I promise we’ll update this, hopefully with pics, as often as we can hippos and technology permitting. It would be great if readers could add their own comments to this. When we’re out in the bush, it would be great to know that people really are out there and sharing in our mad adventure.

Until we meet again….

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.