Saturday 17th January
Unlike in Kabul the weekend here is a traditional Saturday and Sunday affair. I was glad of so much preparation work to do because the hotel is dead in the daytime – but for the waiters sloping around arranging and rearranging empty plastic tables and chairs by the pool side.
I went to a shop nearby to buy 6 bottles of water as the hotel charge ridiculous prices, and when I carried them in a porter said he’d help me. When I said I could take them myself, he tried to help me put them on my head. My expression must have said it all, as he laughed loudly and said: ‘Dans les mains c’est meilleur pour vous madame?’
The daytime was fine – I did plenty of background reading and work, went swimming and watched a bit of the build up to Obama’s inauguration. But the evenings are always the weird bit.
I was totally happy sipping a Biere Niger (a cute label with giraffes on it) on my own at a table reading one of the magazines I’d brought with me. I could have walked in the darkness and sat on my own at a nearby Chinese restaurant, Le Dragon D’Or for a fix of MSG and prawn crackers, or (even less promising) L’Exo’tic! a little bit further down the road, but I thought I’d better start with what was closest, which was of course the hotel poolside with the same band playing the same repertoire as the nights before.
But people always think you want to be joined, and if you could see the other clientele (a mixture of mostly Libyan, Algerian and Afrikaans business men talking money all the time with various Nigerien dignitaries…) you would see why alone was best.
Male Kiwi voice: ‘You’re not going to sit all night here on your own are you?’
It was inevitable I suppose. I kind of wished I was an old lady and people didn’t want to talk to me, but I guess when I’m old I’ll be wishing they would. So I reluctantly went to join him and his friends who were average age 25. The conversation was limited and fairly right wing….
He said he was a minerals expert (can you be and expert in anything apart from yourself at 25?!) looking for Uranium and his three friends were the pilots responsible for flying him around, very close to the ground, to find the stuff. We were shortly joined by a Dutch pilot who worked for the World Food Programme who said how much he loved red headed Scottish women. I hoped the light was strong enough for him to see my blonde highlights and seized the first opportunity to run off to my room as the Dutch pilot started to warn the others about the likelihood of them being shot down by rebels on their treasure hunt in the north of Niger.
Unlike in Kabul the weekend here is a traditional Saturday and Sunday affair. I was glad of so much preparation work to do because the hotel is dead in the daytime – but for the waiters sloping around arranging and rearranging empty plastic tables and chairs by the pool side.
I went to a shop nearby to buy 6 bottles of water as the hotel charge ridiculous prices, and when I carried them in a porter said he’d help me. When I said I could take them myself, he tried to help me put them on my head. My expression must have said it all, as he laughed loudly and said: ‘Dans les mains c’est meilleur pour vous madame?’
The daytime was fine – I did plenty of background reading and work, went swimming and watched a bit of the build up to Obama’s inauguration. But the evenings are always the weird bit.
I was totally happy sipping a Biere Niger (a cute label with giraffes on it) on my own at a table reading one of the magazines I’d brought with me. I could have walked in the darkness and sat on my own at a nearby Chinese restaurant, Le Dragon D’Or for a fix of MSG and prawn crackers, or (even less promising) L’Exo’tic! a little bit further down the road, but I thought I’d better start with what was closest, which was of course the hotel poolside with the same band playing the same repertoire as the nights before.
But people always think you want to be joined, and if you could see the other clientele (a mixture of mostly Libyan, Algerian and Afrikaans business men talking money all the time with various Nigerien dignitaries…) you would see why alone was best.
Male Kiwi voice: ‘You’re not going to sit all night here on your own are you?’
It was inevitable I suppose. I kind of wished I was an old lady and people didn’t want to talk to me, but I guess when I’m old I’ll be wishing they would. So I reluctantly went to join him and his friends who were average age 25. The conversation was limited and fairly right wing….
He said he was a minerals expert (can you be and expert in anything apart from yourself at 25?!) looking for Uranium and his three friends were the pilots responsible for flying him around, very close to the ground, to find the stuff. We were shortly joined by a Dutch pilot who worked for the World Food Programme who said how much he loved red headed Scottish women. I hoped the light was strong enough for him to see my blonde highlights and seized the first opportunity to run off to my room as the Dutch pilot started to warn the others about the likelihood of them being shot down by rebels on their treasure hunt in the north of Niger.
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