Monday, March 22nd, 2004

Ok, I realize that its been more than a month since my last posting, so I'd like to apologize. With the vacation and then the aftermath when I returned (for example: George, the bank manager, is out sick with malaria), it hasn't been easy to find a few minutes to write down some of the fun, interesting and delicious things I did on vacation!

I, much like my father, measure the success of a vacation by the number of pictures that were taken. With the advent of digital photography, it has become that much easier to take TONS of photos. And, using Dad's photography law of averages, the more photos you take, the more likely you'll get some really good ones. So, during the almost three weeks of my vacation, I took slightly over 800 photos with my trusty Canon Powershot G1 with 1 gig compact flash card. That would clearly place this vacation in the highly successful category. I will be uploading the photos when I next visit Peace Corps headquarters in mid-April. I have sorted through them, however, on the bank's computer, and there are about fifty that I am extremely happy with. Maybe I should be creating a portfolio to become a professional photographer when this is over?

I left Edéa early morning, caught a bus which dropped me on the side of the road near the airport. A short taxi-ride later, I had passed the first level. The trip was remarkable in that there was nothing remarkable about it. We were not stopped by police, nothing happened to the car, the traffic moved smoothly, no one tried to cheat me, it was almost pleasurable...

In the airport, I met a really nice Indian-South African who was, like me, on his way to Malabo (my intermediate stop before continuing to Madrid). He works for an oil equipment company as the shipping agent. There is lots of oil activity on the small, and formerly poor, island of St. Isabel, Equatorial Guinea- of which, Malabo is the capital. We had a nice conversation, and he mentioned that there was a flight leaving to Madrid that afternoon. Apparently there are more than a few Houston, Texans on Equatorial Guinea, and the best way back to the ranch is on the twice-weekly Iberia flight to Madrid. Well, since my scheduled flight was the second of the twice weeklies, I set about planning how to convince the powers that be that I'd much rather spend three extra days in Madrid than Malabo (I know, tough decision).

Upon landing in Malabo, we walked off the plane and were hit by a wall of humidity which is similar to the feeling of going to the enclosed rainforest at the Montreal Velodome after coming in from sub-zero temperatures. It confirmed the theory that, as bad as you think it is, it can always get worse. The Malabo airport is so new that everything still works, and shines. After getting through customs and passport control, I had to wait a couple of hours for the Iberia staff to show up. Apparently if you only have two flights a week, you only have to work the two hours before the flight. When they arrived, I waited until I got to the front of the line (by this time, I had eaten lunch served in a back room behind the bar). I struggled with my limited Spanish and the woman's limited French to get across the idea that I wanted to fly standby on that flight. Since they didn't have a computer system, she didn't see how it was possible. She left to talk to the manager and came back with a definitive "no". I gathered my bags and began walking dejectedly towards the taxis to begin my three day stay in a steam chamber.

As I strapped my backpack on, the manager came over and said that there was space, and that I could indeed get on the plane! Happily, I paid the exit tax, and made my way to the waiting room with the rest of the Texans leaving for home.

Arriving in Madrid airport was like revisiting an old memory- the memory of western civilization. In nine months, its possible to forget to the point that you think your memories were implanted by some dubbed movie on satellite TV. But, as distant as it seemed, I seemed to get the hang of it and move back into 'Metropolitan Pete' mode. I got my bag (it made it) and headed towards the subway -note to New Yorkers: most cities with subways have stops at the airport so why did it take 30+ years for the Port Authority to get off their butts?. I arrived very late at night (yes, the same day I left my home in Edéa), and looked through my limited research and picked the Hotel Europa. I made it there, checked in and went to sleep.

to be continued...