Okay, so I got my Nigerian visa on Thursday - that's one day after leaving Burkina Faso.
The flight that could have taken me to Lagos that day had been cancelled a few days earlier, so I'm booked on a Friday afternoon flight - the only daily flight from Benin to neighbouring Nigeria.
Hotel, work (limited, since it is really tough to review a financial system remotely), internet, eat a bit, respond to emails about work in Winnipeg, write blog, write wife, catch up on the sleep missed the night before while traveling and negotiating the visa into Benin at 3 in the morning.
Friday - eat breakfast (coffee, hummous, thick yogourt, zatar in oil, French bread, coffee, mango juice), more responses to work emails, find out that my personal email website can't be opened because it's 'security certificate isn't up to date', pack, and go to the airport.
At the airport I find that the flight has been canceled - they give some excuse, but it seems apparent that the reason is that there's only five of us booked to fly on a 737. The two businessmen decide to take a car to Lagos (six hours through a border, police road checks, and the last few hours in the dark on Nigerian roads), and myself and two French Embassy workers decide to book on the flight the next day. We were offered to catch the 'delayed flight' later that same night, but decided that that was a smoke screen since now there'd only be three of us, and we'd be flying the next day anyways.
Fortunately, this trip, I brought along an old sim-card phone and bought sim-cards in each country I was in ($4 for a sim-card, plus time) and could call people to let them know of changed plans and options. Very, very helpful for everyone.
I went to their hotel (saved on taxifare, and had company for a little bit). More work emails (personal email still down - which is where all my travel emails were, including people's contact information, flight times, etc.), sleep, eating, figured out how to do more work on the financial review, and a glass of wine.
Saturday more of the same (still no personal email and this was getting worrisome) and back to the airport - five of us in a small Toyota crew-cab halfton which had been used to haul concrete making supplies - our poor luggage! This time there were lots of people at the 'Virgin Nigeria' ticket counter, so the flight went, and I got to Lagos, where I needed to phone my contact.
So, purchase Nigerian sim-card and time, change sim-card out and in, power up phone - and - my Nigerian contact information was gone. The reason being that every once in a while my backup battery fails, and then when I take out my big battery to swap sim-cards the whole phone dies and loses everything.
Okay, go to the internet to get his contact info - oh, right, my personal email is down. I am screwed. Check work email to see if I have something there, check google mail to see if I happened to forward this info there for storage (I just use google mail for storage for when I travel), check all the papers in my bag. Nothing.
Okay, whose info do I have? Finally find info from Burkina. Oh, crap, I'm going to have to let them know that I lost the crucial Nigeria contact info and the MBA there is going to tsk tsk about it - I don't like to appear incompetent after I've just done a financial review - weakens the authority of the thing. But, better that than languishing in Lagos - well, almost anything is better than languishing in Lagos - the crime capital of Africa.
She gives me the info 'from an email that Nigeria sent me' - 'yeah, yeah, just give me the number'. I don't want to spend my Nigerian phone time explaining the situation - and besides I should have written the number down instead of relying on two electronic sources.
Anyway, with a little more waiting, I get picked up, put in a church guesthouse close to the airport, and I'm in Lagos - too late to catch the one flight to Jos, but one step at a time gets the job done.
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