Happy holidays

Just back from a week in Niamey, uneventful except that the increasingly poor service of Air Senegal has left me feeling as though I haven’t slept all week. The journey there was delayed by eight hours (meaning I arrived at 4am), and the journey back by one and a half hours. Then on arrival back in Dakar at 1:30 this morning I had to wait another one and half hours until the luggage appeared. The excuse given seemed to relate to the arrival of another flight around the same time, although no other luggage arrived whilst we were waiting for ours.

Tomorrow morning I fly to Cape Verde for a two week holiday (much of which might be spent sleeping!), so the blog will be a little quiet.

Someone commented that I seem to get an awful lot of holiday, so I thought I had better explain how this has arisen.

The organisation I work for allows us to take a day’s compensatory leave for every weekend day we spend travelling or working overseas and every public holiday we miss through travel, plus one day for any trip of two weeks or more. It is very generous, although in practice (as it has to be taken within one month of the trip) it is often hard to take it given pressure of work. However this year my travels around Rwanda, Ghana and Guinea Bissau, plus the odd day of other trips, were all taken from compensatory leave.

This is a picture of a Senegal parrot, taken through my office window a couple of weeks ago:


Merry Christmas to everyone, by the way, and best wishes for 2009!