Je suis arrive au Bangui!

After encountering the rudest air hostess I have ever met in my life, I am in Bangui. The flight itself was fine, though 2 hours late, but I encountered the most confusion ever in securing a flight. In a nutshell, we reserved our tickets from Douala to Bangui weeks before we left DC. After assuring my colleague and I a million times that a simple phone reservation without payment since they only accepted cash would be okay, we arrived at the airport office to pay for our tickets only to hear that there was no such reservation and the flight was sold out…
Unfortunately, the airline office manager encountered the most aggressive people she would ever encounter in her life and had to find a way to get us on that plane because we weren’t leaving that office without a ticket. Let me preface the rest of this story by explaining that you can only fly in Bangui from Douala on Saturdays and Tuesdays. Therefore, if we did not get on this flight, it would throw off our whole itinerary and we’d be stuck in Douala with nothing substantial to do.
Somehow, the office manager found us a ticket on a completely booked flight, but suggested that even though the flight was scheduled to leave at 3:45pm and check in didn’t start until 1pm, we should be in line before noon… We had a host of other errands to run that morning, but arrived the airport by 12:30 and stood in line behind 10 other people, who had seemingly received the same advice.
After a series of other incidents which I will discuss in a later post, we both received our boarding passes, but there was no seat assignment. When we inquired further, we were told the plane had open seating. My colleague and I promptly changed into our sneakers! No, not really, but we knew that this was an indication that we just might have to summon our inner track stars.
But all in all we got on the plane and secured our seats. We watched the rudest air hostess I’ve ever seen blatantly curse out a passenger for about five minutes and threaten to kick him off the plane mid flight. I’m not sure what he said to her to deserve such a verbal tongue lashing, but you better believe I was all “please and thank yous” for the rest of the flight!
Once we arrived in Bangui airport, there was another long wait for baggage, but our fixer and driver were already there waiting for us, which made me feel very comfortable. Because once we left the airport, the city was a cloud of darkness. Pitch black to the point that I was forced to use my phone as a flashlight. In the following days I will tell you more about Bangui. I haven’t witnessed the extreme poverty that reports and my colleagues have described. Right now I am staying in a very nice apartment/hotel with wireless internet. And I have only visited places that are frequented by expats and high level officials and lucrative business men. But I am sure once I venture out into the North it will be quite a different story.