Trip to Ghana
Picking up right where I left off, which was immediately prior to boarding my flight to Dubai: so of course I was in the last boarding group, Group F. I don't know how the boarding groups get chosen but I am somehow always always in the last one. Which meant there was no room for my backpack in the overhead bins so my feet had to cohabitate the already meagre foot space with my backpack for the 14 hour journey. Airplane was a double-decker airbus thing, which is apparently a thing these days. Had a middle seat, got excited when the guy with the window asked if he could trade seats, but apparently he only was interested in the seat on the aisle ("because I'm gonna be getting up to go to the bathroom a lot"). Which she declined and then I'm like oh great. But he ended up only needing to get up four (maybe five?) times which I suppose isn't terribly unreasonable on a 14 hour flight
I don't generally make a habit of asking my seat neighbors what they're up to any more, but eventually I asked the slightly older caucasian woman to my left where she was headed, because she seemed friendly.
"Lagos, Nigeria"
"Lagos?? What are you doing in Lagos??" I asked, surprised
"Oh a development project, you?"
"Ghana... for a development project."
Turns out she's working with this organization called Nigerian Montane Forest Project. And they'd been in fact thinking of doing a project to promote beekeeping! So I gave her my card and I'm sure we'll talk more about this -- good thing I didn't never talk to her!
The other guy, the one with the window seat, was on his way to see family in the Czech Republic, whom he hasn't seen in four years.
And now it's time for a return of our classic segment:
In Flight Movie Reviews
The Courier - The Courier is about a British businessman who was recruited to help smuggle Soviet secrets out of Moscow to, as the movie portrays anyway, prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis from resulting in nuclear annihilation. I really liked it, it was well acted, well done, a true spy story (it assures us). I give it an A
Rogue - Next even though even from the brief summary it didn't sound very good (something like "A mercenary leads a unit of soldiers in a mission in Africa of rescuing a government official's daughter, who has been held hostage. Starring Megan Fox") I watched this movie just to see how Hollywood is portraying Africa these days. It was so bad I only kept watching just to see how the trainwreck would go. Aside from a generally dumb plot and the "elite soldiers" utilizing tactics even I could see were idiotic, and it goes from guns-blazing shoot em up to everyone-gets-picked-off-one-by-one-at-night-by-a-badky-CGIed-lion horror flick halfway through but my main impression is that I found it wildly racist. Not in that it actively portrays black people as inferior but in that it's set in Africa and yet the only actual Africans in the movie are the bad guy soldiers who die by the joblot -- and one member of the good guys who is just an emotional basketcase who is easily emotionally bullied by anyone and everyone including a teenage girl. And the leaders of the bad guys are all Middle Eastern despite that this does not appear to be taking place in north Africa. Because the one good guy African mentions he's maasai, and the baddies are referred to as Al-shabaab, I assumed it takes place in Kenya or Tanzania, but, the text at the end about lion farming in South Africa implies its supposed to be set there. Most likely all of Africa is a much of a sameness to the producers of this terrible movie. Also while Al-shabaab is Muslim, they would look like East Africans and I think the directors of this movie just thought all Muslims must look middle eastern. Also their mission is to rescue this white girl because she's "the governor's daughter" ... but neither Kenya nor any other African country has any white governors so I think the filmmakers assumption that the local governor must be white is also a fundamentally racist misunderstanding of Africa. F and everyone involved should be "cancelled"
I'm Your Man - now this is, I believe, a romance, which is not the type of movie I usually watch / review but the woman sitting beside me was watching it, and conveniently had closed captions on so I ended up watching it too and despite being a romance I found myself being kind of into it. I think because it was very existential / philosophical -- the plot involves a woman (who is incidentally an archeologist) apparently agreeing to help test out a robot who has been designed to be her perfect partner, so as you can imagine it involves lots of philosophical/existential "yes but you're not real" "you're only saying that because your algorithm says to" stuff. So like, I dunno, as far as romances go I give it an A.
Hive - "A woman who's husband has been missing for seven years since the war in Kosovo turns to beekeeping despite local resistance to a woman working." Or something like that (is what the blurb would have said). Or as the google blurb says "Hoping to provide for their families, struggling widows start a business to sell a local food product. Together, they find healing and solace in the new venture, but their will to live independently is soon met with hostility." I actually really liked it BUT there's a weird bit of false advertising going on here. The movie heavily implies that "local food product" is honey. I mean it's called Hive and there's a picture of her in a beekeeping suit as the cover image. Well there's about a minute of beekeeping in the movie, it really barely has anything to do with the movie. She's seen having a go at it twice, both times she seems to be struggling and gets stung, and the local food product she ends up producing and marketing appears to be some kind of Balkan salsa -- it's definitely not the honey she barely sells. Despite not being about beekeeping I found it to be a compelling story about the community dealing with the loss of so many of their husbands and menfolk in the war, not knowing if they're alive or dead, and women trying to support themselves in a community that frowns on it. If I give another movie an A am I perhaps being too lenient in this batch of reviews??
Having departed Melbourne at 9:15pm, arrived (14?) hours later in Dubai at 5am, whereupon it was already 35 degrees celsius there. Layover in Dubai was uneventful, except in checking my email I finally had an email with a pdf of confirmation of my Ghana visa-on-arrival which is pretty last minute as far as those things go. Flight from Dubai to Ghana (nine hours?) 7:40am to 11:35am. I rather fancied I wouldn't even bother to redeem my visa-on-arrival since I already had a visa, but as I came down the escalator into the passport control hall a young man hailed me "Are you Kris Fricke?" and it turned out he'd been arranged to sort me out with the visa on arrival. I tried to explain that I probably didn't need it but he was undeterred so I just decided to go with it and he walked me to the visas on arrival counter and facilitated talking it through with them. He was apparently an airport employee not presently on shift who had been arranged by our contacts on the ground here to help me through a friend of a friend of his or something. This is how things work in Africa. On the plus side then I got to walk right past the big passport control cues with him and he stayed with me until we met the hotel's driver out front. I had cynically expected the hotel driver to fail to show up but there he was with a sign with my name on it. So altogether my arrival in Ghana was unusually smooth. Never before have the people I'm workign with managed to have someone meet me inside the secured part of the airport so I'm usually on my own until I get out of the baggage claim.
Hotel was a short distance from the airport. Initial impressions of Ghana are that it's not nearly as undeveloped as Guinea (which literally has raw sewage in gutters just outside the airport and shanties), but doesn't give me that trying-really-hard-to-be-cool vibe I get from Nigeria. Nigeria is like trying to jump from undeveloped to the French riviera. Not that I've been to the French riviera. Or Nigeria in over ten years now so maybe I'm out of date who knows!
And hotel as usual is ridiculously fancy compared to what I'm accustomed to. Due to it being relatively cheap to employ people they're gratuituously overstaffed. I come down here by the pool (which has really over the top faux rock formation decorations all around it and several fountains) to sit and be on my laptop (Because my room as nice as it is only has a small window so it feels a bit confining to hang out in) and even though there's no one else here there's three bar staff on duty who jump up to assist me. And then I poke my head in the hotel restaurant just to see what it looks like and even though there's no guests currently in there, there's three staff who jump up to assist me.
And that's the latest. Just relaxing the rest of the afternoon, recoverign from the long journey, and tomorrow I travel onward to the inland Ghanaian town of Tamale.