Day of Errors

     I got up early this morning to walk from my hotel, which was really in the shadow of the cathedral, to St. Pancras Station to catch the Eurostar train through the Channel Tunnel to Paris. Nothing was open on my walk, but I had some time to wander a little. 

    The iron fence around St. Paul's is massive. There is enough iron in it to build a small battleship.

    

    I love old English oak, and it weathers and ages beautifully:

    I walked past the Old Bailey and Newgate Prison and north through Holborn, a section of Bloomsbury and to the station.

The St. Pancras-Kings Cross station is another exuberant Victorian masterpiece. The front from the south where I  approached was built as a train hotel station--the Midland Grand Hotel--which was vacant and run down for many years when Douglas Adams used it in one of his Dirk Gently novels as a meeting place for aging Norse gods (got to read the books!). It's in a new incarnation as some stylish new hotel.

    

    There's a 20 foot tall statue by Paul Day on one end of the enormous, single vault train shed:

    The Eurostar train is modern, sleek, and feels like an earthbound passenger jet as it glides smoothly and quietly across the landscape. A new line, it either tunnels under built-up areas, or cuts through sparsely-populated landscape or farmland in both the English and French countryside. In other words, kind of boring for someone looking out the window. One of my favorite parts of train travel is seeing the backyard vista of the built environment--much of it industrial and grubby--that most train tracks have a front row seat on. All of that is missing on this ride. 

    The train was packed, and I didn't see a seat not taken. I sat next to a young, headphone-clad German woman, who was clearly a student. When she wasn't cell-phone talking to an unseen companion, she was on her laptop, shamelessly plagiarizing the Chat GBT AI bot, and pasting in huge sections of machine-written text into some academic paper she was writing. From her endless conversation with her invisible friend to her academic fraud, she put it all out there for the world to take it in.

      The train windows were kind of grubby, the scenery uninteresting, so I don't have many train pictures. But this video gives a sense of it (impossibly smooth and quiet, fast and efficient):

    We slid into Gard du Nord train station about 2 hours later, and I started my mad dash across Paris to get to Orly airport. My carefully worked-out plan was to take the B-line RER commuter train, stop at Luxembourg, walk briskly seven minutes to the Madame Curie museum, spend 15 minutes squinting at artifacts, then dash back to the station and get to Orly in time. 

    Carefully laid plans collided with sleep-deprivation and carelessness. Somehow, flush with victory at getting the correct ticket from the vending machine, I confidently elbowed my way onto the D train, not the B train, making sure to radiate a look of "aren't I the seasoned traveler?" to the indifferent faces around me. 

    The first three stops of both the D and the B lines are the same, so my confidence didn't wane until about the 6th stop, which still didn't say "Luxembourg." I finally got off and had to take a northbound train back to Gard du Nord and start all over again, throwing Madame Curie and her jars of radium out the window.

    Gard du Nord:

    I don't know what it means, either:

    Who can have too much of busy train stations?:

    For Orly airport, you get off the RER commuter line and hop onto a little automated tram that takes you the last few miles to the airport:

        I got to Orly with plenty of time for my flight and to make sleep deprivation Error No. 2. At Orly, I quickly checked in for my flight on Royal Air Maroc to Casablanca, connecting there to Dakar. Security was a little chaotic. I spent another 30 minutes searching for the nonexistent currency exchange booth to try to get some West African francs before arriving in the middle of the night in Dakar. Then I walked about half a mile, to the very end of a long terminal to wait for the flight. 

    My gate:

     I dozed a little, leaning on my pack near the gate. About half an hour before the flight, they started boarding. The flights here don't seem to board by section--just everyone all at once. I was in no rush. When I finally got up to get into the diminished line I picked up my pack, which seemed strangely light. With a sense of panic, I rummaged through my pack to find my laptop was missing. At first, I thought someone had taken it while I slept, but then I looked on the device tracking on my phone: I had left it in Security! I have plenty of excuses (I had put it in a tray with my jacket; someone had moved it to another tray apparently. When I picked up my jacket, I mentally thought I had retrieved everything.

    It seemed I would either miss my flight or leave behind my laptop. I rudely barged up to the head of the line and talked to a ticket agent. He got my name and said, "you have to go to the police. " He told me to go quickly, and seemed to have confidence there was enough time, even though the line was halfway through, his directions for the police were full of ambiguity and French, and there was close to a mile round trip. 

    There's not much else to the story, except me wheezing back the half mile, rushing past passport control (they laughed, "did you lose your head also?" when I told them my plight), through endless duty-free shops, and back to security, where my laptop was sitting in an office. Then back through the maze, back through passport control, where they waved me through, smiling, and I made it back to the still-there plane. It had been delayed by 15 minutes.

     

    The two flights (737 to Casablanca and 787 to Dakar) were fine, and I was thrilled to see the outlines of the Rock of Gibraltar as we flew over Spain, and could see the Straight of Gibraltar outlined by the illuminated Spanish and Moroccan coastlines.

    We landed in Dakar about 1am in clear skies with the lights of the city showing the curve of the coast. I could see what I think was a giant gas flare from an offshore rig, many miles out.

    Most flights seem to arrive here in the middle of the night, and the airport was packed.

    I had booked a taxi for the one hour drive from the airport to the city, but he didn't show up. After several calls, and waiting for a callback, I was told, "pardon, but we must refund your money." Then I had to plunge into the legions of taxi drivers, or taxi-like drivers. I picked the tall thin guy that had been hounding me while I was on the phone with the no-show taxi company. His name was Joe, and he said he could take me to Dakar for 25,000 francs (about $40).

     He grabbed my backpack, strapped it on his back and walked briskly out the door. While I was trying to keep up with him, two more hopeful drivers followed me, not sure if I had already made up my mind about a taxi.

    Joe's "taxi" was a dirty, beat-up, Toyota sedan with a cracked windshield. When we were a few miles out from the airport, and I showed him the exact hotel location, the 25,000 francs suddenly became 100,000. I said no, you told me 25. In his mostly French, and my all English, we argued for a while, me insisting I had told him Dakar center and that he had said 25. The 100 got to 70, and then we stopped talking for a while.

    He drove liked a skilled maniac, and every hard stop was just preceded with a burst of acceleration. He tried to make friends again every time I seemed to show an interest in a sight, and slowed from 100 down to 40 on the highway so I could take a picture.

    By the time we got to the hotel (which he could only find by me showing him directions on my phone), it was 3:30 am, and I got him down to 40,000 francs. Ushered through the door at my guest house Nyeleni maison sahel, by a friendly, quiet gentleman, he asked me how much I paid for the "taxi." When I told him, he shook his head, tut-tutted and said, "should have been 25."