Odienne

To Odienne: up at 5.00 to finish my inputs to the Country Annual Plan; deadline today and the final version arrived too late for me to rework it yesterday. 6.30 – departure for the airport. We leave at 6.30 because that means the journey takes 30 minutes. If you leave at 7.00, the journey takes two hours. Everyone talks about the opening of the ‘third bridge’ (sometime in 2015, maybe) as the panacea to Abidjan’s traffic problems, but – like most places – it’s not really going to get any better unless there are less cars wanting to go places at the same time. The ONUCI flight was happily all running to schedule, so we left for Daloa at 9 and made our connecting helicopter to Odienne at 10.30. Russian antonovs are not a fun way to travel. Piloted by Russians who don’t speak English or French, with eyes too wild or too dead to comfort their passengers, they employ a jumpsuited young devoushka who always speaks too fast, smiles too energetically, and then reads – voraciously – throughout the flight. The reading material (always paperbacks – already almost archaic amongst the kindle carrying expats) spans Dostoevsky to Mills and Boon – but the intensity never wavers.