I took my first internal flight in Nigeria. The airports were interesting: no obvious check-in desks at Kaduna airport, no checking of ID, no screens displaying flight details. When we landed at Lagos airport, the tiny baggage reclaim room (with a single, linear conveyor belt against one wall, measuring not more than five or six metres) filled up quickly with passengers from our flight. But, for some reason, airport workers decided to wait for three more flights to land before releasing any of the baggage; so that tiny hot space was packed with loud, shove-y, Lagos women, pushing to get to the conveyor belt which wasn’t even moving let alone carrying any bags!
The drive across town from the airport to the hotel was the nearest I got to experiencing real Lagos. There is certainly a lot of traffic. Okadas (some of which have sawn off the ends of their handlebars to make it easier to swerve between traffic!) look quite terrifying. And it’s huge – when we were coming into land, it just seemed to go on forever!
The rest of the three days were spent in a nice hotel with A/C, nice food and a gym. I was facilitating some of the sessions in the workshop, and it was great to have something concrete to do. My colleague had brought her 3 year old and 1 year old daughters, so outside of workshop sessions, I spent a lot of time with them. And it was so much fun!! I took the 3 year old (Sabrina) into the pool a couple of times and she was just so excited about it – it was lovely. A really very enjoyable few days.
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