Let's cruise then, shall we?

Thursday 20 November
Our final days in Niger passed very quickly, and the next thing we knew, it was Thursday afternoon.

The Air France strike finished as planned, so all was good. They have this funny thing for the Air France midnight flights to and from Niamey--for some reason, those on that flight to Paris must check in their luggage (all except for hand luggage) when the plane first arrives at 4:00 or 5:00pm. (It then goes on to Burkina Faso, then comes back for passengers and on to Paris.) So we went to the airport to check in our stuff. When we finally got in, it was all good and things went quickly.

Yes, there is a "but".

But, guess what! Typical Niger: Their x-ray machine wasn't working. Every single bag must be opened and looked through by airport staff. This wouldn't be so bad, if we didn't have ELEVEN bags, all taped shut and padlocked! We finally left the airport by about 6:30, at least 2 1/2 hours after we arrived.


Friday 21 November
Just after midnight. We are sitting in the departure lounge, after going through the police checks and customs, boarder patrol etcetera. Soon enough, we are allowed to board. The French like their security, so after our hand luggage had been passed through the x-ray (yeah, that one works. Don't ask why we couldn't use that one for the rest of the stuff) they felt they had to manually search through all our bags. Their only metal detector was a hand held one (from what I could tell, there was no other one in the airport that we had to walk through), and the only thing I was caught with was a flash drive. How exactly that is picked up by a metal detector, what with the tiny amount in it, I have no idea. Anyway, that was of no threat to them, apparently, so I was fine. Little did they know...

We arrived in Paris just before 6:00am. No trouble in getting out of the airport, except for that minor hiccup when Jonathan went missing.

Okay, maybe not so minor. A long story short: He was suddenly gone. Not there. We had absolutely no idea where he went. After giving us all the frights of our lives, we found him about 15 minutes later. He had walked off ahead of us, thinking we were just behind him, and then when he couldn't see us he assumed we had gone through some doors. He went through them...and the rest is fairly obvious. Eventually we found him, thank God.

As we were going to go to Amsterdam for almost two weeks, we wanted to leave most of our stuff in Paris, as we didn't want to take it all across Europe. So we had to take all our stuff from the airport, outside of Paris, to Kimberley's (my sister) friend's place, on the other side of Paris. A long way, with more than 200kg worth of stuff. And we did it by trains (RER, metro). The Paris metro system is very good, I must say. But I am never doing that again. It was crazy. Nuts. There was this one station in which we had to switch from an RER train to a metra train, and it was massive. We had to lug all that stuff across it (at least 30 minutes). By the time we got there (just after 10am) we were all absolutely exhausted, and our muscles ached like nothing on Earth. I am never going to forget that. And I am never doing it again.

Later, after going to the hostel we were staying in, me and Kimberley went around Paris just looking at stuff, window shopping, wandering the streets. (She lived there for 6 months earlier in the year, so she knows the place.) It was cool. I loved Paris. Eventually we headed back and had dinner and then crashed (went to bed) early, for a nice long sleep.