“I am in!”
So I did get a response, after all. Not exactly what I had expected, though! After all, Sofia is usually the brake on my wildest and most extreme travel ideas.
I brought up that the area where we are going is not the most stable in the world, lots of terrorist organisations, and so on. Also, travelling for 40 days through 9 countries means that we don’t have a lot of time in any of those countries, and by being in a group we don’t have the flexibility to stay a bit longer if we like it somewhere. Sofia had indeed checked the Foreign Office travel advise, and found that quite a lot of the area was coloured red or orange. “But there’s also a lot of yellow”. And about the fleeting nature of visiting so many countries: “We can always go back if we like it somewhere”. Hmmm.
I sent another email to Alonso, asking if there were still places available on the trip. Kind of hoping that the trip would already be fully booked. Which wasn’t the case. Of course not, who in his right mind would want something like this? Well, there were already six participants, out of a maximum of ten.
Alonso also indicated in his return mail that there may be a problem with visas for Cameroun and, especially, Nigeria, so he had a plan B. Instead of going south from N’Djamena, the capital of Chad and the departure point of the trip, further into Chad before crossing into Cameroon and Nigeria to Benin – so avoiding the main operating area of Boko Haram – if the Nigerian visa would be a problem, we could always go north, through Niger to Benin. Avoiding Boko Haram on the other side, and skirting the area of operations of Jihadist groups in Niger and Mali and Burkina Faso. Hmmm.
next: 18 Nov
You are very lucky with a wife like Sofia Bruno!!