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Travelling by plane to Ivory Coast is a fairly luxurious experience. Swiss Air provided us with individual TV screens, headphones, music, and lots of food and drink to keep us going on the six hour flight from Zurich to Abidjan. Flying into Abidjan you can see the coconut and palm trees beside the lagoon and a skyline of skyscrapers. We arrived just as the sun was setting, and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Ajcairns
2005-11-04 20:41:19

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Travelling by plane to Ivory Coast is a fairly luxurious experience. Swiss Air provided us with individual TV screens, headphones, music, and lots of food and drink to keep us going on the six hour flight from Zurich to Abidjan. Flying into Abidjan you can see the coconut and palm trees beside the lagoon and a skyline of skyscrapers. We arrived just as the sun was setting, and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

Once you hit the ground though, the luxury and the beauty are replaced with African reality. As soon as we got off the plane, we could see porters lazing around on top of the carousels and on boxes and crates. Then once we got into the airport building, porters and other dodgy looking geezers were waiting on the other side of passport control to welcome us and help us with our luggage - basically they dive on top of you, start talking a lot of bullshit, and try and squeeze as much money out of you as possible.

We gave about 40 French Francs to our porter - who helped us bring our bags to the car of a friend who was waiting for us at the airport. Officially, the porters are supposed to get a fixed fee of 5 French Francs (or 500 Francs CFA), although our porter convinced us to give him a bit more so that he could bribe the customs officer to only search our bags a little and not ask too many questions. I think though that this was just a lie, and that he just kept all the money for himself.

Transport, like most things in Ivory Coast, is an experience. There are a lot of surprises - not all of them bad (for instance taxis, buses, coaches, etc are very cheap compared to Europe or even the States). We didn't take the train (there is only one line which runs from north to south - from Abidjan to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso), however we did experience taxis, taxis collectifs, coaches and bacas (small buses which in general take people from the larger towns out to smaller villages). We also took a 'bus-boat' trip ...