Niamey

I have been stalling my post in the hope anything interesting would happen I could write about. No such luck and if I do not write now, the danger exists my blog will die a quiet death. With nothing to write about that might happen anyway of course, but what is a death of a blog? Enough of the babbling let's start with the nothing.

Although Niamey was described to me as a dump, I was impressed by its looks. Not that it is beautiful or has (many) touristic sites, but it looks relatively well organized, has a lot of asphalt roads and even some tall buildings and places with street lightings. I believe in the seventies uranium was found in the north of Niger and with prices sky high, money was available in abundance. From these times stem the fancy looking big buildings. When uranium price plummeted the country all of a sudden was poor as a church rat. I wonder what the country would have looked like if they had spent their money on education and irrigation projects?

Still Niamey has friendly inhabitants and I have enjoyed myself, I wish it would be a little bit less hot, today temperature rose to 47 Celsius, they said. I staid in the case de passage of the Deutsche Entwicklung Dienst(?)(DED). The previous week there had been a gathering of all DED staff in Niger. Thorsten, still was there, awaiting the arrival of his girl-friend and 2 friends. Thorsten was so nice to take me to good spots to eat in the evening and took me with him when visiting his friends in Niamey. He even arranged a place for me to stay in Agadez with a colleague, Anne. In Niamey a lot of Embassies are present so I made an embassy tour to find out my options for traveling further. Lybia only gave visa to local people; Algeria said their consulate in Agadez managed overland border crossings into Algeria and maybe they would allow me one; Chad was no problem but on the same day a civil war broke out! I did not want to go south so my only option was to go north to Agadez.