Angola

Work tasks finally finished. Out-of-office switched on. Packing rushed. Shaving and other verbs beginning with ‘s’ completed. Rhetoric about the length of my absence hazily delivered to the building staff lest any attention be directed to an empty apartment. Celebratory toastie and coffee consumed at the airport.

I’m flying to Brazil with Angolan Airlines, via Luanda. The cost is only around 400 dollars for the return journey, which staggers me. Domestic returns in Mozambique can be higher. Angola must artificially lower its national airline’s prices more than others. Or, on reflection after travelling on one of their planes, prices are low because they use crusty old hulks and aren’t spending any money on the fleet.

Angola now joins that tantalising list of countries only visited in transit. Although by flying to Brazil tonight, Brazil falls off the same list. St Christopher, patron saint of travellers, is an ironic chap. I transited through São Paulo in 2005 and have been gagging to visit Brazil properly ever since. I’m going to geek out to the ultimate maximum and say that I believe Brazil to have been the longest-standing entrant on my transit list. I think the next longest may be Egypt which I transited through in 2007 but have never visited. South Korea and Qatar are challengers. What a fun game. I urge you to think of yours.

The thing most commonly heard about Luanda is that it has often been rated the most expensive city in which to live as an expatriate. Tales of 45 dollar cheese sandwiches and scratty hotel rooms costing 400. My impressions at the airport verify this, even when taking into account that airport services are often criminally inflated anyway. When workers in shops in the airport asked if I needed help, I said I was fearful of the prices, but I was forced to walk among the eye-watering labels for longer than I wanted to thanks to a delay with the flight to Rio de Janeiro.

After the volume of work of recent weeks, it hardly feels real that I’m now on the way to Brazil for a holiday. Simply fantastic.