Circumnavigate Log #5

Circumnavigate Advice #3 Ask questions.

It was midnight at Robertsfield International Airport outside of Monrovia, Liberia. Having arrived at the airport with plenty of time for my flight, I was in no rush. However, I should have asked the question, "where should I go next?"

Never before has the airport in Liberia required an airport tax. In the US they area all factored into the price of the ticket. But I am familiar with how to pay them after flying through Bangkok a few years before. After receiving my boarding pass I proceeded to emigration and the health inspection and a second security point before reaching the gate. It was then they told me I had to pay the airport tax. You pay the airport tax after getting your boarding pass.

No problem, I just walked back and payed the $5. But then I faced the line before me. Because of the narrow hallway, I couldn't bypass the 20 minute wait for the emigration and heath inspection stations. At the front of the line, the man looked at me and said, "Why are you waiting here? You can just go right on up?"

Next time, I'll ask.

Circumnavigate Advice #4 Be assertive.

Liberia can be a rough place on the surface. After two years there, you learn how to be assertive. I mistakenly assumed that in Singapore, the people would be gentle, soft-spoken, and kind. I was correct that they are a kind people, but I needed to engage my assertiveness a bit more as I tried to get a taxi. "Do you know where the cove is on Sentosa Island?" I graciously asked 15 consecutive taxi drivers.

"No, that's a new development; I can't help you," was their unanimous response.

A passerby pointed me to the direction of the train station to Sentosa Island. Grateful that I only had two light bags, I walked through a supermarket, a mall, up an escalator to the third floor, down three flights of stairs dead ending in a room where a three Singaporeans were changing, back up the stairs, across a patio I had missed earlier, through sliding glass doors that I mistook for windows, around a corner to the Sentosa Express ticket counter.

I wasn't on the train for more than 5 minutes and we arrived at Sentosa beach. "Take the yellow bus to the second stop," Someone explained to me. "Walk back two blocks to and then get on the orange bus to the cove. Then take the gray bus to the condo where you are going."

By the time I departed from the yellow bus, the orange busses had stopped running for the night. I called Ed Attema, who had expected me an hour earlier and he got on his bike and met me. We walked the remaining mile toward their condo.

I can't tell you how good that shower felt. Bucket baths aside, it was the first one I had had in two weeks.