I’m in Guinea, arrived here last night almost two hours later than scheduled. Fortunately ‘Alhadji’ was still at the airport waiting for me.

Guinea’s airport certainly lives up to its description in Lonely Planet as chaotic – it was the usual free for all to claim your luggage and get past the security not paying any happy money. Confess to being in such a foul mod that I was willing to sit there and insist that my bags me looked at rather than pay a couple of bucks to be cut loose. It an indication of how pissed I was hat I was willing to do this with a smile and a laugh, just to prove a point.

I had asked my client to make a reservation for me and the truth is I was a mite concerned he might land me a in a hotel where the charges would be frowned upon by the ones who bear my costs – I really should not have. What I should have done was brought bug spray.

I’ll leave it there – I need a room to sleep in only. Though I am not looking forward to spending four days here, including a Sunday to my self.

That said, today, Saturday was an awesome one – It just so happened that my arrival coincided with the arrival of the first order that I had done for this client. The look on his face when the container was opened when he turned to me and said “you know to load a container’ was perfect. Its always been my mantra to have a ‘wow’ factor, to provide the client with what he wants and then something more. In this case, at our initial meetings he had mentioned almost in passing that he was not happy with the manner in which he’s previous supplier had packed and loaded his containers.

This was one was packed tight, almost 35 cartons more than he was used to, making his unit costs that much lower – wow factor!

Sunday morn in Conakry – did I mention that this city suffers from chronic power shortages, that usually there is NO power between 8am and5pm, that usually most hotels run gen sets? My hotel runs their set ONLY at night; I’m faced with a bleak day ahead of me once my battery runs down, this part of the city is incredibly short of anything to do – the only three things of interests so far are a) the Total Gas station, b) A Chinese – Vietnamese - Thai restaurant which I am yet to locate and c) a mini Super Market. I suspect that before the day is through, I will out of sheer boredom go eat yogurt. Let me go do some work…