I have developed a love of places where street signs point to neighbouring countries. In Ziguinchor there is a roundabout with a sign pointing to three destinations: Town Centre, Bus Station, Guinea Bissau. In Cotonou, capital of narrow little Benin, there is a sign on one side of town pointing to Togo, and on the other side of town, to Nigeria.

Narrow and insignificant it may be, but Benin is a country of fantastically dressed citizens. It’s not just the poor and the proud who wear locally-printed textiles, but absolutely everyone, in a range of colours and patterns which rivals even Senegal, where to wear the batik-style wax print cloth is a matter of national pride. The men, many of whom are dramatically short, wear trouser suits in matching yellows and greens and over the top purples, and the women, climbing onto motorcycle taxis and carrying giant dishes of pineapples on their heads, wear finely embroidered tops, stylish tapered trousers in matching cloth, or just a simple boubou caught with a tie around the waist. Even the children are well-dressed.

“Madam, madam,” says a bright little boy wearing a yellow and green outfit, tapping P on her leg and looking up expectantly. “Someone is calling you.”

“Who is calling me?”

“My papa.”

This is dating Benin-style.

Today's taxi driver was as cheerful and as pleasant as they have all been, despite the oppressive heat and dismal greyness of the day.

"I started work at 7 this morning," he chirped, "and I have already done 85 km. When you have a family to feed you have no choice."

We careered along the highway and across the bridge in the morning traffic, and I told him that in Senegal, taxis have meters but do not use them, so that either I overpay, and am pissed off before I even start the journey, or that I pay the right price, and he is pissed off that I am not paying more. Either way, the journey is usually unpleasant because of the Dakar taxi man's insistence on bargaining for a price.

"There are a gang of Senegalese taxi men at the airport in Abidjan," said my man. "They stay there all day, and wait for a client who isn't from here. Then he makes up for the fact that he hasn't had a fare all day and stings her for it all at once. Once," he said, getting into the swing of it, "I was outside a hotel when a taxi appeared with a Chinese girl inside. He had told her it would cost 15,000cfa to the hotel from the airport, when really it should have cost 5,000 at the most, but that at the bridge she would have to have her bags searched by the police, and she had agreed to pay the cost of the bribe. Well, when they were stopped at a checkpoint, as he knew they would be, the Senegalese had paid the man off but when he got to the hotel, he said he had paid him 10,000 francs. When the girl refused to pay, the man took her bag. So I told the man I would take him to the police station."

My taxi driver went on with other stories about the Senegalese taxi mafia, concluding that it was all "pas bon".

I have heard a lot about Abidjan's legendary military roadblocks, and even scooted through and around a couple of them myself. "If I haven't made eye contact with them, I don't stop," says Pauline, as I regret making eye contact with a whistling soldier on the way back from the beach, and bow my head hoping I haven't done any damage.

On Friday night, well Saturday morning really, we were coming home from the Ritz Discotheque when we came across a roadblock on the otherwise-deserted bridge. The taxi driver, a man who had assured us that we were in safe hands because we were with an 'old chauffeur', fell silent and switched off his engine, watching with worrying disinterest as five armed military men in green fatigues demanded to see our papers.

"Where is your vaccination certificate?" asked one of me through the window, knowing full well I hadn't taken it out dancing with me.

"You must get out of the car," said another, opening the door, "we want to check the car."

I did not know what to do and I was afraid. We sat tight, did not look at them. But they were all looking at us.

"Are you refusing to get out of the car?" he asked, and I tried to push the worst from my mind. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash silver car approaching, slowing down as it approached us. As Pauline and I climbed cautiously out of the taxi, staying as far away from the soldiers as was possible, one of them went over to the car which had slowed to a halt beside our taxi. I saw two men in the front seat. They started a discussion with the soldiers.

After some moments, we were told we were free to leave, but that we must "thank monsieur"- indicating to the silver car.

"Have a nice holiday in the Ivory Coast," said one of the soldiers to me as he handed back my ID card. "We like to please all visitors to this country."

I am going to the beach for the weekend.

The sky yesterday was something special. Not a cloud in sight, glittering sunlight, not too hot, the city felt like a sleepy beach town while people cruised around in their cars, everyone feeling cheerful.

My taxi driver was as happy as can be. "Good morning, Madam," he called out as I climbed into his red cab. "How is the health? he cooed. "If you have good health, you have everything," he said brightly.

Racing along the lagoon-side, he became distracted from the road as he tried to catch something on the passenger seat next to him. He let go of the steering wheel while he tried to get a hold of whatever it was on the seat. Cracking a broad grin, he held up his find for me to see.

"A golden hair," he said, laughing and showing me one of my own hairs, come loose in the breeze of the open window. "I presume one of yours?"

Laying it in the compartment next to the gear stick he said,

"I will put it in an album," and chuckled, bright with the freshness of the day.

"But what name will I write next to it?" he asked, and laughed as I said he could put whatever name he liked.

We bantered too and fro, he told me about all the great things Cote d'Ivoire had on offer, wild animals, every fruit and vegetable you could imagine, and lovely beaches. He told me about his days as a room cleaner in a hotel in town, how he made friends with a Polish girl whose hair used to drop out a lot. He asked me if it was normal. I expect it's quite interesting to someone surrounded by African girls whose hair, presumably, doesn't fall out that much, or get long enough to be noticed when it does. He was really pleasant to talk to, and did not leer at me in the rearview mirror or say anything inappropriate. I gave him a good tip.

Over lunch, I told Pauline about my nice encounter with a friendly taxi man.

"He might have been trying to voodoo you," she said. "All he needs is one of your hairs, and your name."

I landed in Abidjan and was met by a terrific rain storm that went on all night and flooded the roads to knee-height. It's good to be back though, in a city where the Ivorian French accent is rounded and singing, and people seem more reserved, or perhaps more wary of white foreigners, and I can pretty much go about my business without being noticed all the time.

Last night's rain brought with it another colossal mess, the traffic, which did not move for more than two hours along the city's main artery. I was lucky enough to have the kind of taxi driver one doesn't find much in Dakar anymore, the kind who will do everything possible to get to the destination more quickly than if we sat it out. Careering off the highway and onto blocked smaller roads, mine smiled and waved and cajoled his way through the traffic and into a car-wreck yard, whose muddy thoroughfare had been blocked by young mechanics with a tyre.

"Give us 100 francs," shouted the boys, which we did, and they lifted up the tyre barrier to let us pass. This is what my friend and fellow Africa blogger Pauline calls, West Africa Wins Always. As we churned up the mud to pass out the other side, the tyre was slammed back down and the car behind us forced to stop, and hand over money.

I have been trying to get into Nigeria. At the embassy I realised I didn't have the right papers, and was about to despair when a large, fleshy black woman with an incredibly deep southern American accent, waddled up to the application window and forced her way into the face of the bony, acid-faced secretary on the other side. She declared that she was an American citizen, although was most likely of Liberian origin.

"I am the minister of my church and I don't need no letter from nobody," she said, her voice unavoidably loud, the whole bedraggled room of Nigerians turning to stare at this fascinating creature.

"She don't know what the hell she talking about," the lady, dressed entirely in pink, bellowed as she walked away from the window and went to sit down on one of the plastic chairs. "I don't need no invitation letter to go nowhere."

"No! She is sitting there," she barked, almost screamed at a young Nigerian who came in and wanted to take the empty chair next to her. Her mignon, an embarrassed-looking Ivorian girl, smiled apologetically at the man, and did not take the seat allocated to her. Instead she started making frantic calls to the ambassador, who did not answer his phone, at the request of the minister who sat, false pink and gold nails fanned elegantly across her lap, calling out orders.

"You get the ambassador on the phone and you tell him what I be going through down here. I shouldn't have to put up with this. They ask me to come and preach in Lagos and that what I'm trying to do."

As the furor died down, and the invitation was sent for by two further mignons, I leaned in to hear a conversation between a Nigerian woman who had come in, and the minister. The Nigerian was telling the minister, who was not listening but instead umming whilst looking at her telephone, how she was out in the villages feeding children and giving them clothes and everything, but needed more money to keep her operations going.

"There's a lot of money out there," the pink lady said conspiratorially, leaning in towards the Nigerian. "The Chinese, the Lebanese, the EU," at which point she swept her podgy hand towards me, "they give billions of dollars. But they gonna take it for you cause they think you're stupid. By the time it gets to you, it's just a cup of soup. None of the food gets to the villages, none of the trucks get to the villages," the lady had become breathless, "it's just for these people"- once more sweeping her hand towards me- "to ride around Africa saying what good things they're doing. So until you get accurate records, that's going to keep on happening. Accurate records."

"Accurate...records," the listener repeated slowly, savouring these words of advice as if they were the answer to so many of life's difficult questions. "Accurate records."

The minister, whose briefcase flipped open spilling hundreds of pink church leaflets proclaiming her ministry was the way to finding everlasting joy in the lord, was talking about her trip to preach at a church in Lagos.

"That's why they got security and everything. Cause Lagos is a crazy place. But I trust the Lord is with me, I trust he is there."

Someone told me how a friend had described living in west Africa as living with eternal decay. The decay of buildings, the decay of infrastructure, the decay of governments and democracy and people. I thought this, at the time, unnecessarily gloomy, but I think today I agree with it. This morning the skies were filled with clouds as I tried to find a sunny spot to hang out my washing. It finally rained, but the oppressive tension in the air didn't lift.

At the Air Ivoire office, on my second visit- the first being fruitless since the office was on a lunch break- the clerk sold the man infront of me a ticket on the flight which I had been told had been cancelled due to a plane break-down in Paris.

"Oh, they sent another plane on Saturday," the clerk cheerfully told me. "And check in opens in ten minutes, you'd better hurry."

But someone had told me, from this very office, yesterday that there was no other plane to replace the broken one, that I would have to wait for a seat on a plane with another company.

"Well, they sent another plane on Saturday," he told me again, and I wanted to cry.

Managing to convince him that I could not get home, pack and to the airport in the next hour, he agreed to transfer me to the even more unreliable Air Senegal flight tomorrow. The guard, the one who looked vaguely sympathetic when I arrived at the office in the lunch break, looked baffled as I fled the office in tears. Some days the total decay of everything- communication, planes, order and organisation- knocks me for six.

Hospitals for the rich. The roof terrace cafe has the best view in Dakar. Down below, wheelbarrows hold bountiful fruits, mangoes and bananas, whilst women in glorious embroidered outfits trail the hallways. A few roads away, the general hospital keeps patients on the ground amongst the roaches.

A lazy afternoon on the beach, hazy skies and endless breaking waves, a sea of wash.

The thousands of black figures scattered across the wide sands playing football, wrestling, doing acrobatics, gathered into one dark mass as a fight broke out amidst them.

By the time I got there, picking my way through stranded mauve jellyfish, a group of gangly kids torturing a large one with a piece of driftwood, the fight had broken up and I was amongst thousands upon thousands of teenagers and younger children, mostly boys, spending their Sunday afternoon in activity.

Some paired themselves off into couples, grappling at eachother, pawing the others' raised hands as they went into a bodylock which would result in one of the boys being thrown on his back. Others sat and watched, some played football, pitch upon pitch lined up along the shore, shoes, tires, blocks of wood, lumps of concrete forming the goalposts. The odd group of teenage girls in childish bikinis, breasts and curves spilling out unaware.

Absolutely everyone was covered in sand, some faces with only the eyes clear behind a mask of fine white sand, most in their underpants, all caked in the stuff. Everywhere I went, with my camera around my neck, the bolder boys hissed and asked for me to photo-them, the girls looked away shyly. One group of children sat tranquil in a group on the sand, an oil painting of sun-faded red shorts and pants and white sandy bodies, the black skin barely visible beneath. But once I had aimed my lens, they leapt into a pose, grins and thumbs up, and the moment was lost.

Near them, some older teenagers were doing somersaults. I lined up behind them and crouched down, a crowd of a hundred or so people gathered beside me. The acrobats made dramatic twists and leaps in the air, kicking up the sand, as they effortlessly leapt off eachothers' cupped hands and flailed elegantly in the air. Some kids tried and failed to leap, the younger ones giggled.

So many black bodies, all around me, suffocating except for everyone was so happy.