I dread Dakar airport at the best of times, but with a bicycle on my luggage trolley hoping to get it on a flight to London, the task seemed monumental. Now and I had wrapped the bike up in rice sacks and gaffa tape but I feared that the police at the airport door would shake their heads with glee and declare, ‘C’est pas sure’.

Sow the taxi man arrived on the dot of 4am, as ever punctual and ready for the job ahead, the seats already folded down. Sow has seat belts in his car and worries if I don’t put one on.

At the airport, all was quiet. Beside the taxi rank, usually brimming with touts and old men keen to extort a few thousand francs, a row of young men lay lined up on a set of concrete steps, fast asleep. One sat with his head between his knees, his beige t-shirt pulled up over his head. Another, wearing a woolly rasta cap, had laid his neck on the lip of the step, as if it were a feather pillow.

A young guy with a squeaky-wheeled trolley appeared and quietly took my cases and bicycle away. He was happy with his coin, and didn’t ask me to change money. The gendarme on the door smiled as I wheeled my trolley through, and the man at the Air Maroc desk apologised for the fact that I would have excess luggage, then said, ‘C’est pas grave’ and let it go. The military man at the oversized luggage door said my bike would arrive with me in London, insh’allah.

Outside, I went to the boutique, a crowded shop at the end of the dark car park. I bought an apple, then went to sit on a home-made bench of wooden planks smoothed over time by bottoms. A young guy with a Nescafe cart standing nearby said hello, and I asked him for a café au lait, with just a little sugar. We spoke Wolof.

“Are you going to sit here?” he asked, because he needed to go to the boutique to buy plastic cups.

“Go ahead, I’m staying,” I said, and he went off leaving me in the dark road with his cart, his jacket, and his money purse.

Before long, an airport employee appeared in a smart white shirt and asked if he could have some coffee.

“He’s coming back soon,” I said. “Wait.”

The coffee seller came back after a while and served the worker a cup of coffee. He was wearing a shiny black and white shirt with dollar notes printed all over it, and ‘Goodbody’ scrawled across each one. An old, skinny man in a long purple boubou, weathered by his time spent traipsing the streets and airport car park, paraded up and down not far from us, his hands clasped behind his back and head down as if he were looking for something he had lost. On the radio attached to the Nescafe stand, the morning Koran call came through and we sat in silence, enjoying the calm and quiet cool air, drinking our coffee.

I wish I was accepted here as part of the furniture more often, I thought.