I left my flip-flops in Lagos when I was last here and they are now long gone. I thought I could get some in a go-slow but so far I haven't seen any.

Yesterday morning I went to the hole in the crumbled wall across from my guesthouse, and awoke a man sprawled on a woven mat across the floor.

"Do you have slippers?" I asked, as he scuttled around to the window to serve me.

"What size?" he slurred, pulling out two pairs of swirly purple plastic shoes. One pair were the size of a small hovercraft, the other fit for a medium-sized child. Neither fitted me.

"This is ten" he said holding up the small shoes. "And this is eleven," flapping the large pair. "You must be ten and half."

When I left Senegal in July I never thought I would be back to Africa so soon, but as someone who showed me around the late Fela Kuti's house today told me, "your dream has come true". Some time around August, when I met a journalist planning to go to Lagos for Felabration, the annual festival celebrating Fela's birthday, I hoped I would be able to find a way to go myself. And there you go, sometimes dreams just come right at you and you have to grab them while you can.

When I landed in Lagos last night, I was filled with that familiar feeling of euphoria at being in a place so hot and disordered whilst at the same time knowing that anything could go wrong. Racing, and then crawling, down the highway at night, a route I told myself I would never take for fear of bandits who rob anything that moves slowly enough, I had that rush of adrenaline as the hot dusty air ripped through my tangled hair and a bus completely filled with green oranges and topped with men crawled alongside. Back in Africa, just a couple of months after leaving, and feeling so incredibly at home, but not really knowing or understanding why.



This afternoon I was treated to a tour of The New Africa Shrine, the legendary musical home of Femi Kuti, son of Fela. Afterwards, Fela's daughter took us to where her father is buried, in the scrappy front yard of the Kalakuta Republic, where posters of her late father still stick to the white wall of the house and her brother Seun's more recent posters are stuck all over the front gate. She looked sad, she said she had not been there in six years. There seemed to be bad feelings surrounding the visit, but I still felt honoured to be there, in the place which I had heard so much about and never really thought I would ever get to visit. When we left, a crazed skinny man whose jeans seemed barely to cling to his waist, spotted Fela's daughter and chanting, "Mama, Mama" ran alongside the car, his clenched right fist in the air, until she wound down the window and met his fist with hers, the undying sign of her father's incredible strength.

"I think that if Africa has something to sell, it’s not petrol but the joy of life, the joy of living with nothing. I know that we had that, I don’t know if we still have it because today, in Africa, people complain a lot. Before, everyone wanted a mobile phone, now everyone wants three.

Africa is not just bam-bam-bam-bam and acrobatics. No, it’s also violins, people who walk peacefully, people who have something inside their hearts. It’s bam-bam-bam-bam inside, spirituality, people who have a special view of the world, people of emotion, poets who do not know they are poets. Africa isn’t just a history but something new as well, something which is moving towards the future."

I had a pleasurable encounter with Wasis Diop this summer, who told me this as he talked about his ethereal new album. What a poet, intellectual and visionary. I especially like his song and clip Automobile Mobile, which uses shots of 1960s Dakar from his film-maker brother's film to show a Dakar that still exists in small, barely-detectable elements.

Steve, who commented on my last blog, reminded me that I did not explain the removal of my previous posts from London. I have not found England easy to return to; the first weeks in which I revelled in the ease with which things can be done soon gave way to despair that life is colourless and provincial. Gone is the drama of a trip to the shops and gone the afternoons swimming in open warm seas and the heavy heat that allows, or insists on, long naps. Life in London is stressful, busy, rushed, but flat.

My last posts were becoming moans. I did not want to write a blog that bemoaned my easy life, and so I decided to delete the last posts. But things are becoming a bit easier, I suppose, and I am going to Lagos in a couple of weeks for some work, so I imagine I will start posting again soon enough.

In any case, it seems that from all the comments I have had from people who have left west Africa and now read my blog, it has got inside them like it has got inside me. I can't explain it, and don't need to, just that I will be happy to go back.

I have recently gone back to a camera using real film, which means that the last months' images are only just surfacing. In no particular order, or perhaps chronologically, they follow.



These are the young fishermen Pauline and I met at Assinie in Ivory Coast. We were ambling on a long relaxing walk; they were out catching their food for the day.



Walking back along the beach at sunset, trying to remind myself that being able to walk on the beach almost every day is a luxury I have chosen to give up, for something better, if yet unknown.



She might not like me posting this picture- we have a 'no bikinis' policy on our blogs but not as yet a 'no boubous' one. But it was such a happy day and P looks radiant in her boubou, which she did not buy, yet could still. We walked through Treicheville, a run-down quarter of central Abidjan, and met a tailor in his shop who showed me into his house behind to use the toilet, lending me his flip-flops so as not to get my feet wet. The tailor and his boys watched television as P tried on the outfit. I can't remember what we had done that day, it may have been on our way back from an odd hotel where P had saved a frog from the hotel swimming pool, causing every male in the joint to approach us in the hope of igniting a friendship. It is the second time that P has saved a frog from a pool in the time I have known her, which is not all that long.



Philip, the Beninois corner shop worker, has been documented before. P and I went to see a dress-maker in the hope of finding someone who could make shirts for a mining company whose CEO we know. We went through Philip's shop and up into a tower block that felt like something one might find in the outskirts of Paris. Abidjan is impressive like that- from the outside a truly big city feel, deeply degenerated. I was taken with this stack of eggs.



I thought that this could make the foundation for a wax print cloth pattern. On our way to Abomey in Benin, we stopped at a village that seemed set up only for the purpose of selling pineapples. We had raging hangovers and the car was all over the place, dangerously overtaking long slow trucks on their way to Niger. We stopped at this village in order to stock up on the cheap, sweet fruits, and a lady cut them up into a plastic bag. Later on, as the juice began to spill across the car, I was charged with throwing the juice out of the window, bag and all. I still find it hard to chuck plastic into the bush. Armand, our small handsome driver, could not understand my reluctance to do so.



Mangoes. Seeing the sticky juice crystalising on the skin still makes me feel nauseous, as I have eaten too many in the last years. I wonder if I will ever love them again.



At a market on Lagos Island, I met Nike (pronounced Ni-kay, right) and her twin sister. Nike was half-heartedly persuading me to buy a piece of Akosombo cloth from Ghana, a fantastic black and white fabric with diagonal patterns slanted across it. She liked the outfit I was wearing- a boubou from Benin-, and asked if she could 'snap' me, holding up her mobile phone and taking my picture to show her tailor later. I snapped her in return, although her sister was reluctant, and then I sat down to draw her outfit, which Omar later copied to dramatic effect. At this market I met many girls who I could sit and chat to. Half way through the sale, Nike became distracted from our sale when a trader came in and she counted out hundreds of naira notes in great bundles to give to him. Nike was no small-time cloth saleswoman.



Back in Dakar, I was fascinated by Yaya's face, and one sunny day asked if I could take his photo. He was Julia's guard at her flat, and so nice with everyone, especially Julia's wayward dog Diek. He sat outside the door every day, with very little to entertain him, but he was always smiling and pleasant, even when the landlady, a mean-sounding woman, screamed his name through the intercom.

At the weekend I tramped off to another festival. It was all the things that were in the England of my home-sick memories- rain, stoic picnics, checkered rugs, ale, polite queuing, friends, music, and marshmallow teacakes.



To my absolute delight, one of my favourite musicians was playing, a singer from Kent called Chris Wood , who's timing, humour and gentle mannerisms shine out from even the simplest of songs. To a tent of sodden onlookers, he unassumingly transfixed us all.

'Heaven and hell, and the life ever after
Are such a beguiling idea.
But our spell on this earth
Is much richer, Jehova,
Richer than we'll ever know.
When it comes time to leave it behind,
We'll just close our eyes and let go.
If we've done our best,
We'll be ready for a rest
We'll just close our eyes and let go.'

This from his atheist spiritual, Come Down Jehova. When my grandparents died, I was haunted by the fact that I had never explored where the dead went to. Consequently, and in search of some kind of solace, I went to a church, a mosque, and a marabout, but nothing much touched me. It's a nice idea, put to me in a damp marquee in Cambridge, that when we go, we just go, and that what we have to look forward to is a long, well-deserved rest.

*****



A prom, where these smooth discs on the ceiling made me feel incredibly soothed.

*****

London is taking some time to get used to. My stresses are not the same kind of stresses I dealt with in west Africa, yet I am still geared up physically and emotionally to do only one thing a day, for it will take all day, expect that things will somehow not work out but then suddenly work out in a way I could not have imagined, and to harden myself against all irritations.

What I am finding is that life- the logistic of life- is easy. Food is everywhere and everything is available, roads are good, public transport is quick and comfortable, traffic is quiet, people are restrained, money comes quickly and efficiently out of a hole in the wall, pavements are made for walking on, medical care is available to anyone, cycling is a joy as sand does not billow onto the roads. I wonder how long it will take for me to start complaining about the things I used to- buses cutting up cyclists, crowded tubes, rude people? I have already started thinking I should be thinner- that only took two weeks.

But the stresses in London are there, if different, and I miss the colourful disorder of Africa. I had a sudden overwhelming desire to hear the call of the mosque yesterday, that reassuring sound that sends men to the gutter to wash their feet and ears. I miss Omar and my afternoons at the cutting table, I miss the balcony doors overlooking the cathedral.

What I miss most, which is the very reason I am glad to be away from it for I know it will make me stronger in the end, is the complete chaos and struggle, the entertainment and the exoticism which distracts me from me. In London, I am faced with the bare bones of myself, and there's no getting away from it.

Cycling to Peckham this evening, I noticed that little has changed since I lived nearby. 'Your Time Clock Shop', antiques and new time pieces, is still open, and the large billboards advertising miracle healing and faith ministries still litter brick walls and train bridge underpasses. Paul's Olive Shop in Camberwell, where the one-eyed Greek-Cypriot owner who used to bring me kilos of Cypriot apricots every summer to make jam, sells olives and stuffed breads, is still there, smoking his brown-tipped fags from a chair outside, his large wife beavering away behind the till. The shop selling Persian foods and artifacts is still there, a sign in the window saying,

'You smile
I smile, they smile, we all smile
Please smile more.'

In Peckham, Nigerian suya grilled meat shops line the high street, and a crowd of Africans had gathered around in the road where a number 35 had run someone down. A stoned man on the other side of the road watched as another bus coming in the opposite direction ran his bike down, which he had left inexplicably in the road. The Peckham Pulse has been re-named but is still an incongruous modern-design swimming pool, and the Member's Club which is no doubt a brothel on Camberwell Church Street is still up and running, a neon light flashing outside. My old street is smarter, window boxes proliferate, and posh blocks of flats have shot up, nearly outnumbering the not-so-posh estates and crack houses on the other side of the road. The Zest of India Indian take-away is still running at Loughborough Junction, and they gave me a discount for being a customer from the very beginning, when they were a restaurant in Camberwell.

While I was waiting for my take-away, I sat flicking through my photos from my last weeks in Senegal. A beautiful little girl came in with her mother, and while she, her enormously fat mother, ordered food and took no notice of her daughter, the girl came to look at my photos. She loved the snaps of the pineapples in Benin, and the market women in Lagos. She told me about her Nigerian neighbour who wears wax print cloth, but said she didn't like living where she lives because they have mice.

When I showed her pictures of wall paintings in Senegal warning people not to take pirogues across the ocean to Spain, the girl told me that when she was on holiday in Spain, she was on the beach when a big boat came along and there were lots of African people inside, many of them dead. The mother turned and said, yes, all these Africans washed up on the beach, but the police took them away. She said she had lived in the Canary Islands many years ago and Africans, dead and alive, turning up on beaches was always a problem.

It's always disappointing when the writer of a blog you really like moves. People who become enlivened when describing the mundanities of getting on the bus in Equatorial Guinea become positively bored by the experience when returning to Surrey. I am on my way to London and unless the police have started directing traffic with Kalashnikovs, I imagine I will have little to say about it. Much about west Africa irritates me, but the worse fate of all is to be rendered apathetic by a place.

In other news, I have spent a lovely final week in Senegal, including a night on a house on stilts above a clear lagoon where the turning of the tide at midnight sounded beneath me like an incoming tidal wave. Croaking birds kept me awake beyond that, but the moon was full enough to read by. In the morning, four bedraggled young fisherman approached us on the beach.

"We are looking for our friend. Our boat turned over last night and he has disappeared. If you find him, please ring this number."

I wrote the number in the sand with my finger.

"Those men are pig-headed," said one of the men at the guesthouse to whom I reported the incident, lest they should find a dead body washed up on the shore. "They don't listen to the weather report and then they go out in their fishing boats at night."

On returning to land and our car, we saw another boat rocking slightly on its side in the lagoon. A coloured wooden canoe, a long prow, like a child's toy boat.

"This boat came up from Casamance full of illegal immigrants trying to get to Spain," said our boat driver as we sped past. "The boat ran into difficulties and came in here. The police jumped on it and arrested 25 people. The rest ran away."

The price for getting to Spain on a canoe has gone down. It used to cost almost £1000, but in 2006 went down to £450. Now it is possible to buy a passage for £350. It must be the only thing in Senegal which has gone down in price. A loaf of bread has gone up by a third since I last bought one.

*****

An over-heard snippet of conversation from the news room, recounted to me by a friend.

Journalist on the desk rings on-the-ground reporter over reports that 27 people have died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaking generator in a church in Nigeria.

"Look, the police say they found a generator leaking carbon monoxide. They were not killed by evil spirits."

Omar and his tailors are making a right fuss of me, since they know I am leaving. Omar became tearful today when I started photographing the tailors, knowing I was making souvenir photos. The Nescafe guy brought me strong sweet coffee without me asking, and did not ask me for money.

"I heard that if in Europe your women have two or three children and then they stop," said one talkative skinny boy as he folded white shirts on the rickety cutting table. "You have it easy there!" he laughed, trying to imagine how cheap it would be to only have to feed two mouths. "You Europeans have made the right decision," he concluded, seriously.

Omar, on the other hand, had something pressing to tell me.

"Last week I had a phone call," he said, as he busied himself on the hem of his latest creation. "It was a Guinean living in Liberia. He said that he had seen the magazine on the airplane..."

One of my less inspiring money-makers is writing city guides for airline magazines. Each month at the end of the page I try to include a friend who I know makes good hand-made products. One month it was Omar, noting where to buy the cloth and how to find him, including his phone number.

"He rang me and he spoke to me in French. Then he asked if I was a Peul and we started to speak in Peul. Then he asked me if I was from Guinea, and I said, 'diarama'. He told me that he had seen my name and number in the magazine, and knew I was a Guinean. He said he wanted to ring to tell me that he was proud to see a Guinean succeeding and having his name printed."

Omar was moved, and I was a bit too.

"Then I had another call," he went on. "A Senegalese journalist living in the Gambia. He was coming to Dakar to write an article about tailors, and a friend of his in London had seen my name in the magazine and had passed it on to him. He said he was coming to Dakar to see me and Oumou Sy."

Oumou Sy is one of Africa's most famous clothing designers.

"This week he rang me again. He said he was at Sandaga market and where could he find me. I went to pick him up right away."

"Where is better, Nigeria or Senegal?" is the question an airport taxi man will always ask when he drives you away from the infernal mess that is Dakar airport. "I hear Nigeria is hot," meaning hard-going, "they don't have peace like we do here."

I was surprised at how hot Dakar was when I got back here. Perhaps I have become too used to air-conditioning, but I slept the first night bathed in sweat on top of the sheet, wishing it were morning. I sit here now in much the same way, wishing it were November.

I am interviewing rappers for an article I'm doing about the electricity problems, or 'lite' as they call it, in Lagos.

"NEPA office got no lite how them wan take dash me?" (Even NEPA, the National Electric Power Authority, has no electricity in its office, so how are they going to supply me with any?) raps Terry tha Rap Man, a young rapper who I met in the mall this afternoon.

Terry tha Rap Man is easy to get to know: his first name is easy to decipher (Terry) and I have no cause to call him by his surname (Mr Tha Rap Man). Harder is Modenine, or Mode, as I forced myself to call him yesterday. Even worse is Six Foot + who I am meeting tomorrow. Do I call him Six? "Nice to meet you Six"? Or does he go by Joseph, Fred or Adesinya? How does one ask without sounding a pratt?

The meeting I am really dreading is with a hard-sounding woman, who shows up on my iPod as Weird MC.

I was an hour today in the go-slow, the traffic jams which have inspired many a Lagos musician to pen a tune or two. Trying to pull out onto a main road, we came across a pick-up truck full of military in full battle-gear. Jet black dark glasses, helmets with visors and padded neck guards, flak jackets with pouches stuffed full, presumably, with ammunition, and bayonets, the blades glinting in the afternoon light. Finding themselves stuck in the jam, two of the guys leapt out of the truck and started screaming for cars to move this way and that, jabbing their bayonets near car windows, while the pick-up lurched violently forwards until it was out of the jam, and then was away. The traffic very quickly soaked up the space they had made.

A friend, and someone who knows these things, tells me that the police on Falamo Bridge do not have bullets in their Kalashnikovs. At least, they didn’t when he was running the Nigerian budget. They were never given money to buy any, because of their tendency for shooting at people.

This morning I have tried to make bread, but the only flour I could get, although happily locally produced, is ground for making a smelly sloppy porridge. My bread is therefore smelly, with the consistency of hard porridge.

Saturday evening, seven o’clock. The row of squat shops along Falomo road in Ikoyi are lit up, mini-generators coughing their ghastly fumes out from the puddle-filled forecourt of each one. An old woman sells apples from a tray on the ground, there is a beggar, a couple of shops selling plastic plumbing pipes, some girls dressed in tight tops with mis-spelled random English phrases across bulging breasts, and the loud and comforting noise of excited chatter, generators, men calling out to other men, merchants and busy-bodies asking what we would like. It is a typical west African scene, and completely reassuring to me, who has heard nothing but bad things about Lagos City.

On Friday I ventured to the National Museum. I found a taxi, another reassuringly west African moment, the taxi barely held together with panels of thin rusted metal, and he fought his way all the way up Awolowo Road, competing with hundreds of ocadas, stinking motorcycle taxis, to get through impossibly small spaces. At the museum, the lights were out, I was told. There is a generator, but we can not put it on just for one person. Perhaps come back Tuesday when there might be some school children, we can put it on then. Sorry.

A man crept out of the shadows, wearing a daftly shiny black boubou and offered to show me around the dark exhibition. I said I would come back another day, but he insisted, said it would be his pleasure. I said I had to leave, as he cornered me against a display case of heavy metal beads and a wooden fertility statue. I resorted to sucking my teeth, as my only defence against the overbearing west African male, and was able to escape into the drizzle.

Back on Awolowo Road, trying to find a cash dispenser that worked, bright sun had broken out above the clouds, and wet steam rose off the pavements and shop parking slots. I tried to get from one side of the small road to the other, and remembering the Saigon Shuffle, learnt nearly a decade ago, set out across one lane only to be pushed back by a crack team of ocada drivers. Heavy-duty Land Cruisers racing in the other direction, I was defeated, wanted to hold me head in my hands, wanting to hate Lagos. I naively thought I had seen it all in west Africa, there was nothing left to shock me. Perhaps that’s why I like it here, it’s not west Africa, it’s a whole other world.



Today there is grid power and we can open the windows and let in some fresh air. This morning I was woken up by the sound of a bird singing, a shocking noise in this place where the generator normally grinds outside the bedroom window from morning through till morning, seven days a week. There is a breeze, and palms are rattling their leaves. Last night I went to the cinema, thinking how nice to be in a place where there is a bit of cash, where there are cinemas, where other people can afford my luxury items too. When the film came to an end, the Nigerians were up and out of their seats before the credits rolled. It reminded me we were in west Africa, reassuringly familiar, where no one waits until the end or demands encores.

Coming back over the bridge after the film, a police checkpoint herded the small amount of traffic into one lane. A rickety car beside us, dwarfed by our colossal size, wanted to take his chance to beat us through the check point. Neither of us stopped, and he ground his already-smashed wing mirror along the side of our car. The policeman, in alarming black fatigues, stepped out infront of us, his AK47 in one hand and a torch in another. His oily face glistened in our headlights, as he shouted at the other driver, a guttural rumble of a voice which did not sound like words, but another kind of language. The second driver, seeing he was in trouble, slammed his car into reverse and sped backwards, down the hump of the bridge, his dim lights receding. The policeman grabbed his Kalashnikov, held it in the air, and slammed the handle forwards and back ready to shoot. Another policeman, watching this scene lazily from a chair nearby, told him to drop it, and the tension passed.

“You see dat?”, the wild-eyed policeman barked through the open crack in our window, “he’s animal”.

Benin is the home of voudou. Voudou is the belief in the power of animist spirits, used by a practitioner to achieve certain results: success, happiness, health. When slaves were taken from west Africa to the Americas, voudou was also transported, which is how it finds itself in Haiti, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. But Benin is its original home.

When I saw the state of the roads in Benin, which wouldn’t be so bad if used for their original purpose- the transport of a thin flow of traffic, rather than the transportation of goods by decrepit trucks to all the landlocked countries of the Sahel- we decided to see the fetisheur who deals in contra-accidents. Chugging a trois through the vast green landscape on a motorbike, Marc, our serious-looking guide, took us to a voudou priest who was particularly strong in this department. There were no displays of voudou tourist nonsense that we had feared we might be dealt, just a small room in a concrete compound in the forest full of old wooden statues covered in wax, cigarette ash and old cow blood. Here the fetish for making women pregnant, Marc pointed out, and here the fetish for erectile problems. Consult this fetish, he explained, mix up an ointment of shea butter and then massage the penis, indicating proudly to his crotch. “Within 43 days,” he assured us, “the man will fall upon an erection.”

Our expensive contra-accident talismans in hand, the three of us set off once again through the bush to another voudou priest’s house. This is the Love Doctor, Marc explained, and he is available to give consultations on any matters of the heart that we might want to discuss. I was initially, and latterly, sceptical. We were taken into a compound where from over the mud wall, the eerie humming of children- or fetishes- rose to meet us. Through a gate, guided by a series of toothless crones, eight children dressed in hessian wraps, their black bodies smeared in some kind of vegetable oil, were guided towards us. They did not once look at us, the bewildered and suspicious tourists, but kept their bodies doubled over, clutching their arms around themselves, until they were kneeling on the ground infront of us.

Would we like them to dance for us?, asked a mean-looking man in a fake Puma shell suit, clutching three mobile phones in one hand. No, I asserted, it’s not necessary. The oily children were led away, and the Love Doctor took us back to his consultation room.

On the porch of a mud and concrete hut, strange objects, strings, shells, and free 2007 wall calendars hanging on every hook and wall space, we were asked to sit down and compose our questions. I would like to say here that our visit was purely for research purposes, journalists on the prowl, but by this time I was convinced that our man was for real, that there was nothing so cynical as voudou for tourists in this village. The way he had gently taken my hand in greeting, but held it for longer than was necessary as he also greeted P as if he was already trying to read me, made me feel completely at ease in his presence. The fact that he was wearing a faded Dutch wax pyjama suit, adorned with the 80s-style motif of lips and lipstick, only warmed me to him further. That he didn’t ask us for money was more concrete proof that he was in fact applying a legitimate trade. I asked him my question, muttered onto two seeds pressed close to my lips, and he got down to work.

Pulling out from an old bag some dirty-looking rope tied with shells and some kind of seeds or nuts, he gathered this in his cupped hands and rubbed chalk into the mix. He spat into his hands for good measure, and started whispering. He laid the ropes and shells on the ground, threw the seeds onto them, and took note of the way everything had fallen. He did this a number of times, muttering, whispering, adding chalk, until he seemed to have finished. “Yes,” he proclaimed, looking satisfied. “You have already met your husband, and you will stay with him morning and night until the end of your life.”

“But,” he warned, talking through our translator. “You must find work or live no more than a few kilometres from a body of water, the sea, or a river. And it is very important that you learn how to forgive. You are someone who gets annoyed or angry very quickly, and your husband is too. You must be the one to forgive quickly.”

Assuring me that everything was already taken care of in the marriage department, he said that just to make sure, he could make a sea sacrifice for me at a later date, if I liked. This would involve a baby goat, some peanut oil and a bunch of bananas. He marked down my divination patterns so that when I phoned him with the order, he could get to work taking the goat and the bananas down to the sea.

In Dakar, we have the 'taxi-blow dry', where one washes ones hair and then gets in a taxi and has her hair styled for her by the warm woosh of sub-Saharan air through the open taxi window. It is cheap and effective: many times I have commented on a friend's new hair-do only to hear that it was the results of a 'taxi blow-dry'.

In Cotonou today, I experienced the 'zemidjan nail-dry'. Deciding to fight off two-day old achey-body syndrome with a visit to the beauty salon, I emerged two agonising hours later with newly-varnished toe and finger nails, wondering how I was going to get to my hotel through the sandy street without smudging them.

A smiling motorcycle taxi (or zemidjan) chugged slowly along beside me as I walked along what passes in these parts as a pavement, and asked me where I was going. He had such a sweet smile that even though I was only going 200 metres or so, I agreed to get on the back, asking him if the ride was free.

"Of course," he said, laughing, and whisked me away through the hot afternoon air. My toe and finger nails were dry by the time I reached my hotel.

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.