Getting into Ifriqiya

17th of September – Bucharest, Romania

“Africa – a place that I wanted to visit because it fascinates me…I finally get to see Africa…I’m finally going there…A feeling that cannot be described in words…A place so different from what we are used to here in Europe…Two weeks…Damn…To many things to do, so little time…I should spend there a lifetime to discover it.” All the way from home to Otopeni International Airport, this was running through my mind. My trip is just starting, I’m thinking. But before getting into West Africa, I needed to change three flights : one from Bucharest to Rome, from Rome to Barcelona and finally from Barcelona to Banjul, The Gambia, right on the smiling coast of Africa. Me and my friend, Vladimir, we are finally doing it! After a few months of struggling to get everything fixed, here we were just outside the airport, looking one at each other and smiling for no obvious reason to anyone passing by.

It must have been past 4 o’clock in the afternoon. We finished our cigarettes and left our backpacks at the check-in point. We knew it would be a long and exhausting journey to enter Africa. But we were happy.  The airport staff was checking the usual things before take off. We found our seats in the plane and in no more then two hours we were in Rome.