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It’s amazing to me that DKR is as bad as it is, and so disproportionately bad compared with the beauty of Dakar and the relative prosperity of Senegal. I would have expected Ouagadougou’s airport (which is eerily close to downtown) to be a catastrophe, but it’s great. Since most of Bamako looks like a bombed out ruin of a city, you’d think its airport would be worse than scenic Dakar’s. Somehow, Dakar beat out two of the poorest nations on the planet for worst airport ever.
If it weren’t enough to be fearing for your possessions as you repeatedly fend off the scores of bandits in DRK, the airport’s security makes you fear for you life. When traveling with my brother and father in 2002, we took a wrong turn and opened a door out onto the runway. We hadn’t even passed through security or presented a ticket. One could conceivably walk from the curb outside to the runway with no problem- other than the scores of bandits.
That broken ATM was great surprise as well when we were told we had to pay some sort of airport tax on our arrival and didn’t have enough cash to cover the bill. Luckily, someone found and woke up the sleeping currency exchange attendant before too much trouble started.
After a horrendous wait of several hours (with no place to sit), my father actually thought he made a clean get away when he was allowed to board his AirFrance flight. Boy was he wrong. As soon as he sat down, they cleared the plane to get rid of the rats and he was forced to do another 2 hours of penance in the terminal.
Needless to say, he would have preferred flying with the rats onboard.
When I traveled from Cape Verde back to Los Angeles via Dakar, Paris, and Montreal I got a real treat as I got to see security measures improve as I got closer to the US. In Cape Verde, the x-ray machine was under a blanket: presumably they didn’t risk wearing it out on such unimportant guests.
At the Dakar airport, I made all the x-ray machine lights and buzzers go off. I was allowed to pass through after telling them that though all the lights went off, I really didn’t have anything dangerous and should be let go rather than inconvenienced by further search. It didn’t take much effort to convince them not to expend any more effort than they had to. Just telling them you belonged on the plane and weren’t dangerous was enough to move right through.
Maybe that’s how the rats got onboard.
