5. The Paris of Africa

After three weeks, I have become familiar with the cafeteria's revolving lunch menu of beef skewers, fried chicken, pork chops and grilled fish, followed by the dinner offerings of my neighbourhood's dozens of Lebanese restaurants. The cuisine is decent but monotonous; I crave a homecooked meal. While my living standards have slipped sufficiently to render my spartan accommodation palatable, if not hospitable, I feel the pressing need to find an apartment in order to prepare my own tomato sauce.

The desire to have a kitchen becomes overwhelming when I see what is on offer at the local grocery store: seven varieties of prosciutto, four types of mortadella, real maple syrup, infinite quantities of cheese (even gorgonzola), grilled peppers, live lobsters. I limit myself to purchasing peanuts, milk biscuits and grapefruit juice.

Abidjan has been called the "Paris of Africa" and I am beginning to learn why. The grocery store is attached to a mall, small by North American standards but which includes a well-equipped sporting goods retailer and, shockingly, Cartier. The neighbourhood I am staying in is dense with restaurants, bars and clubs that are popular, expensive and difficult to avoid. Cigarette consumption rivals the Parisian stereotype. Renaults line the streets.

There are, nonetheless, certain peculiarities that set Abidjan distinctly apart from Paris: restaurant patios are enclosed in metal cages; roads are frequently blocked by police checkpoints. But our caged dinner is lightened by a karaoke guitarist who knows every song we can think of in every language we speak, and the checkpoints are easily navigated with an identity badge which, I come to realize, bears a certain practical resemblance to Monopoly's "get out of jail free" card.

The ease with which anything can be obtained makes the transition easier, as does the knowledge that everybody I know is in a situation similar to mine. Abidjan is a non-family duty station; we all arrive alone and, sooner or later, question what possessed us to move here. We seek familiarity in each other and fill our evenings with a frenzied social life. This network is at once comforting and disconcerting. It isolates those less curious from the local culture, makes it challenging for the more adventurous to experience it fully.

I get my snippet of Abidjanian culture in Treichville, an agglomeration of street vendors, stalls and stores that spans several blocks. There is a large covered market stocked with fruits and vegetables, crafts and paintings. In a dark, concrete-enclosed area cages of live poultry are stacked for sale, the overpowering smell waking childhood memories of fetching eggs from my nonna's chicken coop. While bargaining for shoes, I realize that many of the vendors are Ghanaian. Along the street, outside a small hardware stand, a group of men are huddled around a television, their tools awaiting the next customer. They are watching a soccer program. It is being broadcast live from Paris.

4. Luxury resorts

On Sunday, a group of colleagues drive me to Assinie, a beach town about an hour from Abidjan. The waves and the undertow make it extremely dangerous to swim but the sand is pristine, accented by sparkling, washed-up jellyfish. The beach is impossibly long, sparsely populated, both ends disappearing into wave mist.

A five minute walk from where we settle down is an abandoned Val-Tour luxury resort; further down, a deserted Club Med. I find two seaside restaurants blackened from fire, a large pool now filled with green water and debris. Wooden posts on concrete bases mark former showers, the plumbing stripped from the walls. The room numbers are eerily untouched. A colourful sign advertises massages that last took place five years ago.

It is not difficult to imagine what this area must have looked like when the resorts were operational, hundreds of fresh tourists arriving every day, music playing, children splashing in the water, waiters serving elaborate drinks to wealthy vacationers. My mother laments how tourism has destroyed her native town, but things have moved in the opposite direction here, the sand now empty and silent. A beach vendor tells me that the resorts employed 600 people each when they were operational. Those people have now returned to their former lives, many working in the fishing industry. The village collectively owns a handful of fishing boats; these are their primary source of food and income.

We observe one such boat, a long, worn-out affair, approach the shore. Once in shallow water, several men disembark. With difficulty, they guide the ship towards the sand, the waves constantly shifting it out of place. When the boat reaches the shore, the men are joined by several others and the tedious but visually breathtaking process of folding the fishing net begins. The end of the net is pulled out of the boat and a revolving line of men, equally spaced, each draping the net over his shoulder, carry the it off the boat and up the beach, where it is folded onto the ground. This process continues for the better part of an hour, hundreds of metres of net pulled from the inside of the boat; I am reminded of a magic trick. Once the net is folded, the ship is brought onto the beach, again manually. Two wooden tracks are placed alongside the boat and a large metal pipe is crossed over them. Together, the men pull the ship with a rope so that it rolls a few feet over the metal pipe. Everything comes to a standstill as another pipe is brought in and the process is repeated.

By the time the boat is brought completely out of the water, the crowd has swelled to more than fifty men, women and children. Two hours have passed since the boat neared the shore, but it takes only minutes for the catch of the day to be laid out in piles on the beach. Quick bartering occurs, although the fish is free for village residents. Women rinse the fish and carry it off in pails on their heads. Within the hour, the area is empty.

The drive home is oddly stereotypical: we stop to buy coconuts; it is sundown and roadside vendors are gathering their wares; two men are drumming while children dance.

3. Photo Set I

A few photos from my first few days in Abidjan:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2590926&id=28105190&l=59b79958ac

2. A familiar smell

The day begins with leftover baguette and a 1.5-hour wait for our escort. I pass the time unsuccessfuly Googling the French equivalent of "there is no hurry in Africa" on my BlackBerry, exploring the pool, exchanging a few pleasantries with the other volunteer who arrived on my flight, happy to just sit and wait.

By day, the streets are bustling. The traffic moves at a good pace, with bicycles, cars and pedestrians weaving through narrowing spaces. The roads are paved and potholes are scarce. Again, I cannot help but compare what I see to what I grew accustomed to in Dar es Salaam. The women dress differently but just as colourfully. The dust is black, not gray. The buses are full-sized. On the side of the road one buys not chapati but baguette. The graffiti messages on vehicles are less elaborate than Tanzania's but their substance remains unchanged, "Dieu est fort" replacing "God is great" and "Dieu est bon" instead of "Mungu ni mwema". We pass two markets, where fruits and vegetables are packaged in netting rather than merely stacked. We cross a bridge and reach the compound.

The sun is blazing. The compound is a converted hotel. It sits atop a cliff, overlooking the water and the city. As one walks through the grounds it is impossible not to imagine what it must have been like when it would fill with vacationers. Giant satellite dishes have been planted next to walkways, where benches might once have stood. Rather than signs prohibiting pets, the entrance doors display prohibitions on long firearms.

There is a fairly even mix of civilians and peacekeepers. Everybody is very friendly. Precisely at noon, "bonjour" gives way to "bonsoir". Registration, introductions and training all happen in French, but I hear many languages I do not recognise.

Identity cards are issued. I give the camera a death stare when my picture is taken, mindful of Canada's passport regulations; the person going after me grins. Our cards carry clear lettering demanding civilian and military authorities to allow the bearer freedom of movement. I wonder how many days will pass until I will discover precisely how effective that demand is. We are issued two-way radios and given forms to sign.

Around 18:00, I head back to the hotel with the other new volunteer. A third volunteer, also twice as old as me, invites us to dinner at a nearby restaurant off a dirt road. I eat the Ivorian equivalent of mishkaki na chipsi: brochette et frites. I had ordered a brochette and haricots verts but am not in the least surprised, nor upset, by the mistake.

We walk home and the same vague smell that I remember from my arrival permeates the air. Again I savour it, trying to place it, until one of my companions enlightens me: Côte d'Ivoire is the world's largest exporter of cocoa. In the distance, vapour billows from the smokestack of a processing plant. The smell that envelops the city is the smell of chocolate.

1. Travelling at the speed of time

“In times past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the earth passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning Equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands.

Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If we've come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. It's the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.”

Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun

It is not the climate that shocks me but the place. It is just after six and the sun has set. The air is, relatively speaking, cool. It is humid and as I inhale I am reminded of a smell I cannot place. It is comfortable to breathe, vaguely comforting. It is not the acrid smell of burning garbage, nor is it the smell of cooking.

There are three of us: the person who has come to collect us, myself and another volunteer who is 30 years my senior. One of the parking lot's many guards stands straight, in the middle of the lane, a few steps from our van. The van is white, with large black lettering on the side, and reminds me of scenes I have seen on newscasts.

I am thrust into a place I do not know. In a mix of ignorance, conditioning and nostalgia, my body thinks it is returning to Tanzania. Abidjan's pristine airport, with its efficient officers and modern signage, do not belong in the place my body is expecting. We drive a short while to the hotel. Pharmacies are marked with flashing green crosses, reminding me of Italy. Women carry stacks of pots on their heads. This place feels much wealthier than I expected. We pass a police checkpoint but do not stop.

The hotel lobby is old but clean. We check in and are led through a maze of yellowing, abandoned corridors. Lights flicker. We reach the room and my heart sinks. It is musty, brightly lit by two bare neon tubes. Water has decayed the ceiling and the bleak, smudged walls. In the bathroom, pipes that lead nowhere stick out of the bathroom walls, their ends plied shut. A 40-watt bulb casts a yellow glow over a mouldy ceiling.

The style of the furnishings is in line with the style of the building: off-white, off-yellow, off-cream, with the occasional hardened wax puddle and many scratches. At the far end of the long room is a balcony, overlooking an outdoor parking lot filled with the now-familiar white vehicles with big black lettering.

I mourn my situation, repeatedly consider why I'm here and conclude it is best to sleep.