a écrit le 7 janvier 2017 à 21h42 (..) Along the way I checked progress of the search for the missing plane and made arrangements to meet the highest ranking politician I could muster the following day.
It was a professional decision that probably saved me from a long stay in a West African jail.
On arrival in Yaounde I chose not to check into a hotel but went straight to the airport where Talbot’s personal jet was still on the tarmac. Within minutes I had been arrested for unlawfully taking photographs of a restricted site.
“Who are you spying for?†my interrogator kept asking. “Do you have an embassy in Cameroon?â€
I was calm but pretty certain they had all the evidence they needed. Beside me was small digital camera and on it were unmistakeable photographs of the airport from which the Sundance charter had left.
It was Information Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who I had organised to meet earlier, who saved me. Later, when we discussed the airport “misunderstandingâ€, Bakary said he was the “man who can do anything in Cameroonâ€.
But his intervention didn’t stop my captor leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head, to declare, “I think you now owe me a big, big drink!â€
Good god no, a bribe was out of the question. This man had been a menacing hindrance rather than help and I had only enough US dollars left to pay the return passage to Yaounde.
Worse than that, I had already become a victim of West African cyber crime. Each time I put one of my credit cards into the ATM at the Hilton Hotel and casino for cash it was frozen dead.
Equally pressing was the fact, although the missing plane took off from Cameroon, it crashed in Congo, which was only tens of kilometres from where I stood — but to get there I had to travel hundreds of kilometres south to Douala and then catch an international flight to the Republic of Congo — which I didn’t know much about but the only things I had heard were bad.
It was late evening in Sydney but editor Paul Whittaker was able to arrange a Western Union transfer of $US5000 for me to collect in Douala.
Unfortunately, when I collected the money, it was given in a bundle of West African francs that was a wad of notes the size of a house brick.
I strapped the brick to my stomach and made the journey through sticky fingers at Customs in Cameroon and transit in Kinshasa before arriving in Brazzaville, where I discovered they don’t speak English in Congo — they speak French.
Fortunately for me rock music is the universal lan
It was a professional decision that probably saved me from a long stay in a West African jail.
On arrival in Yaounde I chose not to check into a hotel but went straight to the airport where Talbot’s personal jet was still on the tarmac. Within minutes I had been arrested for unlawfully taking photographs of a restricted site.
“Who are you spying for?†my interrogator kept asking. “Do you have an embassy in Cameroon?â€
I was calm but pretty certain they had all the evidence they needed. Beside me was small digital camera and on it were unmistakeable photographs of the airport from which the Sundance charter had left.
It was Information Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who I had organised to meet earlier, who saved me. Later, when we discussed the airport “misunderstandingâ€, Bakary said he was the “man who can do anything in Cameroonâ€.
But his intervention didn’t stop my captor leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head, to declare, “I think you now owe me a big, big drink!â€
Good god no, a bribe was out of the question. This man had been a menacing hindrance rather than help and I had only enough US dollars left to pay the return passage to Yaounde.
Worse than that, I had already become a victim of West African cyber crime. Each time I put one of my credit cards into the ATM at the Hilton Hotel and casino for cash it was frozen dead.
Equally pressing was the fact, although the missing plane took off from Cameroon, it crashed in Congo, which was only tens of kilometres from where I stood — but to get there I had to travel hundreds of kilometres south to Douala and then catch an international flight to the Republic of Congo — which I didn’t know much about but the only things I had heard were bad.
It was late evening in Sydney but editor Paul Whittaker was able to arrange a Western Union transfer of $US5000 for me to collect in Douala.
Unfortunately, when I collected the money, it was given in a bundle of West African francs that was a wad of notes the size of a house brick.
I strapped the brick to my stomach and made the journey through sticky fingers at Customs in Cameroon and transit in Kinshasa before arriving in Brazzaville, where I discovered they don’t speak English in Congo — they speak French.
Fortunately for me rock music is the universal lan
