26.02.10:

I’ve made some big boo-boos in The Odyssey so far. Going to Cape Verde with a bunch of Senegalese fishermen, for one. Not just taking the DAL Madagscar on its route around the Indian Ocean for another. Of course, turning up in Tunisia without visas for Algeria and Libya last May cost me massively in terms of time and money, but the boos just keep coming. Today, I was planning to head to Algeria for the day, cross the border, tick the place off the list. Easy.

But instead, I spent the entire morning fighting with my damn iPod Touch in a vain attempt to get my Lonely Planet pdfs onto the damn thing so I wouldn’t have to take my laptop with me. In the end (and after losing all of my other apps that I had on there), I gave up and e-mailed them to myself (how staggeringly retarded, but let’s not go on about it here) and that seemed to work.

By 1pm, Dja suggested it was too late for me to head to the border today. I’m still tremendously (and uncharacteristically) tired and so I elected to head to Algeria on Monday instead. The ferry didn’t go back to Italy until Tuesday anyway… so what difference would it make?

Ah, well, we’ll come to that on Sunday, shall we?

That night Dja and Claire invited a bunch of their friends around and we all celebrated Mohammed’s birthday (fellow Piscean, I guess) like the Pagans we are by getting really quite fantastically drunk. So much so that I very nearly wound up getting myself arrested again by running into Dja’s flat and attempting to hide under the sofa when a policeman shouted at us in the street. Hee.