The one about traveling while poor.

Sigh.

Poverty is a bastard. The year was 2016.

My friend and I decided to “disvirgin” our Nigerian passports before it expired. Dubai was the obvious choice for visa and ticket purposes. There was a snag though, we were proper broke. However, we said to ourselves that we have a black man blood in us, and all things are possible through Christ. We got an agency to help us plan the trip.

Our first problem was the flight. The ticket we booked was RwandAir on the first leg and Kenya Airways to return because those were the cheapest airlines at the time and like I said, we were broke. It was a total of about 16 hours to Dubai .

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Now it was not just the length of the journey that almost crippled me, it was the suffering that came with it. First of all, the seats inside this aircraft were smaller than that of a BRT and this is me being generous. I don’t really know how they expected human beings to fit into the seat but we all squeezed in. Oxygen was being rationed per aisle so sorry for you if your seatmates took more than their fair share.

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We finally got to Dubai sha after what looked like forever. We got to the hotel and upon checking in we got the next shocker. We paid for a breakfast inclusive room and the lady at the hotel reception with her sweet smile said “No dears, your booking only covers room”.

We called the travel agent all she had to offer us was ‘sorry’. I was ready to cry at this point because my strict budget did not include breakfast for 5 days, for gossake, oluwa wetin dey happen??? Dollar rate increased from N220 In February to about N341 by May 2016 when we travelled so already our budget and projection was messed up.

My sister had advised we use our cards mostly for our transactions, so we held very little cash. With the additional business of having to pay for breakfast, we were really low on cash by day 2. Luckily, I had a 100-dollar bill I had planned to exchange but never got to doing. On getting to the BDC, they passively aggressively told us they could not collect the dollar bill as the date on it was old and it was also torn. E gba mi ke. We went to two different BDCs and were told this same thing. This stupid dollar bill was given to us at one of the BDCs at MMIA, they knew the note was bad and that we were novices and they quickly offloaded it on us. We weren’t so bothered sha as per we had our card to use. We also planned to give it back to the BDCs in Nigeria.

The animal that will get lost won’t listen to the whistle of the hunter. With our two legs we left the hotel the night of Day 2, my friend wanted to take “abroad ice cream”. She got the ice-cream, whipped out her card with flourish, we heard pim pim pim, the mummy at the counter said card was rejected. I said, “not possible ma, please chook it again”. After about 5 chooks, we knew we were screwed. She had started eatiing the ice cream and we had no money to pay. All the bad stories of how they amputate people in UAE for little crimes flashed before my eyes, oluwa is this how I die, because of “haiz cream“?????? 

Somehow, we scrapped all the coins we had left over in our wallets, we were short a few coins, but the lady understood and let us go.

So, there we were on the streets of Dubai, penniless, without hope and hungry. We started walking around looking for solutions, we tried to use the ATM but no such luck. It turns out that year was when the UAE blocked most Nigerian cards due to fraud, it was just our rotten luck we travelled that period. Luckily, we walked into a random eatery and told them what we wanted to eat but we insisted they test our cards for payment first and voila, it worked! We were practically dancing in the restaurant, we even had mind to order take away in case this was the last time our cards would work. That night’s wandering made us discover the best Chinese take out in Dubai as far as I am concerned.

Hope came the next day when I reached out to one of my friends that lives in Abu Dhabi and he gave us a Nigerian contact who does money exchange for people in exchange for naira. The dilemma of getting to the exchange point was solved when one nice old man in our hotel who was also heading to the same area paid for our cab, our other alternative was trekking there. You know how drug dealers meet people at one dark alley to exchange goods, that was how the scenario played out when we went to meet the guy at Deira market. He goes “are you from xxxx”, we say yes, he beckons we follow and we did the business deal in less that 5 mins before he disappeared.

This man even took my condemned dollar bill and gave me the dirham equivalent. This what people mean when they say Nigerians will find a way to survive anywhere they live. This guy practically saved our lives, we would have starved to death. We got this money and our first port of call was to locate amala spot inside the market. It was bliss, I tell you. Amala excites me, I was shining teeth while typing this part.

Thankfully, we were able to go on our tours because we had prepaid. Another notable day was the Dubai Mall tour day, all we could afford to buy for ourselves in the mall was popcorn. It was exotic popcorn though, so we won. Let me also add that myself and A have a special knack for getting lost when we travel. We had paid for Underwater Zoo & Dubai Aquarium tour.

We got to see the Dubai Aquarium but did not see the Underwater zoo. After trekking for about 2 hours and we did not locate the entry point, we chopped another L and started window shopping. We decided that the zoo does not exist because no place should be that elusive. Beloved, we got back to Nigeria and saw people posting pictures at the Underwater Zoo, it exists.

There are so many parts of this trip that I have even forgotten. I forgot to add the hotel was so useless, they only clean when they feel like it. Anyday, they don’t feel like it, they just “unlook“. It was the absolute ghetto.

After 5 days of “vacationing”, we came back to Lagos via Kenya absolutely drained. People at my office were wondering why I came back from a vacation looking so stressed. I had to say I went on pilgrimage instead of vacation.

So traveling while broke, I 100% recommend. You will laugh at yourself years later and that in itself is one of the little things that matter. Plus, you get to create memories money cannot buy. A case in point is the header picture, my silhouette looked peng if I may say so myself.

Till next time, ensure you eat amala regularly.