I can safely say that Gnassingbé Eyadéma International Airport, the international airport for Togo’s capital, Lome, is one of the most frustrating airports I have ever traveled through, and this is despite the fact that as a small airport that also conveniently serves as a hub for Asky Airlines, a pan-African airlines that includes a lot of worthwhile and obscure destinations for a traveler like myself, it has a lot going for it. I generally like small airports, their security is generally easy to get through and they offer a lot of intrigue in a modest size, including quirky restaurants and shops, and Lome’s airport certainly delivered on these things.

So, what made it so unpleasant given its obvious advantages in having a quick security line, and quirky amenities that I admittedly did not have time to check out because I had one hour to change planes at the airport? The first sign that this airport experience was not going to be a good one was getting off of the plane, which was at one of only 9 gates the airport has, only to find that the entire plane full of passengers (and I was at the back of the plane as well, it should be noted), had to file into a hallway where a single and somewhat overwhelmed person was looking up all of the disembarking passengers on a printout in alphabetical order to check off the people one by one. As a few of us had tight connections in Lome to get to other places (like my hour and twenty minutes to go to Libreville and then Johannesburg, and others who were traveling to Lagos), we pushed towards the front of the line and helped the person to see our names so that we could get beyond that line. Then we had to move from that line to another line where we got our boarding passes.

This led to a second surprise. When I booked my ticket to go to South Africa, the ticket showed as being from Ethiopian Airlines, and at Newark the people at the check-in were able to check my bags all the way to South Africa but were, unfortunately, not able to give me a boarding pass, and they gave me a somewhat dodgy reason. When I arrived in Lome and saw that the boarding pass to Libreville (the capital of Gabon, about more later) and then Johannesburg was on a different airlines, I realized that Ethiopian Airlines was serving as some sort of distributor or broker for Asky Airlines in the United States, since that airlines does not operate in the United States, but goes to many of the same destinations that Ethiopian Airlines does in slightly more luxury. This was not necessarily a problem, except it meant waiting for more people to look up things and print them out before going through security (which was thankfully quick) and then walking to the other side of the airport for the gate for my flight.

This then led to the next slight hassle of the trip and the airport that is a somewhat common one in some of the airports I have flown at this year. The plane was not at a proper gate that could be reached by walking directly from the airport onto the plane, but required a bus trip (on a crowded bus, it must be added) to the far ranges of the tarmac to climb into a plane, where yet another person had printed out sheet and was checking off the seats that were occupied by the travelers arriving to board the flight. At least I was able to sit down for a bit, but not for much, and I didn’t have enough time to snack nor were there enough plugs to charge up my laptop, which had drained a lot of its battery on my flight from Newark where there were no plugs in coach for computers either. I am not sure if my opinion of the airport would improve but even spending an hour in an airport can sometimes indicate some severe problems, and perhaps some encouragement to upgrade the technology of the airport workers.