We booked this trip back in November 2025, after we went through various places we wanted to visit in 2026, and West Africa was right near the top of our respective lists.  This was the first of 8 planned trips together in 2026, but Crystal had already traveled abroad twice, once to Budapest and once to the US.  Justin had been jonesing pretty bad to go somewhere, but at least he’d been able to visit all the Carnaval events in February, which thankfully hadn’t been rained out this year.

We’d been intrigued at traveling with Wilderness Travel for several years now, and indeed had booked a trip with them for the summer of 2020 to visit Tonga.  That obviously didn’t happen, nor did it happen in 2021 or 2022 either.  But the itinerary for this trip intrigued us, and West Africa was one part of the continent we hadn’t visited before.  We’d been to Northern Africa a couple of times, and the same for Eastern and Southern Africa.  And we’d also been to several of the Indian Ocean islands as well.  So it was time to visit West Africa.

While West Africa is not too far away as the crow flies, from Tenerife to West Africa is logistically difficult.  There is a direct flight from Tenerife to Casablanca, and also a flight from Casablanca to Lomé (where our trip was starting), but they are on different airlines, not that frequent, and the schedules don’t line up.  There’s also a flight from Gran Canaria to Dakar, and from Dakar to Lomé, but with the same frequency issues, and also we’d have to get from Tenerife to Gran Canaria via ferry or puddle jumper.

So ironically, the easiest/best way to fly 3000km southeast (so maybe a 4 hour direct flight, if one existed) was for us to fly 5 hours Northeast to Brussels, spend a night there, and then fly 8 hours nearly due south to Lomé.  This wasn’t a huge surprise, but it was still a bit of a bummer.  On the plus side, we’re familiar with Brussels and like visiting there, and also despite all the flying we wouldn’t have to adjust our clock.  We’d go forward an hour for our one night in Brussels, and then get it back on the flight to Lomé.  Tenerife and Togo are actually on the same time, believe it or not.

Our flight to Brussels was in the early afternoon, and we just decided to take the late morning 343 bus to the airport, figuring the trade-off of not having to switch buses would make up for the extra waiting time at the airport.  The bus was fine.  The airport was not.  The airport was about as busy as we could recall, which seemed odd for a weekday in early March.  Part of the reason it may have seemed so busy is because of the security checkpoint.  

We’ve probably gone through security at close to 100 airports now (we’ve never tracked it, but that seems in the ballpark), and Tenerife South has one of the worst ones out there.  The bins for the bags are before the conveyor belt, meaning you empty your bag out into 2-4 bins, and then you have to figure out how to get your 2-4 bins onto the conveyor belt without feeling like you’re holding up the line.  The technology for the people and for the bags seems quite old, with a ton of false positives, meaning people are constantly going through multiple times.  Finally, rather than just removing computers, about half the security staff seem to want every electronic object out loosely in a bin - batteries, cameras, chargers, cables - it is insanity.  It is especially insane when they tell you “I see you have a camera in the bag, you need to take it out and run it.”  If you can tell it is a camera, then why is there a need to re-run it???  Anyway, we aren’t fans, and it sucks that this is the airport we fly out of 8-10x a year.  Hopefully the technology will improve sometime soon.

Once past security, the lounge was pretty busy as well, but it cleared out almost immediately, so most of the people must have been waiting for a couple planes to board.  We hung out there for an hour or two, then boarded.  We were at the back of the plane, and the plane didn’t seem especially crowded.  We fell asleep for a good chunk of the first half of the flight.  After waking up, we saw some snowy mountains, and then we were flying over water.  We were a bit surprised to see things in this order, and our best guess is that we saw the Pyrenees and Bahia de Viscaya.

We landed a bit before 20:00, but 19:00 to our heads and stomachs.  Our hotel was right across the street from the hotel, at the Sheraton.  When we checked in, the guy asked us if we spoke English, since we’d greeted him in French.  [He was being far too kind, as we know very little French, and what words we can say, we say with an awful accent.]  We got some sort of upgrade on our room, maybe for being Lifetime Gold.  The room was pretty nice, but we left almost immediately after dropping our bags.

We went right back across the street to the airport, went downstairs to the bottom level, and entered the train area.  The train tickets were fairly steep - €46 for two round trip tickets to downtown, only about 15-20 minutes.  We got off at the Brussels-Luxembourg stop, which we think was a new stop for us.  In previous stays we’d been in the Ixelles area and the Anneessens area, and Justin stayed near the Brussels Noordstation on his way to our trip in Utah.

We’d come to this train station because it was just a few minutes from London Calling, where we first went back in 2021.  We’d visited again in 2023, on the night we spent in Brussels during our move to Tenerife (upper right photo above).  When we visited in 2023, the owner recognized us, which was incredible and made us like the place even more.  And sure enough, tonight, after 2+ years, he recognized us immediately upon seeing us.  We got two rounds of drinks, plus shared a meat and cheese plate.  We chatted a bit with the two waitresses at the bar; one of them had parents that were born in Poland, but she’d spent her whole life in Belgium.  The train back to the hotel was empty, and we didn’t even need to scan our return tickets at the airport (we could have saved €23, but oh well).  We went straight to sleep, a bit before midnight.