Algiers, Algeria

I’ll be honest that this trip got really messed up. My visit to Algiers became half of what it should’ve been.

First, my flight in from Mali the night before was delayed by 2 hours. Then, when I got to the Algiers airport and connected to the wifi, I found out that my onward flights at midnight the next night (24hr later) via Paris to Dublin were canceled. I would have to wait til the following day, but that would mess up the things coming after.

After thinking about it, I decided to make the best of my time in Algiers, buy the cheapest ticket I could find leaving later that day up to Dublin, and get a few hours of sleep.

Luckily, there’s a Hyatt hotel just across the parking lot from the airport, so I walked over there, slept until 7am, and then had an early breakfast.

I found a ticket to Madrid in the afternoon and then a RyanAir flight Madrid-Dublin that night, so I had until then to explore.

My main interest was the mosque they’re building. It will surpass Casablanca’s mosque as the largest in Africa and actually become the largest mosque outside of Saudi Arabia. I got a taxi there.

Being under construction, you can’t enter it yet. Even still, the scope of the mosque is massive. You feel tiny next to it.

The final plan for the mosque is that the minaret will be one of the tallest buildings in Africa and have an elevator inside up to a lookout deck. There will be a charge for going up in it as a way to earn money to help pay for the mosque.

Unsurprisingly yet surprisingly, a lot of the construction is being done by a Chinese engineering firm. Not surprising, since China has a ton of the building projects in Africa. Surprising because of China’s own treatment of its Muslim population. “Sure, we’ll build your mosque, because you’re paying us. Our Muslims? We hate them.”

I spent about an hour walking around the mosque and then went into the nearby neighborhood. There wasn’t much to see, but there was also nothing else around the mosque in walking distance.

I was afraid to go further into the city, because traffic just to the mosque had been horrendous. There was an event for the president of Algeria later that day, so a bunch of streets were closed off, according to my taxi driver. I couldn’t risk missing my flight by getting stuck in traffic, since there’s only one main road from the airport to the city and no way to go around it, from what he’d told me.

After I lost interest in the nearby neighborhood, I went to find a taxi and back to the airport.

I grabbed my stuff from my hotel room, checked out, and was off.

Just because that’s how my trip to Algeria went, my Iberia flight couldn’t land in Madrid, due to weather, so we had to divert to Valencia, Spain for 2 hours. That made me miss my RyanAir flight to Dublin, and they didn’t care at all that I’d missed my flight because of Iberia. Not their responsibility. Had to buy a new ticket for the later flight to Dublin and am sitting here months later waiting for Iberia to respond to my numerous requests for reimbursement.

My trip to Algeria started and ended poorly.