Isn't Murphy's Law an awesome thing when it really gets a grip? I experienced the full force of it while covering the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, with a side-trip to Malawi and Zambia. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, in the classic formulation. Out there, the ex-pats call it AWA - "Africa Wins Always."
It wasn't always Africa's fault. For a start, the whiz kids in our systems team supplied me with a faulty laptop: its internal mouse, that rubbery green nipple in the middle of the keyboard, wasn't working. Don't worry, they said, we'll give you an external mouse. Except that it had to be kept plugged in because of a dodgy connection.
So far, so good. The first time I was given a laptop was in 1992, when I was sent off to cover the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. These gizmos were cutting-edge technology at the time, and I was being used as a guinea pig to test whether or not it would file copy over such a long distance. It did, on occasion.
When I set off for Johannesburg I knew the drill involved in big UN summits, having covered most of the climate change gigs, including Kyoto in 1997. The geographical location changes, but not the modus operandi. Many of those attending are the same faces you've seen before; some are old friends at this stage.
Tight security
Johannesburg was different, though. Security was as tight as the proverbial duck's arse. So while journalists could exit through the main entrance of the opulent Sandton Convention Centre, the only way we could get in was through the back door (tradesmen's entrance?) at sub-basement level, which involved walking round the block.
The South African organisers had clearly underestimated media requirements. In "The Bullpen", as the main hall of the press centre was called, there were only 100 internet terminals for 2,000-plus hacks, so dogfights became increasingly frequent; nobody could even go to the loo without having their place nicked.
Most of us worked without laptops from narrow trestle tables with barely enough room for a mouse on one side and a mountain of documents on the other. There were lots of phones, for which you had to buy credit, but it hadn't occurred to the organisers that you might want to receive incoming calls for radio interviews and the like.
My laptop caved in on the second day and not even the purchase of a new mouse could get it going again. As a deadline loomed near, I had to be led through complex DOS programming by one of our whiz-kids to retrieve a 600-word story I had already written. And I don't even understand DOS, being a committed iMac user myself.
Then we were off to Malawi with Tom Kitt to see some of the Ireland Aid projects run by Concern. I made the mistake of checking in my bag for the flight from Johannesburg to Lilongwe, Malawi's bizarre new capital, about which Dorothy Parker's line, "There's no there there", might have been written.
On arrival, we were all been whisked through the VIP suite with the Minister and his party, our baggage tags taken by an official, and then into a fleet of four-wheel drives to Lilongwe, 20 kilometres away, and the surreal enclosure of the Le Meridien Capital Hotel, where even a standard room cost about as much as the annual income of most people in Malawi. It was only then I discovered that my bag had been mislaid, somewhere.
Last toothbrush
The South African Airways office was powerless to do anything as the bag hadn't been reported missing at the airport. So were the chaps who run the VIP suite; by the time we tracked them down, they announced that their office was closed. And when I went to the little shop in the hotel to buy a toothbrush, they had just sold their last one.
Patrick Curran, an old Africa hand who is now the Irish chargé d'affaires, managed to establish that my bag was still in Johannesburg and would be sent up the following day via Blantyre (the old capital) to Lilongwe. By the time we went out to collect it, the airport was all lit up but, like the Marie Celeste, there was nobody there.
"Did you have anything valuable in the bag?" someone asked. Yes, a camera and a travelling iron. "Well, you can say goodbye to them!" she cackled. "Didn't you know Johannesburg Airport is notorious for theft? It's even worse than Nairobi." (But both the camera and iron were still in my bag when I was reunited with it, on the way out.)
Then, the private jet chartered to take Tom Kitt and the rest of us to Ndola, in the north of Zambia, was delayed for an hour because one of the Minister's party had left his bag at the hotel. Or rather, it simply hadn't been loaded on one of the 4x4s that took us to the airport. Oh, and none of our mobile phones worked in Malawi or Zambia.
We made it to Lusaka without a hitch, but in the rush to pack the following day to catch a flight back to Johannesburg, I left my travelling iron behind in my room at the Inter Continental Hotel. Then, it was back to the bedlam of the Earth Summit and its "sprayed-on infrastructure", as Ian Willmore, of Friends of the Earth, described the facilities.
Cheap food and drink
Were it not for Dan Pender, Martin Cullen's press secretary, bringing out a replacement laptop that actually worked, I would probably have lost my mind in the hectic last few days of the summit. By that stage, as UN novice Carl O'Brien from the Irish Examiner observed, it was like "one of those inter-galactic conferences in Star Wars."
Apart from the amazingly cheap food and drink, due to South Africa's devalued rand, my real source of comfort throughout this ordeal was the Melville House, a wonderfully convivial B&B run by Heidi Holland, in the bohemian Melville area of Johannesburg. And she didn't even jack up her prices, so cost the equivalent of just €35 a night.
Heidi, who's also a journalist and author, recently co-edited a Penguin book on Johannesburg, entitled From Jo'burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa's infamous city. A collection of essays by 60 writers on different aspects of life there, it offers a fascinating insight into what makes this region's powerhouse tick - AWA or not, as the case may be.