Business Travels

So this past week I've had the opportunity to do my first business travel with Chevron Nigeria, or with Chevron at all for that matter. I returned to the Lekki camp last night for the weekend, and will depart again Monday morning for another week of traveling. I'm traveling with a Nigerian coworker of mine from the Internal Controls group and we're visiting four of our different operating locations all around Nigeria conducting reviews at each place. Essentially, we are doing cash counts at each location, making sure their imprest accounts (petty cash) match whatever is on the books. Along with this, we're analyzing their usage of the funds over the last year and trying to find ways to eliminate the use of cash across the entire business. The goal is basically to use cash for nothing except actual emergency situations. The reviews went smoothly this week, and hopefully will next week as well. Honestly, the whole thing is pretty straightforward, so it's hard to imagine what could actually go wrong.

As far as the travel itself, one thing was reiterated to me again this week: domestic travel in Nigeria stinks. I mean, really stinks. I mentioned this in a post awhile back when I traveled for a weekend trip to Calabar, but the operation of the airlines here really leaves you scratching your head. More on this in a bit, but first I'll talk about the good parts of the trip. Chevron sponsored travel, on the other hand, is quite the opposite - it's pretty nice. The first leg of my trip Monday morning, my coworker and I got to travel on a private float plane that Chevron utilizes for shuttling people to and from the other main work location, Escravos. See the pictures below.

On our second day in Escravos, we set up a trip with the GM of Operations out there to take us offshore to one of the platforms. This was a really neat experience. We got to travel by helicopter (my first time) out to one of our platforms that essentially separates and funnels oil and gas brought up from 7 different wells back to our onshore terminal. It was such an incredible site to see the breadth of our offshore operations from an aerial view. I was told that in the multiple fields we operate offshore in this area we have about 300 individual platforms, some of which are actual wells, some serve as storage, some for offloading and shipping, and others for transporting, to name a few. I can't express enough how incredible it was to see the expansiveness of this from above, as well as from the single platform we landed on and toured. They did take some pictures of us while we were out there, complete with the hard hats, goggles, gloves, and steel-toed boots, of which I have not yet seen. If they ever get sent to me I'll be sure to share them.

On Wednesday, we got to take another helicopter trip to our next location. It was only about a 20-minute trip at 1500 feet elevation. This entire area of Nigeria is dense swamps and forests, so, again, it was quite cool to see these parts from an aerial view. Unfortunately, no pictures since we had to turn our phones off, but I definitely stashed away some mental ones.

Okay, now to the last leg of the trip. Friday morning we were supposed to take a domestic flight back to Lagos at 9:55 AM. I never expected this flight to be on time, as that would be a lot to ask, but didn't really expect a complete cancellation, which is, of course, what happened. They announced the cancellation about 30 minutes before departure and cited only "operational issues" as the reason. I didn't need any more reason than that because, alas, my response to everything now is simply TIA - this is Africa. Nothing really surprises me anymore except for, honestly, at risk of sounding arrogant, the level of patience I've acquired since being here. I think my reactions to these situations would have been totally different as little as six months ago. Anyways, after about a 45 minute scramble by our airport protocol personnel to try and get us re-booked, they finally put a plan together. We were to fly back to Escravos, via a small shuttle plane, and catch the only flight from Escravos back to Lagos at 4 PM. Both of these flights were only for Chevron employees as we have such a high volume of people shuttling between these locations, we contract a number of these flights just for us. I felt a little guilty because they bumped a few people off both of these flights for us solely because we are expats and they give us priority. They do it this way because Chevron sees it as a safety concern; they see it as more risky to leave the expats stranded in the remote locations than the nationals, which kind of makes sense. I felt a little bad at first, but it soon wore off as I just really wanted to get home. Whoops.

So what should have been a relatively quick trip - plane landing by 11 AM and home by 12:30ish - ended up being a full 12 hour travel day, getting me home around 7:30 PM. There were many other little nuances that occurred throughout the day to make it more entertaining (frustrating), but I won't go into detail on those. Traveling the airlines here is never a smooth process and you can never know what to expect. Wish me luck, because every leg of our journey next week is via domestic airlines - three in total. Who knows if we're even going to get any work done; we might just spend three whole days sitting in airports. I'm sure I'll be back in a week with some good updates. Until next time...