There are 4 internet cafes in Monrovia. Each has about 8 PC’s. They are old, slow, and have almost no bandwidth. I find them unusable.
I cant update facebook, as its too big and chatty. Any page using Ajax grinds me to a halt. it took me 30 minutes just to update my status on facebook once, so people wouldnt worry when I arrived here.
The big hotels have wireless. At the moment I am on a time bomb on a borrowed Mac laptop, at the Mamba Point Hotel. Powerbook G4. Safari (Mac browser) is barely usable, and freezes and crashes a lot. To work on the blog, i found that the laptop has Internet Explorer 5 installed and runs on the old Mac Classic environment. Its the only way I can survive: old dumb browsers work fine, and I guess they dont know modern javascript or make ajax calls. A nice thing about the blog is that once the page opens, I can just type away then post it. But if I have gmail or facebook open, they tie up the bandwidth doing background things that starve me out.
Next trip I will DEFINETELY bring a laptop, as its the only was to stay connected in liberia. Note this is a 110V country (they follow the US in everything!) and the power points are 2 flat pins with parallel axes, like the verticals in the letter H. Fortunately my Nokia charger, and my camera charger, both accept input 100 ~ 250V.
Apologies for the typos and grammaticals; I’ll clean the entries up whenI hit Accra.
The first person to open a decent internet cafe here, with a good satellite link and modern PC’s, will clean up. This is a city of over a million people, and there is no competition.