vip

Algeria is not the safest of travel destinations. In fact, for my friend who is a foreign service officer, this is a danger post, and the security section is involved in many of the decisions of daily life. We are allowed to move through the capitol city freely for the most part, but traveling outside the city, and especially outside the wilaya requires a police escort.

Over the last couple of days' adventuring we've been somewhat uncomfortable with this situation. The police don't simply drive along with us just in case, they station a vehicle before ours and a vehicle after ours, and they use their authority and their sirens to make way for this trio.

This road was built to be one lane in each direction, and our escort pushed traffic to the shoulders to create a third lane down the middle just for us.

Although it was nice to bypass the traffic, we were aware that we were making the evening commute longer and more challenging for the other cars around us. In this moment, three middle-class Americans were shocked to recognize that we were the VIPs in the motorcade.