At COP17, before the official opening

Sergio Abranches

I’ve arrived in Durban on Saturday, and found that the transportation services are not working well. You are welcomed by several nice and helpful young South Africans who are doing their best to help who arrives. But information is lacking.

Everybody wanted to know how and where to get tickets for the hotel shuttle. Actually the shuttle takes everybody to the Convention Center, the ICC, where there are vans servicing the several routes to the official COP17 hotels. They would explain that to those arriving, and take them to the counter where the tickets are sold.

I used the link on the official UNFCCC-COP17 page to buy mine in advance. I had the impression I was the first to appear asking for prepaid tickets. It took them 25 minutes to figure out what to do, before they handed me the two tickets.

When we finally got into the bus, the driver didn’t know what to do with the tickets. She would let some people keep the full tickets, took a detachable part from others. She was very confused and concerned about the tickets, and kept counting them time and again. Everybody wanted to go to the hotel, meaning to get as fast as possible to the ICC, in order to take the specific shuttle for their respective hotels. But she would make all preprogrammed detours and stops although all passengers were heading to the ICC, and had told her so.

When we finally arrived at the ICC, more than one hour after we left the airport, a crowd of helpful  guys came to our rescue indicating others, dressed like them, who would indicate others who would indicate each passenger which line of vans to take to get to their hotels. There is a map and a chart on the COP17 page showing the lines and the list of official hotels to be served by each one. But the near two dozen guys who were there to indicate people which van they should take to get to their hotels didn’t know the location of several official COP17 hotels listed by the UN. In this case, they’d start a conference among themselves, in their language, and when one explanation seemingly prevailed, they’d point the chosen line to the person. Several were redirected by the van’s drivers. After a conference of their own, they would decide the route to some hotel was a different one, and would redirect the person. As one can imagine, the process consumed considerable time. Those who were already settled, and had already been introduced to the vans’ roadmap would show their exasperation with the delays. In my case, a delegate kept asking the driver to drop him first, instead of distributing the others, who where tired of their travel from home and were heading to hotels that were apparently closer his. Not a very cooperative spirit.

My hotel, the Durban Manor, is located about 1.5 miles from the ICC, in the central area of the city. It was my fourth choice after trying other hotels first, because they looked better, and were nearer to the venue, but they were all fully booked. The Durban Manor lies in front of Durban’s marina, on a large, and busy four lane road, in the central area of the city, but not even the drivers had heard of it. I had to show the route on Google Map on my iPhone to the driver before he accepted me as a legitimate passenger of his van, serving the Central line. As a result, I landed in Durban at 6:10 pm, after embarking in Brazil 10:00 hours earlier, and arrived at the hotel, exhausted, at 10:00 pm.

I thought that was a bad omen, and it was. The hotel has had better days. It is a derelict old house, smelling of mildew all over, needing urgent refurbishing, hopefully a retrofit. The hotel is really old, the room is small, but the bed is comfortable and the shower is decent. There is neither wifi or cable Internet connection on the rooms. The concierge told me that there was an wifi hotpoint in the sitting room, actually a cafe-bar. I tried it and got no signal. Breakfast is quite poor.

I left towards the ICC at 9:00 the next morning to register at the media registration desk. I couldn’t find the shutter stop indicated to me by the driver that took me to the hotel the night before. I walked all the way to the big white tent, built before the ICC, where they are registering delegates, and is the doorway to the venue. There were several working people still working on the final preparation of the site. It was clearly a soft-opening with lots of things still requiring fine tuning.

Registration was fast and kind. I passed by a G77+China meeting and got the impression that there were more Chinese than G77 delegates there. I found the press room small. What they actually did was to line up working benches across the corridor  on the second floor of the building where the plenary rooms are. If the number of seating positions was calculated to match the number of registered journalists, coverage is set to be less than it was for COP16, in Cancun. The Internet connection worked well for me. There are a few positions with both wifi and cable. I didn’t feel the need to use cable. The wifi was fast enough. Let’s see what happens, when the place gets filled up.

Durban is mobilized to COP17. On the flight from Johannesburg I read a story on the Independent saying that last Friday there was a huge traffic jam, because of the “blue lights” securing preference for delegates and a large amount of people trying to leave town for the weekend. Traffic officials are expecting heavy and slow traffic in the central area of Durban, and are asking drivers to have patience, to be friendly with each other, and to drive carefully. On Friday drivers were reported to ride on the sidewalks, trying to get off the lines. But people are welcoming COP17, and locals are ostensibly nice and cooperative with delegates, environmentalists, and everyone else they think are related to the meeting.

The real test begins tomorrow. It will test the organization of the meeting, but even more seriously the attitude and will of negotiations. And there will be a lot to talk over before any meaningful result comes out of Durban.

Tags: Cancun, COP16, COP17, Durban, UNFCCC