Having boarded and found my window seat in the shabby B-767 that usually does the Paris-Douala-Yaounde route, I was surprised to see from my window that my luggage - along with most of the luggage that had been brought to the plane - was loaded, then unloaded, following what looked like a dispute between staff. "Odd", I thought, and put my worries down to my paranoia.

Once the plane took off, we were informed that we were going to "fly over" Monastir (Tunisia). The "fly-over" then turned into landing and we were left to wait for three hours on the tarmac in the middle of the night, unaware of why we had even landed there in the first place.

It turned out that the national (Cameroonian) soccer team which had just lost the Africa Cup decided to return that very day, along with the relevant Cameroonian minister and his delegation. They had managed to divert a regular Paris-Douala-Yaounde flight to fly from Monastir to Yaounde without going to Douala first.

But the problems weren't over yet. Once we arrived in Yaounde (about an hour late), all the soccer players and the delegation got their impressive amounts of luggage, but most of the passengers flying from Paris found that their luggage had been left in Europe. I strongly suspect that when Cameroon Airlines found out that the plane was going to land at Monastir, they unloaded our luggage to leave room for that of the soccer players. I was left 48 hours without my luggage (which is considerable given that I was only staying 5 days in Cameroon), stuck in Yaounde and unable to travel the same day to the forest in the east of the country.

However, my feelings go to those passengers who were flying to Douala who, according to my calculations, would have arrived some 7 or 8 hours late, without their luggage, and those traveling on to Bangui (Central African Republic) who would most certainly have missed their plane, and again been luggage-less for several days.

I feel particularly bitter about this whole affair given the priority that they gave to some Minister and his delegation at the expense of foreign tourists and ultimately the reputation of the airline.