One cheeky little devil I knew never told Her Indoors about the switch from 8&4 to 7&5, spending that extra week back in his home country but shacked up with his girlfriend instead of at home with the wife! I always wondered if he had the nerve to take two weeks with the girlfriend when 6&6 came in.
I did 5&5 with Zimex later, but for a lot less money, and even less than that, no overseas allowance, when home on leave. Too, I did the recurrent training and the chasing of the visas on my own time, usually needing two days to travel back and forth to Berlin for visas, to the Algerian Embassy in Pankow.
All in all, it kind of sucked, especially because the security in Algeria was even shakier than in Nigeria.
Most of my time on duty was spent at isolated locations in the Sahara where the few guards only had shotguns and stayed in lit-up guard shacks, easy prey for attackers coming out of the surrounding darkness with AK-47s. Just ten attackers could have taken over one of those camps with no trouble at all, I think. The security advice in case of attack was basically to "hide under your bed," so good luck with that one, especially given that we were inside a wired perimeter, giving us no chance to flee, into what was an extremely hostile desert environment in any case.
A few years later there was a high-profile attack on a gas plant at In Amenas, when the Algerian military then went in with absolutely no regard to protecting the lives of hostages, using extreme force when attacking vehicles loaded with hostages.
There's that famous fountain in Rome, the Trevi fountain, where if you throw three coins over your shoulder into it, that ensures that you will always return to Rome. I was stood there looking at it, when I fished a 5-kobo coin out of my pocket and idly tossed it in. That meant that I always returned to Nigeria!