Benin

The weekend before last we travelled though Togo to Benin!

We left campus around 12:30pm in a private car we’d chartered to take us to Lome. Upon arriving in Lome in the late afternoon, we ate again at Akeif (the delicious restaurant we discovered the previous weekend) and ate hummus, chicken chawrama and burgers. After dinner we hailed a cab to bring us across the border and into Benin. The drive took longer than we expected and we found ourselves driving in the middle of nowhere searching for a hotel to stay the night. After a few hours in the taxi, we finally found a hotel and were dropped off. The hotel was pretty sketchy, with hourly prices and a board in the lobby indicating which rooms had their “mood lights” on. Ew.

The next morning we left around 6am and headed to Ouidah. Upon arriving in Ouidah, we dropped our things at a hotel (which was way more legit than the previous one) and walked around the city. One of the best things about being in a French colonized country is the availability of cheap and delicious baguettes! They are sold on just about every street corner and are flakey and fresh. I’m fairly sure we each ate at least three baguettes that day. Our first destination in the city was the old fort used by the Portuguese in the 17-1800s. The fort had been turned into a historical museum dedicated to the arrival of the Portuguese and the slave trade. In the museum were various interesting artifacts about tribal life as well as some shocking objects used to shackle and transport slaves. Learning about the relationships between the Portuguese slave exporters and local tribal leaders was fascinating. The slave trade consisted of tribes being paid by the Portuguese to capture rival tribes to be exported.

After leaving the fort, we went to the sacred python temple. The temple is pretty nondescript from the outside, and appears to be a clearing with a few small voodoo huts in various places. We entered and paid 1000 CFA each (about 3 cedi, or $2.5) as an offering. A guide led us into the clearing and disappeared for a few minutes, bringing a medium sized python with him. He put the python around each of our necks and we took pictures. Katy and I were a little disappointed and asked the guide where the rest of the pythons were. He then led us to a larger hut and opened the door for us to look in. We peered in to see around fifty pythons covering the floor of the hut. It was wild! It looked exactly like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie! The snakes were climbing up the walls and slithering across the floor. Strangely enough, my initial reaction wasn’t one of fear, but rather one of excitement and fondness for the snakes. I think this is most likely because my sister Alex has a ball python whom everyone loves and is a very sweet snake. Don’t worry, we took plenty of pictures of us in the room.

After leaving the temple, we searched for food for a long time. We had a difficult time finding restaurants and when we would find one, they would all be out of food. Eventually we gave up and ate more baguettes. After stuffing ourselves with carbs, we headed to the sacred forest. We paid to enter the sacred forest, and then were asked to also pay for a guide and to take photos. None of us wanted to pay more, so we wandered around by ourselves and sneakily snapped photos when no one was looking. The forest was filled with the biggest trees I’ve ever seen. The trunks must have been at least 40 ft around and the span of the branches and leaves was enormous! The hippie in me wondered what stories the trees could tell and how much they’ve seen. I found myself lost in the natural beauty of the forest, wishing I could know how many generations of people had found shade under the same tree I was sitting under. Near the end of our forest visit, we were approached by a boy and a girl who were selling batik cloth and wood carvings. They looked to be around ten years old and were both adorable! They only spoke French, but we used basic French phrases to introduce ourselves. We ended up hanging out with the children for a while and the little girl taught and played hand games with me.

Later in the afternoon we walked the route des esclaves, the route slaves were marched down to be shipped in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The route was dotted with occasional statues to tribute the slaves and traditional shrines. About halfway through the route a group of about twenty school children spotted us and started chanting “Yovo, yovo!” (white person, white person). They ran up to us, amazed at our white skin and hair and accompanied us for about half a mile. During this time we were swarmed by the children who insisted on clutching our hands and speaking unknown phrases to us in French. We reached the end point of the route, the Door of No Return, around 6pm. The monument was an archway on the beach depicting images of slaves walking toward ships. As we looked at the monument, the sun began to sink and we sat on the beach and witnessed the most incredible sunset I’ve ever seen. The sun blazed red as it slowly crept beneath the palm trees and pirogues dotting the shore. Amazing! After taking about a million pictures of the sunset, we rode zimmy johns (motorcycles) back to our hotel. The ride back was pretty scary at first, considering we weren’t wearing helmets and were speeding along down an unpaved road littered with potholes, but once I got used to it, it was really cool.

Saturday morning we woke up bright and early to head to Cotonou. After dropping our things at a hotel, we left to visit Ganvie, a stilt village. On the way we stopped and ate at a road side stand. We were served a light pink soup-ish substance which was made of maize and sugar. This was accompanied by what I can only describe as soft onion hush puppies. It was probably the strangest breakfast I’ve ever eaten. We took a taxi to the launching point to the stilt village. At the launching point, we joined a French couple on a motorized pirogue. The area surrounding the launching point was extremely dirty and overcrowded. There were tiny wooden sheds where people sold food and goods (and probably also lived) surrounded by a giant open air garbage dump where small children were pooping in plain sight. I can’t imagine sharing these living conditions and I was again reminded of the huge disparity between my way of life and that of these people. We took off from the launching point and were soon in the stilt village. It was so crazy how the village was organized. Literally everything was built directly on the water; homes, shops, a fresh water dispensary, a mosque. We saw a giant floating market where women displayed brightly colored fruits and vegetables, as well as handicrafts on wooden boats. We visited shops along the way which sold jewelry (they have so much ivory! I thought this was illegal!), quilts made of colorful fabrics as well as wooden carvings.

After our visit to Ouidah we grabbed a cab to the art center in the center of Cotonou. The cab ride was long and along the way we saw a funeral procession and a taxi with live pigs strapped to the roof. At the art center, we were overwhelmed with the number of shops selling art. We spent about three hours there and probably only visited half of the shops. While Michael and Catherine continued to shop, Katy and I got bored and met some of the artists who were about our age. One of them introduced himself as Lil Wayne and proceeded to rap various Lil Wayne songs and show me all of the pictures of Lil Wayne he’d downloaded onto his phone. We played drums and other various African instruments with them and even played golf on a course they’d created in a large lawn.

Sunday we ate delicious cheese omelets and croissants at a French restaurant across from our hotel and headed to the Benin soccer stadium where the Benin Squirrels (least intimidating mascot ever) and Ghana Black Stars would be facing off. We headed into the stadium way too early and found ourselves sitting with nothing to do for about two hours. We met some friendly fans who spoke English and chatted for a bit about America. The game started with a huge black hummer and charter bus driving into the stadium and around a track multiple times to the intense excitement of the crowd. When the hummer stopped, the star player of the Benin team got out and the crowd went wild. The actual game wasn’t very interesting, but I spent most of my time observing the police guarding the barrier between the stadium and the entrance. Apparently people with fake tickets were trying to get in and the police were fending them off by using their belts and what looked like a metal pipe to hit the fans. It looked fairly brutal and at one point I looked down to see blood splattered across the pavement. The crowd was looking down on the police, screaming insults and occasionally spitting. During the game Catherine and I bought a plastic bag filled with a dark juice, which we determined was pomegranate and we munched on snacks we’d purchased earlier at a Lebanese-run market.

We ended up leaving the game early to beat traffic to head back home to Ghana. We chartered a taxi to Lome, but were soon stuck in the celebration traffic after Benin won in penalty kicks. The drive took a really long time and the driver at one point pulled over to the side of the road, made some type of grunting noise and left the taxi. After about ten minutes Michael went to find the driver and spotted him sitting at a restaurant eating a meal. Later, at about 9:45pm, the driver attempted to drop us off in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Lome. We eventually convinced him to bring us to the border, and we literally sprinted from the Togo officials to the Ghana officials trying to cross the border before it closed at 10pm. On the way out of the Togo border, the guards were listening to a popular Ghanaian pop song we all love and we sang and danced our way out of the office, to much laughter from the guards.

Phew, it was an exciting weekend. Perry (Michael’s father) and Karen (Michael’s Aunt), arrived last Tuesday and we travelled to Cape Coast for the weekend. I am currently working on this blog entry. I will try to have it up by tomorrow!