Africa 2006

OK - one of the last top tens…

1. My only swimming of this trip in the pool of the Hotel Alize in Baguida, with opera blasting from the bar’s speakers
2. A visit to the SPES orphanage - although not with enough energy on my part!
3. Crashing the investiture party of the new supreme leader of the the voodoo religion and meeting him in person the next evening
4. All the shared taxis: lots of waiting, lots of life, lots of marriage proposals
5. Painting walls at the Peuple du Monde orphanage in Abomey
6. Visiting the old UNESCO palace at Abomey
7. Dinner with all the mayor’s reps at the Yovettes restaurant on stilts in Possotome
8. Chilling out with great food (especially a memorable prawn and cream dish) at a little cafe in Baguida, near Lome
9. The long bus journey from Ouaga - but only in retrospect!
10. Being told “bonjour” or “bonne arrivee” by everyone - without them wanting to sell me anything

There’s nothing like an evening with politicians…

After my one day of labour in Abomey, I headed (via a “quick” stop in Cotonou to collect the passports) to the village of Possotome, home of Benin’s mineral water, for a day of relaxation by Lake Aheme at Chez Theo, an auberge which someone had recommended.

While the day was quite pleasant, relaxing was probably not the best word for it, since the auberge was hosting a conference for the day with representatives from the mayor’s offices of four different Beninese cities. (In fact, the auberge had no rooms left, but the owner cleaned out his own room for me to use! – I have no idea where he slept, but at least 50% of the conference delegates assured me that if there was a problem, I could sleep in their rooms in the “extra beds”..)

A lot of the day was at the restaurant Les Yovettes (Yovo being the local word for a white person), sitting on stilts on the Lake. In the evening, the conference delegates invited me to dine with them, as they indulged in the local schnapps, a palm wine / vodka combo concoction from a long thin blue bottle. The German man who organized the day wryly assured me that the men were as rowdy with the palm wine as they were during the day’s meetings.

They were all very excited to talk to someone who was going to write articles about Benin (despite my emphasis that Iceland is a miniscule country and was not going to make them famous).

Conversation at the delicious dinner of spicy fish and pork, as it often seems to, centrered on why I was not travelling with my husband. Are you really married, they would ask. Show us your ring, they would demand cheerfully.

After convincing them that I was indeed married, then they would try a different tactic: ‘You know, if you spend long enough in Africa, you’ll fall in love with an African man. It’s unavoidable.”

Or from the other direction: “Of course you know your husband is seeing lots of different women when you’re away. It’s just normal.”

I explained that it wasn’t always “just normal”.

And then my favourite: “Well, your husband will definitely be seeing other people while you’re gone because I saw it on a European TV show on TV5 once.”

Well, who am I to argue with television?

Benin’s de-facto capital, Cotonou, (the official capital is Porto Novo) is a perfect example of a sub-Saharan African capital getting too big for its britches. It’s grown significantly over the past decades, and there is plenty of pollution, garbage, and unemployment to show for it. But most visitors to the country need to spend at least a day here – visas issued at the border are only valid for 48 hours and need to be renewed at Cotonou’s Directorate of Immigration.

Fortunately, having two passports comes in handy in situations like avoiding spending extra time in boring cities: I deposited the Canadian one at the bureau of immigration, and my UK one at the Ghanaian Embassy, where, after much discussion (apparently you now need confirmed hotel reservations before a visa can be issued!) and nit-picking, the stern official was won over by the fact that I said I lived in Iceland purely “for love”.

And so after a day in the capital I was off again, this time 120 kilometres north in a shared taxi (two in front plus the driver, four in back, as usual) to the town of Abomey, site of the ancient royal kingdom of Dahomey. (en route receiving a record three marriage proposals by noon – my average has probably only been one a day; perhaps it was my freshly washed shirt…?)

At my guesthouse, Chez Monique, I quickly met a group of volunteers from Switzerland and the US who were in town for two weeks to work on an orphanage which they had funded. Would I be willing to help them paint walls for a day, they asked?

And so after an afternoon of touring the old castle (where the tomb of one of the Kings has been made of walls lined with the blood of human sacrifices!) I spent my remaining moments in Abomey at the orphanage Peuple du Monde.

The three-storey building houses 120 orphans, and, despite constant improvements, still does not have electricity, running water, or enough mosquito nets for the children. It is thought that up to a third of them are HIV positive, although it was only on this visit that the group was finally able to make arrangements to have every child tested and to have a pediatrician visit regularly.

I spent my time painting the walls of the kitchen and two bathrooms – the smell receded once the first coat of paint had been put on. It was stiflingly hot and the sweat was pouring off my nose and into my eyes. – But at least now my husband will not be able to say that I can’t paint properly!

And that’s a lot more worthwhile that an afternoon at a museum.

PS: The orphanage could use a lot of help - and from what I saw, the people working on it, both locally and foreign, are putting a lot of heart and soul into the effort. For more information, visit their detailed website: www.peupledumonde.org

I arrived early in Ouidah, Benin after an uneventful shared taxi from Togo. I was the only guest at the Hotel Oasis in the centre. After settling in, I collected a few things and left the room to find some lunch.

There was a group of people loitering around a restaurant at the hotel - “Ici, madame!” they gestured to the restaurant, obviously crowded forsome function. There was a police officer guarding the entrance; even he was inviting me in.

And that is how I crashed the gala lunch commemorating the investiture of the Supreme Chief of Vadoun Religion,the Daagbo (Majesty) TOMADJLEHOUKPON II METOGBOKANDJI.

There I sat during a great three-course meal (with free beer!!) and chatted about this new supreme leader. One of the guests at the table,an engineer named Rodrigue, invitedto accompany me tovisit the supreme leader the next day.

There was lots of singing and dancing in the supreme leader’s compound the next evening. The man himself was seated in a largish receiving room, with plenty of well-wishers surrounding him, as well as an (empty) bottle of whisky.

Rodrigue introduces me as “an adventurer” (which, as spmeone who is too scared to ride a bicycle, I find ironic) who was going to write about the trip.

So the supreme leader invited me to come and have a chat with him in a smaller receptionroom.

He asked me what I thought of Benin and I said I was fortunate to have had the chance to meet him on this auspicious occasion. “Yes, you are,” he replied (!).

Then he asked for my email address so I could have a little correspondance with the “King”.

My first brush with royalty …

PS - I did other things in Ouidah besides mingle with the high classes; visited the sacred temple of pythons (where I gotmy photo taken with a huge python around my neck) and saw various sites associatedwith the slave trade - most of the slaves from this region were sent to Brazil and the Caribbean.

PPS: I will write a more interesting,”proper” version of this story later, with better descriptions ofthe dancing, but the internet cafe where i am writing has a horrible keyboard so further work will haveto wait! 

All’s well that ends well. But, boy was it a long day… (and, strangely enough, another one involving public transport).
My next stop from Burkina Faso is Benin, but it’s a 1100 km journey from Ouaga to the de facto capital, Cotonou, on the coast, about a 20-hour bus ride. In my quest to avoid having to take public transport at night, I came up with a cunning plan: take the bus as far as Natitingou, a large town in the north of Benin, and then continue on early the next morning to Cotonou. Flawless.
So I called and reserved my ticket for NATITINGOU. Then I arrived at the station and purchased the reserved ticket for NATITINGOU. Then I put my bag in the bus storage, clearly marked with masking tape for NATITINGOU. I showed my ticket for NATITINGOU at the door of the bus, and again to the conductor when the journey started.
And then 2-1/2 hours into the trip the chauffeur announced he was going to Togo.
I wasn’t the only one heading for Benin (although the only one for the north). Everyone else for Cotonou, who would now add at least three hours to their 20 odd hour journey and would have to cross another border (and maybe pay other “taxes”) was pretty pissed off.
I was given another option: the chauffeur told me I could disembark at the small Burkinabe village where we were and that another “bus” would be along “any minute” which would take me to Natitingou, in fact probably “even faster” than the initial estimates. Yeah.
So of course I continued on to Lome, Togo’s capital. So much for the plan to avoid driving late at night.
The journey continued with no problems, and it’s only really when we started the daily “race against the sunset” that I started to get nervous:
1) Who knew Togo has hilly parts? All along I’ve been taking these journeys in the comfort of knowing that if the driver did fall asleep or run over a donkey, we’d just careen off into a nearby millet field. Here the picture postcard scenery meant lots more big trees and, as the sun showed us tantalizingly before slipping away, lots of hairpin bends in the road and steep drops. I hoped the hills would end before the sun.
2) After a brief supper stop (tinned sardines squished on a baguette for me), we stopped briefly just down the road where a big discussion ensued with some youths at the side of the road. Turns out they were our mercenaries and the chauffeur was negotiating their fee to accompany us on the bus, in order to protect us from possible bandits at roadblocks – that’s when I noticed the machine guns slung over the shoulders of these kids. In the end, a suitable price wasn’t reached and the youths stayed on the road – I wasn’t sure if that was good or not, but there was really no time to dwell on the threat of armed robbery because I began to realize that….
3) The driver must have been exhausted. He had been driving straight since 7am (and anticipated arrival time in Cotonou was at least 4am) and everyone else on the bus was sound asleep (except me – rigidly looking out the window).
But we arrived safe and sound in Lome at 1am. Then I had to face a throng of taxi men who saw the lone foreign face get off the bus. I agreed a price with one and followed him to what turned out to be an unmarked taxi. Then his “friend” jumped in with him – for “security” I was told. They told me my hotel was 15 km away outside of town.
Although they seemed friendly enough, I was thinking I should ditch and get another ride, but I babbled to them about how I knew the owner of the hotel and he was waiting up for me to arrive and would already be expecting me. And my instincts felt that they were legit people and the “security” was to protect them against rogue clients. A police officer who stopped us at a checkpoint soon afterwards and confirmed the distance of the hotel made me feel even better.
And when I finally arrived at 2am, the taxi drivers really wanted to wake up the owner to confirm that I really had been deposited safely! For the first time in my life, I actually paid them more than I had initially promised – and even threw in a couple of those little Canada flag pins as bonus.
That was the last time (well, never say never…) I’ll be taking mammoth transport like that on this trip. Even better, the hotel where I’m staying has a pool, so it’s all good. And that’s where I’m going right now….