Chapter 60...The Voodoo Vacation Part I - Benin

Benin, the club-shaped nation to the East of Ghana, is famous for being the birthplace of voodoo!  Voodoo got its current name in Haiti and Cuba, it was orginally called 'vodun' in Benin and Togo, a word that means 'the hidden' or 'the mystery.'  10th January is officially 'voodoo day' and a bank holiday with celebrations all over the country. Benin, particularly the town of Ouidah, is also known to have played a pivotal role in slave trade for nearly three centuries giving the country a complex history. For all these reasons Benin was the starting point for mine and the Absters two week vacation spanning three countries, in some cases in less than twelve hours...

Day 1: One Day, Three Countries!

The official start of our holiday and what could we not wait to do more than anything else...leave Ghana! We set ourselves up for the day with the usual egg 'n' bread breakfast, (which takes me half the day to eat, much to Abbie's annoyance as she can smell the grease and tastefullness oozing from my bag) and headed for a tro to the Ghana/Togo border. We paid our 8 Cedis and got comfy for the ride.  For the first time in a long time we were on a road that we had both not been on before, flying past town and place names that we'd only heard of. As we neared the border the road turned from paved and dust-free to pot-holed and red, was this an insight into what our two week vacation would be like...

Crossing into Togo was pain-free, we simply left Ghana and entered Togo, 30 Cedis lighter but all legit with a paid for visa! *A little tease for later...leaving Togo was not so pain-free!* As is always the case, we were swarmed by French speaking men as soon as we left no-mans-land, all wanting to pick us somewhere or exchange money! Now Abbie doesn't speak a word of French so we were reliant on my GCSE fast-track B grade French to get us safely through two French speaking countries (boy did I wish I'd paid more attention in those early morning breakfast classes)! As I got going a lot of words came back to me, but that's all they were, words! All conjunctions and sentence formations seemed to have been lost over the ten years since I sat my GCSE's, but somehow we survived! 

The main form of transport in Togo and Benin are moto taxis, known as 'zemi-johns.'  There are no tros and very few private cars, which are ridiculously expensive! The Lonely Parent gives this description of zemis...'by far the fastest and most convenient way of getting around, but they are dangerous, most drivers behave like lunatics and helmets are not available.' I would say this pretty much sums it up in my experience! Abbie gave it this equation...Chicago (London) traffic + thousands of motos, double the speed - all road rules = a zemi-john ride in Togo and Benin! 

So we hop on a zemi to take us to cars for Benin, we do a quick transfer there and one hour later, having driven along the beautiful coast of Togo and the less beautiful industrial site and port...

My 'twin' - Absee! We get asked all the time while we're travelling if we're twins! We usually just reply yes!

...we are in Benin, our third country for the day! 30 Cedis spent, one visa bought, a love of the street food (roast potatoes) and 48 hours to absorb this country the best we can...

Our final task for day one, once we hit Cotonou, is to find somewhere to rest our heads that night! Thanks to my Lonely Planet West Africa (thanks bro) we have some ideas of places to stay so we holler over two zemis, tell them where to take us and to stick together...oh yes, you guessed right - within two minutes we had lost each other! My zemi was in front so I kept checking back for Abs, but given I had my backpack on, seeing much was difficult! My rider pulled over and we sat waiting for a while, me racking my brains as to what to do given that our phones didn't work in Benin, Abs spoke no French and didn't know the name of the hotel! Luckily after a few minutes more I saw a beaming smile coming towards me, the Abs who had stopped for fuel and was loving the whole zemi-john experience!

My smile suggests I enjoyed the experience, but to be honest I didn't at all! The adventurer in me is decreasing with the more accidents I have!

Photo courtesy of the Abster!

Eventually we check ourselves into a tiny box room for 11,000 CFA, bargain I keep saying to Abs, I can't believe it's so cheap! We stroll downstairs for a cous cous, spaghetti and chicken dinner and chat over the day. As we are I'm doing the calculations in my head - 1,000 CFA is 3 Cedis so 11,000 CFA is 36 Cedis - way above the budget we set ourselves! I have to admit to Abs that I may have been a little hasty in my excitement over the room price, all faith is lost and Abs decides that maybe it's time for her to learn the exchange rate after all!

Day 2: Gilding the Lily!

To make the most of our 48 hour visa we organised a packed second day. Now it will come as no surprise to you all that our day started with food, good French food! Just outside our hotel, which we discover by daylight is in a very nice part of town with wide paved streets and amazingly big houses all around (no wonder the room is so expensive), we find street food of baguettes, avocado, cheese, meat balls, gherkins and tuna, all the things we would never find as street food in Ghana! 

Following breakfast we need to head to the car station for cars to Porto Novo, the official Capital of Benin, so once again we search out easily enough a couple of riders wearing the yellow zemi uniform and tell them (in broken French) where we need to go. They try desperately to take us the whole way to Porto Novo (forty-five minutes away), but we insist we just want to go to the car station and get a (cheaper than the fare they were offering) car there. We instruct them to stay together and away they go! Like any good/bad chick flick this is all looking pretty obvious...Abbie and I lost each other once again, but this time for about twenty minutes! Both our riders were very kind in helping  us to find each other, until my rider who had the better English of the two kept insisting that Abbie had gone to Porto Novo and he should take me there! After clearly telling him that she wouldn't have gone without me, we ride around the block once more in some vain hope that we will find the other moto! Eventually as we turn a corner I see the Abster on her moto and scream her name across the Cotonou traffic! The reunion is bitter sweet as my rider will not take the money for our fare, instead asking us to 'wait, wait' so he can again ask to take us to Porto Novo! I shove the money in his hand and ask for the change, but still he is asking us to wait! I can feel the rage surfacing and try my best to stay calm by walking away, but it's too late! I shout at him to take our money, give us our change or we are walking to get the car with him left CFA-less! Eventually we get the issue sorted (with the help of some other Beninese) and the Abs and I find ourselves sat in a full car waiting to leave for Porto Novo. Now at this point Abs is wondering what she is doing on holiday with this crazy woman so just to prove to her how insane I am, I shout 'chauffeur' (a word she doesn't even know the meaning of) from the full car to get the driver to come so we can leave! And would you believe it, my crazy shout gets his attention, he buckles himself in and away we go...

All smiles in the crazy Cotonou traffic having found each other again! The riders in yellow shirts are zemi-johns!

I wasn't such a fan of Porto Novo, it had a real 'Shutter Island' feel to the place, very cold and very empty, but we enjoyed a stroll around the market and some cloth shopping before heading back to Cotonou where we really let the CFA loose! As if Abs and I didn't have enough jewellry with us in Ghana we spent a stupid amount of money buying even more, I really was gilding the lily! After finally telling ourselves that we had to stop purchasing things we didn't need, we headed back to the hotel via an evening exploration stroll in which we got told off for snapping (taking photos of) government buildings and contemplated life on the steps in front of an unknown statue as the sun set! 

 

On the way back we stopped in at a French grocery store where we picked up a bottle of red wine, brie and crackers. We stood in awe as our bottle of wine was smashed against a wall (with a cloth in between) to get the cork out (it worked, much to our amazement) then we chatted away the evening of day two...

 

Day 3: 'We do Ouidah' (pronounced 'we-da')

Today we have to be out of Benin by the afternoon when our 48 hour visa is up so it's an early start to make sure we can fit in Ouidah before we exit Benin! As usual it's breakfast on the street followed by zemi's to the car station for Ouidah. In every way this should be extremely simple, but with Abs and I there always seems to be a slight hiccup or two...

When we arrive at the car station for Ouidah we are quoted 10,000 CFA for the one hour journey there! We just can't understand it, that's 30 Cedis, which is how much we pay for a bus from the North to South of Ghana (14 hours) and we paid for our visa into the country...how is it that much when the book says it's 700 CFA (2 Cedis and much more likely)! After a small fight breaks out between my zemi rider and one of the car drivers Abs and I step away and find a bench to perch ourselves on while we watch the action unfold! We made a decision to be stubborn and ride it out, eventually one of the many drivers sat around doing nothing would lower their fare and stop giving us 'white' pricing...one hour later we were still waiting! Abs decided to go ask someone what the deal really was and we soon found out that we'd been dropped at the private car station to Ouidah, not the share taxi one! So as I scowled and stropped that no-one had been honest enough to tell us and instead let us waste an hour of the day sat there waiting, Abs was beaming from ear-to-ear with excitement at the thought of another zemi ride to the correct car station!

Our two hours in Ouidah must be spent wisely, which is such a shame because the place is amazingly intriguing and I would have loved more time there! Once again we hop on zemis with our backpacks on to do a quick tour of the town and the 'route des escalves' down to the beach where 'captured countrymen from across West Africa left Ouidah for the Americas.' We walked through the 'point of no return' and marvelled at how we would like more time here and more knowledge of the slave trade to really 'feel' the place properly. 

On the afternoon of day three we left Ouidah and Benin with heavy backpacks from all  our purchases of cloth, jewellry and masks and a sense of love for the parts of this country we had seen. Next stop back to Togo for four days of fun and dramas there...