Heading for the fairly large and bustling town of Kpalimé deep in the forests of Togo's cocoa and coffee country, I couldn't help but notice sign after sign for Ecotourism outings, childish paintings of pinked white people cruising along palm tree lined paths to cascading waterfalls. As our ancient and dying Peugot chugged along the paved highway to Kpalimé, I wondered about that word, ecotourism. It's one of those funny expressions, kind of like "lifetime warranty" or "freedom fighter"; the more closely you examine it, the less it makes sense. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the only way to be a true ecotourist is **to never travel again**. But convincing the world of that would be like trying to convince it to give up its TVs, cell phones, and Gucci alligator shoes. Even the "environmentally friendly" hippies and yuppies back home in San Francisco console themselves on the impending crisis of global warming over $8 bottles of organic goji berry juice made by Himalayan monks. With all the green wash in society right now, I was curious if not a bit skeptical about what exactly ecotourism meant in Togo.
Lunch at the
base of Mt. Agou -- the site of our first attempt at exercise in weeks, and unfortunately for us, at 990 m, Togo's highest peak -- was like a farmer's market in a picnic basket. Our spread included shade grown, organic coffee from cooperative farms in the hills of nearby Mt. Klouto; avocados and pineapples we had plucked from trees that very morning with the help of local villagers; fresh ground peanut butter made, packaged and sold in Benin where we had purchased it; raw honey collected, packaged and sold in Fada Gourma, Burkina Faso where we had purchased it; freshly baked sweet bread made that morning by women from the local villages; and scrum-diddly-umptious mayonaise from...uh, Saudi Arabia. Damn.
After we gorged, we began the 2+ hour trek up Mt. Agou along a winding forest trail, which begins at the Bethisda Hospital in the tiny town of Agou. Accustomed to the free-spirited meanderings through superbly marked trails in America's national forests, we were at first a bit miffed when a local Ewe man, puffing cigarettes, a snub nosed machete in hand, followed us and proclaimed himself our mountain guide. The trail forked and wound up unkempt, rocky slopes,
so we didn't so much as peep a protest as he smiled and led the way. "I am Jahini Kossi Maowko, my grandfather is Jahini Kossi Yaowo, my grandmother is Ese Yaowo!" he'd say, approximately every five minutes, beaming a brighter shade of proud each time he repeated the names. Jahini's day job? Hand-plucking avocados from the orchards growing from the mountain side to sell each week at markets surrounding Mt. Agou.
As we huffed and puffed up the steep mountain path, we were passed again and again by barefooted villagers balancing bowls of water the size of desktop computers on their head, babies sleeping in rucksacks on their backs. Men head-dressed with bunches of bananas and 10 kilo sacks of avocados sped by, biceps bulging and faces soaked in sweat. They'd disappear up the mountainside in minutes and as we stopped to catch our breath, my boyfriend murmured, "why are they going
up the hill?" Our guide would stop and wait patiently for us to catch up, stoke his cigarettes and shout "I'm the chauffeur! Yes, the chauffeur for the trek up the mountain! But we have no car. Let's go!"
After nearly 3 hours,
our caravan, having subtlety and slowly grown to include an entourage of 5 or 6 giggling Ewe women, reached the village of Kabodobagi, one hour from the peak of Mt. Agou. Mud brick houses spread along terraced layers of the mountain's jungle, their rusted tin roofs pinned into place by a few rocks. On a good day, we would have looked out over the cocoa and coffee farms below, past Kpalime and into Ghana, where Lake Volta stretched for nearly 200 miles along the Togo-Ghanaian border. But this February afternoon, the Harmattan winds swept down from the Sahara, shrouding the entire vista in a hazy, dense fog. The sky, the horizon, the ground below and the mountain were all one color, a wet and vaporous white that encroached on the green of even visible trees. The foliage paled, shied away from my camera, brilliant in the sun, too shiny with white and haze. The Ewe villages milled about with a sort of quiet restlessness, kids shouting "Yo bo!" (white man) with smiles that would melt the Grinch. Goats lapped up the rinds and cores of discarded fruit, and fat chickens scratched around in front of the house of a local
poulet salesman. "Mr. Rasta Cool" came to greet us as we walked past his chicken pad, handing out bowls of fresh water from the waterfalls. "You like reggae?" We nodded eagerly. "Then you must stay and smoke ganja with me, and we will listen to REAL reggae. Not that Babylon stuff in America."
Utterly spent from the climb and the sun, we politely declined and made our way back to the Agou station where our all local, all natural hike up the mountain would end with a moto ride, spewing thick black smoke all the way home.
The next day we jumped 12 km northwest to the mountainside town of Klouto, consisting of a few earthen houses and rocky paths that wind through the surrounding jungle. Our hotel, Auberge des los Papillons (Hotel of the Butterflies) was a lover of nature -- so much that he kept dead specimens of butterflies and scorpions for lobby decorations. After a breakfast of homemade pineapple jam and coffee grown in the backyard, we trekked to the Klouto waterfalls with one of the town's official guides. "My job is to hike around every day," he'd say. "What do you do?" He walked
us along slowly, stopping to point out the abundance of local flora used for practically anything you could think of. Indigo leaves, when crushed, would slowly morph into that deep nightsky blue and the bark of another tree was peeled away to reveal thick sticky orange; this was what Klouto's artists used for paint. Fern leaves could be stamped onto part of your skin, leaving a white powdery tattoo. Cotton and ebony trees towered above the forest floor, shading pineapple and banana plants. Hairy palm plants were tapped for their sweet juice that makes a potent local wine, and carnivorous vines...well, I guess they kept the insect population at bay. The seemingly endless potential of local resources for human use was environmentally touching, but in all reality was for the sake of survival rather than fashionable political statements. People have depended on the forest for millenniums -- here they are still doing just that.
Our sticky afternoon hike ended this time with a dip in the pool of one of Klouto's dozens of mountain waterfalls. Since our presence had cost little more to the environment this than than a few bumps and scratches to the trees for the sake
of demonstration, I felt about as ecotourist as I'd ever be. And I had the answer to all the hype in the Western world right now about "going green", which is usually consummated with fancy eco-product exhibitions and expensive tear-jerking films starring polar bears. It's easy to be green -- just be more like an African! The funny thing about progress these days is that sustainability comes with a cost. And that cost, as far as I could see from the jungles of Togo, is to start moving backwards.
Our three day, Togolese eco-tour ended with a trek up Mt. Klouto, where my new found solution for both the developed-developing country discrepancy and global warming waned into lackluster nonsense. Winding up the mountain, past burning patches of jungle scorched for agricultural purposes, we peaked at a large, fort-like castle, imported from Germany in the 1940s. Now to all of those who complain about soap and crackers shipped from China, I beg of you, how do you import a
castle? As we plopped down on the plush white couches inside for a rest, our guide smiled smugly and said "so we're in the White House now." And it kind of
is -- the President of Togo lived here during the 1970s. Now he only visits during a local festival that takes place once a year. And he arrives in his private helicopter.
So all in all, I'm sad to report that ecotourism in Togo, despite its local-flavored charms, is as confusing and slightly embarrassing as Janet Reno's hair. It did give me some comfort, however, to see an old annex of the stout German castle crumbling under swathes of root-like vines. In the end, nature prevailed over palaces. And it truly was the beauty of the bush, not German architecture, that kept driving us and our African chub up those impossible mountains.
Togo's Flag
Map of Togo