Advertisement
Whew, what a rough couple of days.
I guess we should have taken it as a sign from above to expect a less than perfect trip when we set out to find a cab at 6 in the morning in the pouring down rain.
Last Monday, 3 of the girls and I took off for the Ghana border to travel across Togo and into Benin for a little whirlwind trip.
As it started, we woke up at 5:30 am to pouring down rain and screaming wind, but we decided to head for the hills anyway. Well, of course, there was not a taxi to be found outside of our hostel, so after getting slightly soaked, we found one and made it to the station. The station in Accra was as crazy as usual and before we even got out of the cab we had people pulling at us from all sides and insisting that they help us find the place we already knew how to find. I swear, “no” never seems to mean no. I guess everyone must think selective hearing leads to more tips… Anyway, one crazy man stood out to me as we were pulling away - probably because he had ten peswas in his ear as he was yelling and chasing after us. I guess that’s as good a holding spot for spare change as any, right? “Hey guys, just a sec, let me pull my peswas outta my ear.” Haha.
Anyway, we got to the border in about three and a half hours and crossed into Lome. From there, with a little bit of trouble, we got a taxi to drive us for a fair price to the spot to catch a bush taxi across Togo and to Cotonou, the largest city in Benin. We found one without a problem and we were on your way yet again.
There’s a little something you should know about bush taxis: they are unmarked cars that don’t move unless they have at least 7 people in them. In Ghana, everyone at least pretends like it matters when you overload a car, but in Togo and Benin, we found overloading to be pretty mandatory. At one point on the way to Cotonou we had 8 people in the car. Let me tell you, the four of us have got squeezing ourselves into the back of a car of any size down to an art.
Any time we crossed a border on the way there and on the way back, we got hassled by patrolmen who had no trouble expressing their want for an American wife. I felt kind of bad for our taxi drivers that had to wait extra long for us at each border. All the guards seemed to take their sweet time stamping our passports after numerous unsuccessful attempts at gaining our contact information, much less our hand in marriage.
Togo and Benin are also both French-speaking countries and not a single one of the four of us can speak any French beyond hello, please, I don’t speak French, I don’t know, thank you, thank you very much, how much, too much, and goodbye. As you can imagine, that didn’t get us too far. After the first day, we took to looking up destinations in the guide book and then writing them down on paper to show the drivers.
Anyway, we made it to Cotonou in late afternoon. We had been told that Cotonou wasn’t anything to write home about and that it wouldn’t take anything away from our experience if we were to avoid it altogether, but we went anyway. Turns out everyone was right.
Cotonou is crazy - crowded streets with thousands of motorbikes (zimmy-johns or zims as they are called in Benin) and the pollution in the air made it darn near impossible to breathe. A good majority of the zim drivers wore handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses as to avoid passing out from the fumes. Flying down the street on the back of a bike, it was literally hard to breathe. Also, they drive like kamikaze fighter pilots. Seriously, I often found myself wondering if I was going to live to see my destination.
Our first real scare of the trip was when we had just arrived in the city and went in search of an ATM to take out CFA. The first bank we found didn’t have one, but the teller spoke just enough English to understand that we needed a “money machine” and he helped us flag down some bikes and told them where to go. Well, we hopped on for the ride of our lives and clung to the drivers as they zoomed in and out of rush hour traffic. Plain suicidal is all I have to say about that.
We made it to the bank and Nicole, Cate and I hopped off. Sarah, however, was nowhere to be found. Well, you can probably guess what was going through my mind at the point. We waited and waited and waited and she still wasn’t anywhere in sight. I was pretty terrified, I’m not gonna lie. She literally could have been anywhere, and we had absolutely no way of finding her. Twenty minutes later, she came flying into the parking area with a crazy look on her face. Well, as it turns out, her driver had decided to make a pit stop halfway to the bank for some gas and it wasn’t until after he stopped that he realized he didn’t know where he was supposed to be going. Seeing as how Sarah couldn’t even speak enough French to tell the man she needed to find a bank, things turned out a lot better than they could have.
Needless to say, zims were not our preferred method of travel after that, but we sure were hard-pressed to find a taxi anywhere in Cotonou.
I also noticed that on every single bike I got onto, at some point during the ride, the driver would adjust the mirror as to be able to look at me while he was driving. Umm, I think I’d prefer he look at the road, but maybe that’s just me.
I got quite the kick out of the kinds of things people transport on motorbikes. I saw one bike with 2 guys and a mattress on top of their heads, a bike with a man and a women and two trees, a man on a mo-ped with 6 boxes of motor oil balanced between his arms and legs, and a bike with 2 guys balancing 20 foot iron rods on their heads. Haha.
Also, official gas stations in Togo and Benin seemed to me only to be used by huge trucks. Everyone else makes use of the thousands of little stands on the side of the road where you can pull up and have someone pour some gas in your tank using a water bottle and a funnel. I asked about it and was told that there are huge shipments of gas that come from Nigeria and people buy it by the jug to sell on the road. Crazy huh?
The next day we got up at 6 in the morning and went in search of some breakfast (the streets were already hazy with fumes). After a few unsuccessful explorations, we found this little bakery with rolls and yoghurt and juice. It was delicious, but there wasn’t anywhere to eat inside so we ended up sitting out on the curb amongst an abnormal amount of flies and a couple of pretty chatty beggars. Go us.
Well, after eating, we searched for about an hour to find the “unofficial” stop to catch a bush taxi to Abomey-Calavi to visit a stilt village. Nope, never found it.
We did, however, manage to get royally ripped off by some guards outside the office building where we ended up.
We asked them where to find the stop but they told us they could just go find a car and bring it to us instead, so one of them hopped on a motorbike and came back a few minutes later with a car. Long story short, we couldn’t get them to take us for any less than 10 thousand CFA, even though we knew the ride was only supposed to cost about 1,200 CFA for the four of us. Outrageous I know, but really, we had no other choice. Then, if that wasn’t enough, the guards asked us to pay first (you never pay first…) and proceeded to give only half of the money to the driver. They kept the other half for themselves. Grrrr. You can’t imagine how helpless we felt.
Anyway, we made it the 10 kilometers to Abomey-Calavi and then had to pay 20 thousand CFA for a round trip motor boat ride to the village and back. It wasn’t until after we were already on the lake that they told us in order to actually see the village, we had to pay the driver an extra 10 thousand CFA to do more than drop us off at the craft shop on the edge of the village. Splendid.
Well eventually, we got him to take us for 6 thousand instead of 10 and it was so completely worth it.
The village of Ganvie was started by a man back in the day who fled to a small piece of land in the middle of the lake in order to escape the tribal wars that were raging in Benin at the time. Over time, the village expanded off of the little island and onto stilts. Nowadays, 30 thousand people live their day-to-day lives 2 meters above the water and the islands are used almost solely as burial grounds for members of the village. Ganvie is described as the “Venice of Africa” and I felt like I was experiencing something that could have easily been on the travel channel.
We happened to visit the village during market day and got to see all of the women in their boats piled high with goods to sell all gathered in the “town square.” It was really, really cool.
Fishing is the main source of food for the village, and also their main source of income I assume, and the lake was sectioned off by hundreds of palm frond fences. The fishermen build fences to stake off their section of the lake, and then they gather soil, leaves, branches and grass and scatter it over top of their section of water. They then leave it for 11 months. During that time, the foliage starts to decay and the fish feed off of it. After the 11 months, they come back and harvest the fish. Hmmm, I imagine that takes an amazing amount of patience.
After we left Ganvie, we somehow happened to end up in the cab of the same driver who aided in ripping us off on the way there. Again, go us.
On our way to the junction to catch a bush taxi to Ouidah, we had been driving for about 5 minutes when we got stuck in standstill traffic for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, all of the zims were zooming past us, so we decided to pay the driver a fair portion of what we would have owed him had he taken us all the way, and get motorbikes instead. Well, that turned out to be the wrong choice, and the driver ended up stopping the car in the middle of the road and proceeding to get out and go on a rampage screaming at us in French. People were honking all around us and then the zim drivers decided they weren’t going to budge until we paid the driver the full amount. Then, we had to pay the fair a second time, just so we could risk our lives driving in and out of traffic and on and off the road to get to the junction on those stupid bikes.
Well, after another couple of bargaining sessions turned yelling matches, we made it to Ouidah (we-dah, for those of you not savvy in the French pronunciation department, myself included.)
Side note: We found during our time in Benin that the only way to get what you want or what you know is a fair price is to be the one to yell the loudest. Everybody drives an extremely hard bargain, but in the end, whoever makes the biggest scene wins… not even kidding. Not a fun game to play over and over again, if you ask me.
Anyway, we found a cheap hotel and had some interesting sandwiches there before we set off down the Route des Esclaves to the Door of No Return - the main road slaves from all over West Africa were marched down before they boarded ships to the Americas. We sat down on the beach for a while and I guess you could say we just reflected.
Then, we rode triple on motorbikes back to our hotel and after about an hour, began our wild goose chase in search of some food. We were quite hard-pressed to find a single thing to eat in the town except a giant vat of thick brown slop with tails and ears and such in it. Now, I’m definitely not as picky an eater as I was 3 and a half months ago, but seriously, no thanks.
We eventually had to take bikes back down to the beach and we ate some pasta in the dark before paying far too much for the bikes to come back and pick us up again. It was either that, or walk the 4 kilometers back in the dark. Again, no thanks.
That night, I literally bathed in bug spray, but still got eaten alive anyway. I woke up the next morning with more bites than I could count.
Well, Nicole got sick with what we suspect is her second bout with malaria that evening and after she was nauseous all night, we decided to take her to the hospital the next morning to get her started on the malaria meds. Another long story short, we ended up waiting there for about an hour and a half before they wrote her a prescription for medicine they didn’t even have. Splendid.
At that point, we were so fed up, we just decided to get back to Togo, even though it meant skipping going to the voodoo museum.
Benin is the birthplace of the voodoo religion and more than 60 percent of the population still practices it. Ouidah is known for its voodoo following and festivals, but Nicole needed meds, and Ouidah hadn’t proven to be our favorite place so far, so we headed for the border regardless.
Well, our bush taxi broke down halfway through Togo (Togo is only about 40 kilometers across) and we sat on the side of the road for an hour before they got it started again. Then we picked up a man who loaded his fishing nets into the back and we got to enjoy the smell of dead fish for a while, and then, we broke down again.
We just decided to call it a lost cause and since we were just outside of Lome at that point, we caught motorbikes and headed to our favorite restaurant for lunch. And then, my motorbike broke down. Ok, really? For crying out loud.
Eventually I made it to the restaurant though and after a delicious lunch, we headed for the border and our beloved Ghana.
Home free, right!?
Nope.
One of the girls in our group of four only had a single entry visa into Ghana, but since we had heard from numerous people that if anyone noticed, slipping a few cedis inside her passport would solve the problem, she decided to come with us anyway. Well, low and behold, she happened to get the only patrolman in the whole office who wouldn’t take her bribe. She cried like a superstar and tried just about everything, but he wouldn’t believe that she hadn’t known it was only a single entry visa. So, she ended up having to get new passport pictures taken, hand over 12 thousand CFA and her passport, and we waited for 2 hours while one of the border guards took her stuff to the Ghanaian embassy in Lome and got her a new visa. We thanked the lucky stars that one of them was willing to do that for her, and was also able to get it in such short notice (visas usually take 24 hours.)
So, we crossed back into Ghana, got bombarded by people offering to give us rides, and finally settled for a private taxi. It was almost dark out, but we had no money or phone credits left and all we wanted to do was be back in the safe haven of ISH, so we decided to head back anyway. We have been advised many times that it is unwise to travel at night, and now I understand why…
Aside from coming far too close to crashing into the back of a semi that had broken down in our lane and been left with no lights or reflectors of any kind, having no headlights on our car for half of the 3 hour drive, and going about 50 kilometers per hour too fast the entire way, I did see a tro tro jam packed full of goats that was stopped at one of the many police barricades on the Aflao - Accra highway. Of course I cracked up, and our taxi driver was like “Why you laugh!? Goats also like tro tro.” Haha.
Anyway, to sum it all up, my trip this last week just made me love Ghana that much more. I cherish being able to bargain in my own language, being able to eat, sleep and go about my everyday life very cheaply, and being able to jump on a tro tro anywhere I happen to be.
I don’t dislike Togo or Benin just because I had a few rough days there - I know the circumstances we found ourselves in along the way could have been completely different at any given time. I’ve learned that everything that happens when you travel in Africa is left up to chance, and it is absolutely mandatory that you just take things as they come.
Meanwhile, I’m missing you all.
Much love,
Cari
Advertisement
Tot: 0.092s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 9; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0528s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
larry
non-member comment
thank you
Good blog, informative, descriptive, revealing about Togo and Benin but also about yourself.