Scratching the Surface

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		a		After dusty, aid-soaked Niger, Benin felt fecund and alive. The scrubby landscape quickly became forest, there was fruit for sale on the streets and the people seemed louder and happier. Many of the men wear brightly patterned pyjamas whilst some of the women wrap sarongs around their bottom half only (unfortunately for Chris most of the women who adopted this traditional style of dress were grandmothers!). Voodoo is still very much alive, as evidenced by the many fetish shrines on the street and the python temple to be found in most towns. When we arrived in Abomey late one evening we could hear a voodoo ceremony being held a few streets away and the next day, when I bought greens from the market to cook with our omelette that evening, several people called out to ask me if I was going to eat them. I guess I may have inadvertently picked up the cure for flagging virility – or a particularly annoying enemy! Chris and I had both read the fantastic ‘Viceroy of Ouidah’ by Bruce Chatwin earlier in the trip and so were excited about seeing both Abomey and Ouidah. A fictionalised account of the live of a real Brazilian slave-trader the book is full of colour and atmosphere and the towns didn’t disappoint. Abomey was the seat of the powerful Dan-Homey kingdom that supplied the Portuguese with slaves, mostly as a result of their war-mongering with other tribes. The remains of the mud-palaces are fairly barebones now but their scale is impressive and our guide brought to life many of the customs and rituals that supported this violent royalty. Of the small collection of artefacts that are left we were inevitably most impressed by the infamous throne with a seat made out of enemies skulls. Talk about disrespecting the dead! In Ouidah we saw the other side of this African story as we took the last walk that the slaves made before being sent across the Atlantic. This is a strange kind of tourist sight but is nonetheless affecting. The path is lined with fetish shrines, statues of the symbols of the Abomey kings and memorial to the Tree of Forgetfulness. The slaves were made to walk around this tree whilst denouncing their religion, culture and history in the interests of being at peace with their new lives, or rather 'becoming a people with no will to react or rebel'. The walk ends at the Door of No Return on a beautiful beach where we couldn’t help but reflect on how strange and terrifying it must have been for slaves taken from the interior to reach the ocean, never mind cross the Atlantic. We had driven down in three days and could see that the environments and peoples were worlds apart in just these few hundred km. After our visit to Ouidah, we made an early start to cross into Togo. Poor Benin and Togo often get lumped together when in fact they are two quite different countries. But the truth is that they are both very thin, both Francophone and both use the same currency so most people treat them as a package. And to be fair, when we crossed the border between them there were hundreds of people streaming backwards and forwards - ladies with food pots on their heads and men with bundles of goods to sell – but only us, one Korean and a Ghanaian couple seemed to be bothering to stop at the immigration post. The main difference we saw between the two countries during our short stay was that Benin seemed much more developed for business and for tourism, apparently a product of their relative political stability. We quickly traversed Togo's 56km coastline to reach the capital, Lome, which sits right on the border with Ghana. Despite a fun visit to the fetish market and some great local food, Togo was rather overshadowed by the terrible experience of trying to get Ghana visas. After the pompous consul had interviewed us and finally deigned to accept our application, he still decided to give us only 15 days - barely enough time to drive all the way through let alone stop anywhere. We’d been hoping English-speaking, tourist-friendly Ghana would be an ideal place to get some mid-trip jobs done and now we were anxious and frustrated. We were feeling a little depressed, both at the Ghana situation and at the realisation that the biggest part of our trip was behind us, and so we decamped to the coffee-growing region just north of Lome. Here we spent a few days walking in the hills and planning for the final few months of the trip so that we could enter Ghana refreshed. Photos Chris replaced by Abomey prince Door of no return Shrine on the Oudiah walk Jackie with Highland guide
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