togo & benin

Day 1: Lonnie, Nina and I arrived at Circle (the place where we would get the bus to Lome) around 2pm, and pulled out of the chaotic bus station that is Circle approximately 30 minutes later. The three of us dozed in and out of sleep as the bus moved slowly through traffic, until we noticed – about an hour and a half later, might I add – that we were just passing by the university. We have no idea why the drive that usually takes 20 minutes took five times as long…Oh, Ghana. We were told that the drive to Lome from Accra would take about 3 hours, but we ended up at the border in almost double the time. I got excited as we neared the border to start speaking French again – while getting our visas at the Togo border, I married off both Nina and Lonnie to one of the security guards, who also wrote down his number for us and told us to call him. Good times. We made it to our hotel and then wandered around looking for a place to eat, after which we crashed into bed to try and get some sleep

Day 2: After leaving our not-so-lovely hotel room, we had an amazing breakfast of omelettes and our first moto ride of the trip along the coast of Togo…it was awesome! We wandered through the market in Lome, and after deciding that markets in West Africa pretty much all look the same, headed to the fetish market. The fetish market is where people who practice voodoo go to get their medicines…it was certainly an interesting experience. We met the son of the fetish market chief and saw how many stones/animal parts/random stuff was used to do voodoo, and then got to walk around and take pictures of all the musty dead animals.

As Nina put it: “Thank God for the World Wildlife Federation.”

After we had enough of snake skulls and horse heads, we got a taxi to Togoville, the village that the whole country is named after. We took a pirogue ride through Lac Togo to the village, which boasts of the voodoo religion (stone statues of gods were everywhere) and the place where the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared in the 80’s (the pope even visited Togoville after that happened). We then pirogue-d it back to the shore, which was a memorable ride as Lonnie met another future husband and an old man blessed us about 50 times…pretty sure “God Bless You” was the only thing he knew how to say in English. We crossed into Benin in the afternoon, and made it to Ouidah in what we thought was a too-full taxi with 4 people crammed in the back. Little did we know what was to come….anyway, we made it to Ouidah, which is a small town with a Portuguese fort, slave history and a museum full of snakes (but we stayed far away from that!). Our hotel was blue bungalows right on the ocean…amazing! We had a lovely French dinner, laughed when the power flickered on and off numerous times, and swam in the saltwater pool.

Day 3: We first walked to the Door of No Return, which was located pretty close to our hotel and then took a motorbike into town…with all THREE of us, along with our backpacks and purses, behind the driver…it was crazy. We took a tour of an old Portuguese slave fort, taxi-ed to a bank in Cotonou to take out money, and took a moto ride to Ganvie, the largest stilt village in Africa -- It is comprised of 4 villages that total around 80,000 people. They even had two hotels you could stay in and a gift shop, where the store owner outfitted Nina like an African woman which was pretty funny. We then headed north to Abomey in a shared taxi, walked around a little bit in search of French food, only to realize that Ghana has a disproportionate amount of street food compared to Francophone West Africa. We pulled out the guidebook and found a place that sounded good, found it and sat down to learn that they had no menus (we are used to only getting one menu per group, but no menus??) and that they were only serving rice and meat. Since I don’t eat meat and Lonnie and Nina were rice-ed out, we decided to give up on and head to our hotel, which turned out to be a great idea. The hotel was very cute and despite the lack of running water, we had a great dinner and lots of fun hanging out there.

Day 4: In the morning we visited the palace that used to be where the chiefs of the Abomey people lived – now it has been turned into a museum. The whole thing was so interesting, we saw many of their religious practices, the uses for the various compounds within the palace, and heard how all Abomey kings had more than 1,000 wives -- whenever one king died, the next king inherited all of the previous king’s wives! After our tour, we went to the bus station only to find out that there wasn’t another bus going to Natitingou (where we wanted to go) that day. We accepted an offer to ride up on what we thought was going to be a tro tro the whole way, only to find out that was NOT the case. Here ensued the hilarious events: from a squished tro-tro, to taxi #1, which included me straddling the stick shift, 4 people in the front row and 8 in the backseat, which is a total of 12 people, then taxi #2, which had three rows – 4 people in the front, we think 8 in the middle, 4 in the back (that’s where we were), 1 in the trunk and 1 on the roof for a grand total of 18 people. This was a seriously hilarious experience…we bonded with the Beninois people in the car, and I got to play with a little girl who was adorable. One of the guys in there (the one who was at first on the roof, but then came in the car when it started raining) spoke a little English and said “See? Africa no good. In America, this not happen.” He was laughing about it, but it’s true. I don’t know whether there is a shortage of taxis in Benin or that people don’t have enough money to pay for a reasonable number of people in one taxi, but it is so unsafe. Then, we were dropped off again to taxi #3 which I thought was the most uncomfortable. Lonnie and Nina were jammed in the front with the driver and another lady, I was in the middle with I think 7 others, and 4 guys were crammed in the trunk. We went through a police checkpoint….our driver bribed the officer to let our way-too-full taxi through with a bag of pure water. We finally made it to Natitingou around 10pm, found a hotel that had the friendliest workers ever who helped us get a guide for our SAFARI the next day!

Day 5: AFRICAN SAFARI! We rented a truck and a guide for the day, which turned out to be a great idea. We left our hotel at 5:30am and returned back at 5:30pm….it was amazing! We saw lots of elephants, crocodiles, monkeys, hippos, wildebeasts, gazelles, warthogs, monkeys, baboons, birds, antelopes, turkey-looking things and many other animals that we had no idea what they were called. We got to ride on the top of our guide’s truck….we felt like we were in the Lion King and so sang a lot of Lion King songs throughout our drive  After our safari, we took a tro tro through Benin into Togo which was amazing. The ride was beautiful and we saw so many interesting villages. One of the funniest parts was the “border” between Togo and Benin…it was literally a tree log. Since we didn’t get exit stamps, the three of us never actually left Benin, according to our passports. We stayed overnight in Kara, a city in the far north of Togo, at possibly the worst hotel I have ever been in in Africa…and that’s saying something!

Day 6: Travel day! We took a bus from Kara to Lome, which surprisingly left on time and got to our destination on time! From Lome (which, fun fact, is the only capital city in the world that is also a border town) we went through the border with no issues and then got a tro from Aflao back to Accra. We were so happy to be back in Ghana! As the three of us were sitting on the tro with people surrounding the bus trying to sell items, two ladies in the tro yelling at each other over something or another, and being able to use our beloved cedis instead of confusing CFA, Lonnie said, “I never thought Ghana would feel so much like home!” So true :)