We passed from farmland into the jungle and walked up a steep hill.  In no time we found the gorilla group.  This is not down to luck.  There are trackers hired to keep an eye on the location of the gorillas who sleep in a different place each night.  These trackers hike into the jungle at 5am, follow the gorillas all day, and only leave at 6pm when they’ve seen where the gorillas are bedding down for the night.  It sounds like a gruelling day.  That said we were lucky to be assigned such a close group.  Other people we talked to had a six hour day walking up an almost vertical incline.  It’s just luck of the draw which group you are assigned to.

We came upon a female gorilla sitting on the path, just like that.  Soon another female joined her and they had a play fight about two metres in front of us.  During the briefing they say you should keep seven metres from the gorillas but that goes out the window when the gorillas start moving around.  We were just hustled out of the way by Francois when appropriate, and he made friendly gorilla sounds the whole time (meaning ‘I’m here, it’s ok’).  The No. 1 silverback came along to check us out soon after the females.  His name is Charles and he is 24 years old.  He is a big bastard and very intimidating.  It was rare to see them on a path like this, out in the open.  Usually they are sitting amongst the shrubbery eating their vegan diet.  Charles was accompanied by  a couple of his wives (he has four in total) and some of his children.  Natalia, a Ukrainian girl in our group, was crouching on the path in front of Charles for a photo, encouraged to do so by the guides. As the gorillas came towards us along the path, we all backed away instinctively, but Francois and Patrick told Natalia to stay there, ‘no problem’. She was facing away from the gorillas with only our anxious faces to tell her what was going on. The guides continued to make gorilla-calming sounds, the photo was snapped, and then we all backed off down the slope. We were perched in steep jungle when Charles started beating his chest and staring us down like a boxer about to start a fight.  This was a very different experience from the zoo.  We were about two metres from a wild silverback in territorial mode.  If he charges you, running is a bad idea – you are supposed to hold your ground, crouch down, and not look at him.  This is probably easier said than done.  Luckily for us he didn’t charge and having established his dominance he wandered off down the slope.  In his wake one of his wives and kids thumped the ground in imitation.

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Meanwhile one of the trackers spotted the No. 2 silverback.  This poor bastard is so insignificant in the scheme of things that I don’t even know his name.  He is sixteen and the understudy to Charles. Eventually he will break off from this group and start his own, but in the meantime he has to grab some ‘jiggy-jiggy’, as Francois referred to it, with the females in his group whenever he gets a chance.  This is a highly risky business.  If the No. 1 silverback finds out about it they will have a fight, and the No. 1 silverback is much bigger.  There was visible evidence of No. 2 silverback’s dalliances.  He had a scar on his neck as the result of a fight and looked down in the dumps.  He picked at a few leaves, hugged himself with his big arms, picked his scab and ate it, yawned widely with a big black tongue and big black teeth.

We learned that a new wife had joined this group recently but had not gotten off to a good start.  She tried to grab another female’s baby and in the resulting tug-of-war the lower half of the baby’s leg got ripped off (if I’m interpreting the guides sign language correctly – perhaps it was just really badly dislocated.) The baby is still limping.  Luckily for the gorillas they have a vet on standby who comes along and treats their maladies, just one of the benefits of having rich tourists come along for an hour a day to stare at you.

For our next hour we followed either the No. 1 or No. 2 silverback as they wandered through the undergrowth, getting incredibly close to them.  The babies headed way off down the hill pulling down trees.  The silverback made a mating call at one point, a low grunting which made his flanks shiver. None of his wives were in the mood and who can blame them with all these people standing around looking at them?  I can replicate the gorilla grunt quite well but I didn’t try it up there, not wanting to antagonise a 220kg animal who was already giving me the evil eye as if I was personally wrecking his prospects for romance that morning.

The gorillas are habituated to humans which means that they don’t run when they hear us coming. They stare back at us with curious eyes and I guess for an hour a day they get to stare at another species themselves.  For us humans it’s an amazing experience to be that close to a wild animal who could literally tear you limb from limb and yet most of the time is quiet and contemplative, chewing on a leaf or having a play fight.  That they are brushing past you to get where they are going is an incredible feeling and the experience is sure to stay with us for a long time yet.

The gorilla trek seems addictive and if not for the US$500 per person price tag I’m sure many people would be repeating it a lot more.  One of the guys at the guest house we stayed at had done the trek 49 times over seven years.  The trek also seems to attract the high end of town.  At dinner we had two surgeons from Canada, two doctors from Florida and a Lufthansa first officer.  Lowly budget travellers like ourselves do it once and cut the daily budget for the rest of our trip.  Still, it was worth seeing such a rare animal in such a unique way – it is something that will stay with us forever. Definitely recommended.

Across West Africa there are couples wearing matching outfits, all with colours as bright as bright can be. You can see bolts of cloth for sale all over the place, so once a fabric has been purchased it must be used to tailor outfits for the whole family.  You will see Mum, Dad and five kids all dressed in the same fabric.  Ladies will fashion elaborate headdresses from the same material.  It looks snazzy so don’t be surprised if Sarah and I turn up for your next function in colourful matching clothes.

Abomey is 100km north of the coast but with the state of the road it takes over two hours to make the trip through dusty, sparsely wooded terrain.  Abomey is famous for being the seat of the Dahomey empire, a large African tribe that encompassed most of modern Benin.  In fact, Benin was only named so in 1972 and many feel that the country should have retained its colonial name of Dahomey instead.  The name Benin comes from the Bight of Benin which was named after a Nigerian empire.

We arrived at midday and headed straight out for a guided tour which, through some miscommunication, took us to some holes 8km from town that we hadn’t been that keen to see.  It’s often hard to communicate when you’re on the back of a scooter and have roughly no idea where you are going.  The description of the tourist site is holes that the Dahomey warriors used to hide in.  It didin’t quite grab our imagination and the first part of the tour, looking down into extremely large holes was not all that thrilling.  They only found this site recently when machinery being used to construct a road in the area collapsed into a huge hole.  After a bit of poking around they figured out that the holes had some archaeological significance.

The tour picked up when we entered the one reconstructed hole which you climb down into on a wooden ladder.  It is pitch black and stuffy inside while the guide explains that warriors used to hide in here and wait for enemies to stumble in. No doubt they got a nasty surprise if they did.  Originally there was no ladder so once inside enemy soldiers would have great difficulty getting out.  The only way out was to climb on someone’s shoulders to reach the first step out.  Once the guide switches the light on you can see that the room is well engineered, carved out of solid rock, with three rooms lower down and off the main entrance rooms.  One is for storing rain water and the other two are bedrooms that also act as water overflow if there is a downpour.  There are 56 of these holes in the area with thousands more in the region.  It is attributed as one of the reasons the Dahomey empire become so successful and dominant.  The entrance was also circled by thorny bushes for extra protection.

We meant to do a tour of some of the reconstructed palaces in the area but when we got back on the scooters we noticed that one of them had a very flat rear tyre.  This being Africa there was a roadside tyre place about 20 metres up the road but it took a good hour or so to get fixed and sucked the wind out of our afternoon.  No matter, we got to the museum the next morning, housed in one of the old Dahomey palaces.

The palace is constructed of mud with a corrugated iron roof, formerly made of straw.  This makes it sound like a shack but the palaces are on a huge scale.  They have numerous courtyards and feel a little bit Asian in layout.  Eunuchs manned the first entrance to the palace, inside which is a large inner courtyard.  Beyond this is another inner courtyard where the King received visitors, and further in still are the living quarters where his wives lived and the King slept.  Each time there was a new King they built a new palace next to the old King’s digs.  Outside each palace is planted a special tree with a long lifespan to grow along with the new King.  They are still there today grandly guarding the entrance.

The Dahomey had a brutal side as well.  One of the thrones is mounted on the skulls of enemy warriors.  Before going to battle the warriors would sacrifice an animal for good fortune but they would have to make a promise to bring back the heads of a certain number of warriors which they nominated themselves.  If they fell short of this target they would be killed.  I would be lowballing that estimate for sure – under promise and over-deliver.  The Dahomey also had fierce female warriors which fascinated the French colonialists who called them the Dahomey Amazons.

We were allowed to go into the tomb of one of the Kings.  It had a very low metal roof which forced you to bow as you entered but inside were just two small circular rooms.  When the King died all of his wives were killed as well.  As the King had as many as 50 wives this was especially gruesome.  The wives had their own tomb in which they were drugged before being buried alive.  The King also has a spirit house where they keep an old bed for his spirit to rest on when it returns from the afterlife.  They have an animal sacrifice here every year and they stack the buffalo bones up outside.

Our quick to trip to Abomey at an end we hopped on a couple of moto-taxis and were heading to the bush taxi station when we were flagged down by a car heading to Cotonou.  We hopped in and started driving around town looking for a couple more passengers to fill the car up.  We noticed a mosque with a mobile phone tower built on top of a minaret.  Perhaps it is specially designed to receive Allah’s text messages.

We filled the car up relatively quickly but Sarah was stuck in the middle of the back seat next to a Nigerian man who dealt in engine parts.  He gave a very detailed opinion on marriage and relationships which became incredibly boring.  About halfway through the journey his droning was broken up by another passenger being squeezed into the back so now we had physical pain as a substitute.  The road was bad.  It took over two hours to travel 110 kilometres.  At least the bush taxi driver dropped us at our hotel door (for an extra tip of course).

Apart from huge jugs of petrol used as advertisements for drivers dodging potholes West Africa also features many pictorial signs advertising the nature of a business.  This is necessitated by the 40% literacy rate in the area.  This is also why showing a Beninese taxi driver a map of where you want to go is near to useless.  The signs that catch the eye are for the barbers, painted wooden boards showing the before and after effect of the barbers services, arrows indicating the before and after shot.

We headed north from Ouidah via bush taxi and then moto-taxi (scooter) to the town of Possotome on the shores of Lake Aheme.  The hotel had a very attractive stilt restaurant sitting over the water but the matching meal of muddy fish and burning spicy mound of paste did not match the surroundings. The lake itself is another shallow and muddy one which seem unfortunately common in this part of Africa.  The locals are aware of the problem and are trying to correct the rapid retreat of the lake shores by planting trees and mangroves next to the water, the idea being that the lake is in retreat because of all the sand falling into it.

We took a tour here about the local plants and the medicinal properties they have.  Our guide was an entertaining guy who acted out the way the plants stopped you having diarrhoea or eased constipation, together with sounds effects.  Most of the plants seemed to be used for this purpose, either that or treating malaria and fevers.  I guess these are the most common complaints around here. The fruit of one tree, when rubbed on the breast, caused enlargement, although whoever used it had to be careful not to go overboard.  Apparently a local man used it on his own appendage but cannot get a wife now because he overdid the treatment.  We stopped at a local ladies house which acted like a plant zoo for the guides.  She had a plant that appeased the god of thunder and stopped their house being struck be lightning, a plant which stopped snakes entering the house and aloe vera which we all know and love.  We also bought a mosquito bite treatment from her, a block of unknown substance which you wet and rub on the bite (it works pretty well) and some caramalised groundnuts which were super tasty.

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We were accosted walking along the hot road by a young man who wanted us to meet him later for a tour of his ice factory.  This offer didn’t appeal hugely but Sarah agreed to it for some reason.  After our plant tour we were really too hot to hang around in town any more and then afternoon slipped into dinner and I advised Sarah to brush the guy off.  We asked the hotel to organise a taxi to take us to our next destination the following day and who should turn up at our dinner table to arbitrate this negotiation but the ice factory manager.  Sarah quickly blamed me for the missed meeting and the young fellow settled down (after organising the taxi) to tell us all about the NGO he was starting and would we be interested in spreading the word – he was offering free membership in return.  To be fair he didn’t give us the hard sell, just asked for our email address so that he could send us more information.  Then he booked us in for a quick tour of the ice factory the following morning.

So that’s how we found ourselves touring a small factory at 9am the following morning.  It was not currently operational but was well built.  There was a cool room for storing the ice and a dock for the fishermen to pull up in their boat and collect ice for their fish which could then be shipped off to Europe.  As long as the fish stock in the lake doesn’t continue to fall it could be a successful venture.  We didn’t ask who the owner was but if it’s like a lot of the hotels we stayed in there would be a European involved.

This post might distress animal lovers.  I’ll italicise sections you might want to skip if a graphic description of animal sacrifice would disturb you.

The Voodoo festival at Ouidah, Benin was something we highlighted fairly early on in our travel planning as a unique event that we would like to see.  We had only a vague idea of what happens there but it just sounded intriguing.  It slotted in nicely with our planned itinerary although there was some shuffling to make sure we landed in Benin at the right time.  We arrived in Ghana three days earlier than our mammoth spreadsheet dictated which pleased our sense of planning and order.  Right on cue we arrived in Ouidah a couple of days before the festival was due to start.  Arriving in a bush taxi we were beset by taxi drivers offering to drive us to our hotel, once they collectively worked out where it was.  We agreed a price and went to walk over to the car only to find our drivers standing beside a couple of moto-taxi scooters.  We had broken our scooter virginity in Togo but now we had two big packs with us.  We prevaricated initially but were talked into it when the drivers just hoisted our large packs in between their handlebars to demonstrate how secure it was.  Luckily with us on the back as well they couldn’t get much above running pace anyway, but turning a corner on a road made of sand with that kind of weight on board was a tense experience.

In the meantime we had some Voodoo warm-up activities.  Voodoo, despite the negative connotations associated with it, is much like other organised religions, a superstition revolving around statues, appeasing the gods and warding off evil spirits.  Unlike other major religions Voodoo has not modernised and put a nice face on their beliefs.  It is still raw and for that reason comes across as more earthy than other religions.  I would argue it has done a lot less damage in Africa than the catholic church with its stance on condoms.  The pope recently visited Benin. He seems to be a fan of Voodoo having visited the home of Voodoo in Ouidah as well as Cuba with all their related Afro-Cuban religion.  The locals have no problem with people being Christian as well as using Voodoo.  They are seen as separate but not incompatible beliefs.  I think the catholic church is desperate to hang in to anyone who is a believer so probably indulge Voodoo practices on the sly.  70% of the country have Voodoo or Animist beliefs so they can’t ostracise all those people without loosing a large part of their flock (on a side-note apparently in Papua New Guinea the church faithful are called swine instead of a flock, pigs been much more important than sheep over there).

Our first taste of Ouidah Voodoo was the python temple.  This was not nearly as scary as it sounds. There is a walled-off compound you pay to enter, then the guide brings out a relatively small python and wraps it around your neck.  Sarah was our guinea pig, although luckily not guinea pig sized, and very bravely stood with the python exploring up and down her body while I captured it on camera..  I politely refused to have one around my neck now that it had woken up.  I’m quite happy to stroke a snake (no euphemism intended) but don’t feel the need to put my head in the hangman’s noose.  Forty of the pythons live in a smaller room where they laze around during the day rather than writhing over each other as in the movies.  To be fair it was blisteringly hot, as hot and humid as we had experienced on the trip so far.  The snakes liven up at night when they are let loose in the compound to hunt.  The pythons are worshipped as a god but we didn’t get too much detail on this as our guide only spoke French.  In Togo the Chief’s son at Koutammakou mocked this saying in disbelieving tones “In Benin they have a temple where they worship snakes, and they don’t even eat them!”

Ouidah sadly also has a strong history in the slave trade.  Much like the Cape Coast in Ghana Europeans traded with the local kingdom here for slaves, usually Africans from other tribes captured by the Dahomey empire in war.  To supply more and more slaves the Dahomey empire simply had more and more wars with their neighbours to capture people.  This trade lasted for 400 years.  We went for a stroll one late afternoon down to a memorial for the slaves and were quickly pounced on by three young local men who wanted to act as tourist guides.  A much better deal than simply being mugged. They took us around a few of the statues that have been erected in commemoration to the dead slaves and those that returned.  Then they asked if we wanted to see a Voodoo ceremony that was starting now.  Why not?

We went through a doorway to a dirt-floored outdoor verandah with a tin roof, a small courtyard attached to a couple of small rooms made from grey-coloured bricks.  Assembled here were a group of young men with drums.  In the room were some old men and a group of women.  Ominously there was a goat tied to a pole.  Libations were poured of some local gin of which Sarah and I partook.  It was a decent drop.  Then the drumming began in fits and starts while they searched for the rhythm they wanted.  It was a complex beat which sounded random at times but settled on a rhythm which gave a trance-like air to the proceedings.  

The goat was taken inside to have leaves stuffed in its mouth.  Two men then brought it out.  One of the men held its hind legs while the second man gripped its head with one hand, knife held in the other. Even though the small goat had its mouth clamped shut sounds like muffled screams still escaped.  The killing was totally botched.  The knife was nowhere near sharp enough, more like a steak knife that one equipped for the task of killing an animal.  The man sawed into the goats throat like you would cut a tough piece of steak.  The goat struggled as blood dripped out of its neck into a waiting bowl.  Soon it struggled less and was abandoned on the ground but it was obviously not dead.  It twitched a few more times, making movements as though it was running in its sleep.  The old woman who had manned the bowl wiped her bloody fingers on the goats fur.  Meanwhile a chicken had been killed and was placed under the front legs of the prostrate goat.  The man who had cut the goat’s throat wiped the blade clean on it as well.  One man tried to break the goats neck by twisting it around but this didn’t seem to kill it either. Eventually one of the old men sitting with the drummers got fed up with the ineptitude and signalled for the goat to be taken away and killed properly.  It was then tossed back out into the courtyard dust where the old woman picked it up by the head and draped it over her shoulders.  With her goat cape in place she led the procession of dancing women around the courtyard.  The blood from the goat had been poured into something near the drummers, presumably the fetish statue in whose honour the sacrifice had been made.  The drumming continued along with the chanting and dancing of the women.  It was an intense experience for Sarah and I, especially as it had been unexpected.  It was upsetting to see an animal suffering like that but as meat eaters it would be hypocritical to criticise the sacrifice itself.  Sarah might be more inclined to become vegetarian when we get back to Sydney.  I just think that if you’re going to kill an animal, at least do it properly to cause the least suffering possible.

The three lads giving the tour were pretty reasonable about the price so we wandered off back the hotel feeling like we had experienced as authentic a Voodoo ceremony as we were likely to see. Our hotel in Ouidah cost $12 a night and wasn’t terrible, although the bed was a bit short and we were located directly above the wood-fired outdoor kitchen.  Ear plugs, travel pillows and travel sheets make almost anywhere bearable.

After all that the Voodoo festival itself was a bit of a let-down.  It’s a nationwide celebration but we were down at the beach on the seaward side of the ‘point of no return’, a memorial for the slaves.  It was stinking hot in the shade but thankfully there were free plastic chairs to sit on under open air tarpaulins.  There was special VIP seating possibly for the president (we weren’t sure what he looked like at this stage) as well as Angelique Kidjo who gave speeches in three different languages to little response from the crowd.  We were seated by pure chance in the section that was holding Voodoo royalty, a lot of sharply dressed guys in white suits and snappy hats.  There was a huge speaker stack playing music and lots of little groups with drums which combined to form a mish-mash cacophony most of the time.  It was a long way from what we pictured, a small amateurish and slightly scary festival.  This was just dull most of the time.  Once the speeches had finished the day got more interesting as all the small voodoo groups informally started drumming and dancing in their own styles.  It was illuminating to me as it proved you can dance to drum and bass music.

It was here that I came as close I as have ever come to getting my pocket picked.  We had been warned by the hotel owner that there would be pickpockets around so all the important stuff was in my money belt.  Still, I didn’t want to have my wallet nicked on principle.  As we were walking through a stream of people behind one of the tents two guys behind me and to my right jostled me into a guy coming the other way.  I felt his hand reach into my left pocket so I twisted my left shoulder into him and jammed my own hand into my pocket.  He shuffled past and as I looked back he was busy slapping dust of himself with a bandana.  We later heard that a woman at our hotel had lost her camera to a pickpocket.

It was really too hot to stick around all afternoon so we beat a retreat to our hotel, had a shower and lay under the fan.  Voodoo did not win any converts with us but it felt a million miles away from Australia so the essence of travel beat strongly through it.

Photos and videos are here (there are a couple that might disturb animal lovers if you look too closely, and I’m not talking about the snake)

Photos locked and loaded for Ghana and Togo.

We started the day in Lome at an art gallery put together by a Swiss collector.  It is housed in a grand house (not quite a mansion) which had a very tantalising pool in the backyard that was sadly off limits.  The art came from all over West Africa but the strongest influence was Nigeria.  There were some old statues, one of which was made 2000 years ago.  The art from each place had distinct differences.  One of the most striking were some very elongated statues from Mali.  It’s a pity we’re travelling light as there are lots of interesting masks and statues being sold by the road.

Our main destination for the day was Togoville, the one-time capital located further East along the coast and inland on the other side of a lake.  Togo is derived from the local language from a word meaning ‘behind the lake’.  To get there we piled into a bush taxi.  A bush taxi is basically a private car that picks people up for money.  It’s much cheaper than regular taxis but you pay a price – they jam people in.  A regular sized car will have two people in the front seat next to the driver and up to four squashed in the back. This is how we travelled the 45 minutes or so to the place where you can walk to the place where you catch the canoe to Togoville.  First you take a detour through the port and along a dirt road so that all the dust pours in the open windows.  It’s an unpleasant but effective way to get around.  Once dropped off we figured out which way the lake was and walked up there.  Lacking a regular jetty we just waited in the grounds of a fancy hotel by the lake for a canoe to come by.  It took about 10 minutes but a local canoe did turn up, pulled in at the shore, and we hopped on.

Lake Togo is very shallow.  The canoe master used a four metre long pole to propel us across the lake.  The canoe is big enough to hold a dozen people comfortably, but is not as fast as a Sydney ferry.  It was a very serene trip on the way there but once we arrived we were accosted by a few strapping lads who had waded out to the canoe and obviously wanted us to ride on their back to shore.  This would not be a good look from a post-colonial perspective, the white couple riding black men to shore, but we still had warnings about African lakes and all the nasties living in them throbbing in our minds, so I jumped on one guy and when Sarah saw me heading in she jumped on the back of another guy.  They wanted a relatively high price for the service and got it.  Haggling would have just increased the post-colonial faux pas.  More embarrassingly on the way back to the canoe we got the same lift but this time they carried us like babies.

Once in the town of Togoville itself we got the compulsory tour of the catholic cathedral (the pope visited at one stage – he sure gets around) and the voodoo fetish sites.  Once a year there is a festival where the whole town gets together and dances in a square, offering libations to the fetish statues. There is a male and female statue for the whole town, and another female statue for the market.  At any time of year individuals can make offereings to the fetish and you can get a personal fetish for your house.  Offerings are often in the form of whisky or gin.

The ride back in the canoe was fun.  We were joined by bunch of elders who sang a song briefly then had a big argument between each other, the butt of which seemed to be one guy in particular who defended himself the best he could.  We were then caught by a canoe with a younger poler and our canoe started bantering with the other canoe.  Not as peaceful as the journey out but I think more enjoyable.

The following day it was time for another border crossing.  As Lome is about 50 kilometres across it doesn’t take too long to get to the border but we wanted a cheap way of doing it.  A bush taxi fit the bill but for it to be cheap we had to wait until it was full of people wanting to make a similar journey as us.  We got a bit of pressure to just pay more and leave early, including when they insisted we sit in the hot car to wait.  Once Sarah whispered into her her travel fetish though we were underway pretty fast. Maybe there is something to this Voodoo.  We had the luxury of being three across in the back with a Togolese fashion designer now living in Lagos.  He was wearing a suede jacket and denim jeans which in that heat was just insanity but that’s fashion for you.  The two guys sharing a seat at the front were Nigerian musicians.  It’s very feasible to go from Ghana to Nigeria in one day.  Benin and Togo are only about 200 kilometres wide combined at the coast.

It was a white-knuckle journey at times.  Our driver had the traditional scar on the cheek which I think is an initiation rite, but he also had a nasty looking scar on the side of his head.  I suspect a lot of the scarified people and those with limps are the victims of road accidents.  The driving is fast and the roads poor.  Most of the cars are fulling apart.  This doesn’t make for a comfortable journey when your driver is in a hurry.  We weren’t going far and got across the border with Benin pretty easily, although I didn’t have my vaccination certificate handy.  Luckily I was waved through on the strength of Sarah’s.

Our stop for the next few days was Ouidah, home to the voodoo festival.

Getting on the bus north the following morning was a much smoother experience.  The bus was like a Sydney commuter bus but with the middle doors roped shut and the alcove near the door used to jam extra bags in.  To get on and off the bus people had to clamber over the pile of luggage.  The bus is run by the post office so it doubles as the mail van and stops at all the post offices along the route, which are convenient places to go to the toilet or buy a snack or icepole.  Women sell loaves of bread, cashew nuts, fried bean curd, dried whole fish and plastic packets of water.

For the first half of the trip we sat behind a French guy called Louis who decided that after retiring from being an electrical engineer in France, rather than sit around watching TV, drinking beer and  ’growing his gut’, he would come to Togo as a volunteer.  He’s one of these short guys that is a big bundle of energy and non-stop talker but he had a sense of humour about it and promised to leave us alone and not pester us for the whole journey.  He was helping to setup a catholic orphanage in Sokode.  The kids end up in an orphanage when their parents die of AIDS or simply can’t afford to look after them.  Louis said that there is also a large trade in children who are shipped off to neighbouring African countries to work for local families as unpaid servants, otherwise known as slaves.  He was critical of the work ethic of people in Togo saying that they will have a meeting and chew the fat for the whole meeting until they decide that they don’t have enough time to make a decision and will have to come back for a meeting the following week.  Contrasted with the Germans Louis had worked with in Europe the Togolese are incredibly inefficient.  They are often sleepy during the day because they go to church all night and don’t want to work.  In this heat I could understand that.  Louis also thought that Lome had way too much rubbish although he conceded that there’s not much people could do with it other than burn it.  He then proved to be kind of hypocritical by tossing his chewing gum wrapper out of the bus window.  This was not unusual behaviour – all the locals did exactly the same thing.  One woman tried to toss her banana skin out of the window as we were barrelling down the highway but it flew back inside and landed on a fellow passengers head.  Undeterred she tried to throw another banana peel out the window and this one flew back in as well slapping another guy in the face.

The bus journey was air-conditioned the same way as the taxis which was fine when it was moving but hellish at stops.  The journey itself, all seven hours, went through interesting landscape.  Unlike in Ghana which stayed covered in jungle as we moved north, in Togo the landscape very quickly became a dry grassy savannah with trees dotted through it.  As we drove along different images pierced the windows: a massive boabab tree with furry fruit, a flame tree, a bunch of eucalypts, a burnt out truck, a controlled fire burning by the side of the road with flames licking the road, kids washing themselves in buckets, women carrying bundles of small logs on their head, mud huts with straw roofs, people picking up the contents of an overturned truck, a billabong with lily pads, small dusty mosques with men sleeping outside on prayer mats, water taps at head height for filling bowls on your head, people making mud bricks, women with kohl around their eyes, billboards warning of AIDS, goats wandering on to the road and quickly trotting off again, school children walking home in beige uniforms along the dusty highway.

It felt like the kind of landscape where you could easily imagine an elephant stripping a tree or a lion taking a nap.  The humidity dropped the further north we went and to be honest it started to feel like an Australian summer in the outback, a nice dry heat with crackly grass and smoke in the air.  A few more hills appeared, studded with rocks and trees.

We arrived at our motel in Kara and it felt just like being in Stawell or any other dusty Australian country town with clear light.  This was especially noticeable after being on the coast which had the double curse for visibility of a thick atmosphere as well as the annual harmattan wind which blows dust and sand in from the Sahara making the sky permanently gloomy.  It was not the crystal blue skies of home in Kara but definitely brighter.

The main reason for coming north was to see the mud fortress-like houses of Koutammakou.  To do this we hired a taxi, as well as a guide to tell the taxi driver where to go, then near Koutammako we added the chief’s son to the car as the main guide who luckily spoke decent English.  It’s kind of a full employment policy Africans like to have, and who can blame them for milking the tourist dollar a little bit.  In this case it was worth every franc.  Dotted through the savannah in this valley are cylindrical mud brick houses.  We stopped at the chief’s son’s sister’s place which was in the process of being constructed.  The rooms of the house are made with wet mud which is piled on top of each other to form hollow room-sized cylinders.  When we were there two men sat on two of these cylinders that had dried previously and were slapping mud on top.  The mud was supplied by another man who picked up patties formed by yet another man and threw them to the men sitting on the cylinders.  They then shaped it much like my Dad shapes a pork pie, although if you’ve never seen him in action this might not make sense.  Suffice it to say that the rooms are slowly formed as cylinders and when completed the doors are cut into them.  The walls are water-proofed with cow dung and an oil extracted with great labour by women grinding a type of nut.  We took a quick peak in the house nearby and while it is small by modern Australian standards (but then most of the worlds housing is small compared to McMansions) they looked like perfectly comfortable places, especially if you spend most of the day outside.  Given that it rains nearly all the time in June and July you might go a little stir crazy after a while.  We were offered trinkets for sale by the chief’s sister.  She wriggled into a dress behind one of the huts being constructed before coming out.  Bare breasts are not a big deal here but I guess you don’t go flashing them around to tourists willy nilly.

We passed two boys on the highway hunting mice.  They would either take these back to their family to eat or sell them at the market.  We have passed a few random animals being sold by the highway.  There are not a lot of animals wandering around freely apart from those that have been domesticated.  I think the wild animals sensibly stick to the national parks whenever they can.

We next stopped at the chief’s village to pay our respects.  There were a number of the fortress houses here.  All the houses are built to the exact same specifications.  Before getting the tour we wandered over to the chief, past the guy milking cows and the woman grinding oil on a flat stone.  The chief was much like a male lion, just resting in the shade with a radio.  He was personable.  We shook hands and moved on.  The people in this area live in small villages of 500 people or so.  They were driven here by a war with the tribe in Benin, a major regional power.  You can see the psychological effect of the war in the way they keep making their houses, a hundred years after the last war was fought.  It is dark inside with the main light from slits to fire arrows out.  Each house has a dark room where people would hide from attackers if worst came to worst.  You have to slide between a couple of wooden poles to get in the dark room and I can imagine it being easy to defend.  The houses are two stories with the top floor housing the bathroom, bedroom and grain store.  The kitchen is hsalfway between the top and bottom floor.  They have a lot in common with a modern studio flat.  Everything is placed just where you need it.  We ate some dried boabab fruit.  There is not much fruit on it, mainly seed, and I couldn’t really tell you what the flavour was.

Next on the itinerary was the massive boabab tree where they held ceremonies.  You can squeeze inside the hollowed out trunk and which could accommodate four or five people comfortably.  The space inside the tree is about four metres high and the inside of the trunk is as tough as elephant hide.

Despite the chief’s son being well dressed and prosperous looking to greet tourists the same cannot be said for the entire village.  There were quite a few hungry looking kids and disabled old people who were doing it tough.  One old guy had a stroke so that half his face was drooping but he was still carrying bales of straw around.  In fact he kept hitting his straw in people’s faces while he turned around to talk, much to everyone’s amusement.  You would say that one old lady was bed-ridden except she was not in bed, she was lying in the dirt out the front of her house.  I guess she could talk to people as they wandered by at least.

The village is self-sufficient.  They grow all their own food and only buy some soap and shoes from the market.  They grow millet, maize and cotton.  Maybe their fortunes go up after harvest time and when it’s raining but from the crowd following us around begging for change it looked like they were doing it a bit tough.  I’m not saying they were starving to death or anything like that, just poor.  We did see deeper poverty in town where a couple of guys were the definition of ‘dirt poor’.

A couple of the young men gave a fighting demonstration which involves one guy with a whip attacking another guy who defends himself with a stick.  The chief’s son managed to deafen himself with a whip crack that must have broken the sound barrier.

As we left the next batch of tourists rolling through.  It’s kind of sobering to think that this is a relatively prosperous pocket of rural Africa.  I’m not sure how much money trickles down from the chief to all the people in the village but I like to think that they look after their own.

That night Sarah had a suicidal desire for fufu.  We were staying in a hotel 3km from the centre of town.  There are no taxis to speak of, just moto-taxis, small 125cc bikes that constantly ride up and down the road.  Sarah desperately wanted to try some authentic African food.  The meals we had been eating were good but mainly French or Italian in style.  We previously had banku (fermented corn meal paste) but had not had fufu (pounded yam or cassava mash).  We started walking in to town and had not gone 20 metres when a moto-taxi pulled up offering us a ride.  No no, we said.  Both of us can’t fit on one.  Sure you can, he replied.  Sarah got on behind him and I sat on a rack behind her.  We didn’t have helmets but, somewhat reassuringly, neither did the driver.  I think it is the most dangerous thing we have done so far on the trip.  I rode a motorbike for a year and had two minor accidents on the smooth roads of Canberra.  Falling off hurts and getting hit by one of the trucks thundering past would have caused injuries that I’m doubtful northern Togo is setup to handle.  We made it to the restaurant ok, swerving around the potholes and slowing down for speed humps, and we even made it back at the end of the night without incident.  Sarah, the woman who seriously wanted to fly from Benin to Rwanda via Europe to avoid an African airline, got off this death trap and exclaimed “That was fun!” Well it was fun, as long as you don’t crash.

The fufu was not really worth it, although interesting to try.  I would eat fufu over banku but there is not much in it.  The consistency of fufu is the same as if you take mashed potato and whisk it in a blender until it is stretchy and smooth.  It’s as thick as a dumpling.  You take a handful of fufu and dip it in the sauce of your choice, which is tasty.  The fufu itself doesn’t taste like much at all.

The bus journey back down south was fairly uneventful apart from the fellow passengers.  It was one of the noisiest buses I’ve been on.  West Africans are not shy and retiring by nature but these guys were booming at each other as we took off.  At one of the stops we were just about to pull away when this French guy with lion mane hair and a goatee stopped the bus to jump on.  This caused pandemonium on the bus but as it was in French we couldn’t figure out precisely why.  The French guy was yelling, all the passengers were yelling, the French guy kept tapping his watch and laughing.  He had an African wife and child but looked more like a fading 80s rocker.

The bus erupted at a later stop, we think because we started to leave without one of the passengers who got off to go to the toilet.  The passengers were screaming at the conductor and getting incredibly heated about it.  The guy who was left behind had to restrain fellow passengers when he got back on, telling them to calm down.

We got into Lome after dark, found a taxi driver who didn’t know where our hotel was again, but this time we had a map and were located in a simpler part of town to find.  The hotel was lovely, great French food and a little swimming pool with cold water.  It was an oasis of calm.

It’s amazing that Togo can have such a different feeling to Ghana.  They right next door to each other and speak a common African language but when the colonial powers were carving up Africa the United Kingdom got Ghana and the French were given a little slice called Togo as well as Benin further East.

The different vibe is palpable even driving in from the border.  Perhaps it was just the smallest city we had been in for a while but it felt much more relaxed and tidier.  There was no insane traffic or pollution either.  As you might expect from a former French colony, people were dressed more stylishly and the bread in Togo is a thousand times better than its equivalent in Ghana.  Touts are less aggressive and in general it feels like a much more pleasant place to be.

That’s not to say Togo doesn’t have its problems.  It feels much poorer than Ghana with a matching reduction in advertising.  This is nice to travel through but maybe not so great for the locals trying to make a living.  We saw a lot of traffic accidents as well.  On the way from the hotel there was a crowd gathered around a couple of guys that had been smashed off their scooter and were receiving impromptu medical attention.  We saw the result of quite a few accidents on the roads, several very recent ones.  Smashed cars abandoned at the side of the road, broken down trucks, several that were burned out, trucks that had rolled going down a hill or just lost their load.

Our hotel was on a dirt street near the beach.  In general the quality of the roads is bad.  Lome is the capital and has many streets in the centre of town that you almost need a 4WD to get through.  

Our plan was to head north the following day to Kara, a seven hour bus journey meaning we would have to get up at 4:45am.  The recent early starts would be continuing for a while yet.  We had been in negotiations for a private car up to Kara with a driver the hotel organised.  He came over before dinner and we had a very stilted conversation using our phone to translate what we wanted to say into French. We thought we had agreed a price, about $150, which was a little expensive but we thought worth it to avoid the catastrophe the bus was bound to be.  We shook hands and went back to choosing what to eat for dinner.  Shortly the driver came back with a member of the hotel staff who spoke some English and they managed to communicate eventually that the deal we had agreed was actually no good for the driver and he wanted the equivalent of $250.  We had to politely decline and brace ourselves for the early start.

Bizarrely it didn’t feel that bad getting up so early.  Getting to sleep at 9pm has some advantages. Sarah had been a bit disturbed by what she thought was a street party going on all night.  When we got up it turned out it was the night watchman’s radio which had been turned up insanely loud the entire time.

We got dropped off by the taxi at the post office.  They run the bus that goes up north.  We found ourselves enjoying in the pleasant pre-dawn cool in a dirt car park as moto-taxi scooters dropped off passengers and luggage.  It became quickly apparent that many of the would-be passengers had no idea what the system was.  There was a lot of milling around and we put our names on a list, but when bags started to be weighed on a portable scale and ours were refused for lack of a ticket we knew that something was up.  Trying to find out what was up when we didn’t speak French was not so easy.  This was our worst nightmare realised.  I asked the guy who looked the most in charge if we could buy two tickets.  He said something that I understood to mean wait until the bus comes.  When the bus came I asked again and he said to wait.  Sarah found someone who spoke a little English and he told us that we needed to go to another station to buy tickets, preferably before the bus arrived there.

So we jumped in a taxi and hoofed it up to the other station where a small crowd of people were also waiting to buy tickets if there happened to be any room on the very full bus.  Of course when it arrived there was no room at all and we had wasted most of the morning.  Our only consolation was that we had beaten the two French women from the previous station.  They hopped on a couple of moto-taxis, small Chinese 125cc motorbikes that did not cope well with them and their backpacks.  We passed them in a taxi despite their 15 minute head start and felt like we were in an episode of Amazing Race: Sarah and Dave: de facto, Sydney have overtaken Monique and Marie: Mother and Daughter, Paris.

Despite our plans being in disarray we were helped out by a very nice man who spoke English and happened to be a post office inspector.  He had earlier abused me for taking a photo of the burned out bus in the parking lot. “Why couldn’t you take a photo of one of our good buses?”  When he saw that we were stranded he gave us a lift in his car to a hotel near the bus stop so that we could catch it the next day, then drove us to the post office to buy tickets for the bus.  It was above and beyond the call of duty.  

So now we had an extra day to kill in Lome and decided to go to the fetish market, as you do.  Voodoo is still a big part of life in Togo and sits alongside Christianity and Islam.  It is seen as a way to get good luck, ward of evil spirits and cure physical ills.  The fetish market is a small dirt compound with stalls on each side selling gruesome items.  You can buy the dried head of cats, dogs, turtles, snakes, monkeys, eagles and leopards.  Going by the grimaces on their faces these animals did not die of natural causes.  You can buy porcupine quills, elephant tails, owls, large humming birds, puffer fish, buffalo penises and dried chameleons.  Cures are inflicted by grinding the item to a powder then often rubbing it into a cut in the sufferer’s skin.  The large humming bird is a cure for leprosy, god help them.  In trying to establish that the guide was talking about leprosy Sarah rubbed her skin.  The guide then said yes and showed her the leprosy on his hand, which is not strictly miming but got the point across.  I should point out that I think this is as much hocus pocus as any other organised religion and I’m not in favour of animals, endangered or otherwise, randomly having their heads lopped off.  As a meat eater though I’m on thin ice criticising this too much, it’s just saddens me to see a whole rug full of dead owls, or a live eagle tied under the table awaiting a similar fate.

We were shown the fetish statue where sacrifices are made to keep the market safe from evil spirits. The statue is quite large and covered with all sorts of libations which we didn’t examine too closely. They also have very explicitly carved genitals if the examples we’ve seen so far are any indication.  To finish off the tour we were taken to the voodoo priest for a consultation.  The main man was away laughing all the way to the bank so his surly teenaged son filled in.  We were taken to a small room filled with more fetish symbols, some of which I suspected were for sale.  The kid, dressed in a Christian Dior shirt, got our names then rang a bell over us and the fetish statue.  This ensured good luck for us.  The guide then explained the various small fetish objects.  There is a travel fetish, a small piece of wood with a hole in it.  Before travel you ask the fetish to keep you safe, then plug up the hole with the stopper until your trip has ended.  There is a stick that acts like a natural viagra when you chew it.  There is a small statue with horse hair that keeps your house from being burgled.  There is a rock disc with a hole in it for general good luck.  Sarah decided to buy the travel fetish as lord knows she gets nervous enough on a plane.  The purchase process is not straight forward.  You place the small fetish in a large shell and then consult the fetish statue about the price.  The young boy rolled some cowrie shells a few times, not coincidentally the shells were local currency for some time.  On the first roll the shells all landed down, so the initial price of $40 was rejected.  On the second roll all the shells landed face down once again so the second price of $30 was rejected as well.  On the third roll some of the shells landed face up so the price was set at $20.  More hocus pocus but we’ll report back on any success or failure on its part.

There is something badly wrong with taxi drivers in Lome.  Not only do they charge like a wounded bull (relatively) but they don’t know where anything is.  Almost every taxi we caught the driver had no idea where we wanted to go.  We had forgotten to take the hotel brochure with the address on it, and as the post office inspector had driven us to the hotel we weren’t entirely sure where it was.  I had an idea that it was near the University so we headed there but this didn’t help much.  The Uni security guards hadn’t heard of the hotel either.  The taxi driver drove us to another large hotel in town which was boarded up.  We then wandered along to another hotel to get a wifi connection and figure out exactly where we were trying to go.

Despite having a map on my phone showing where the hotel was, and the street address, the next taxi driver still had no clue where to go.  I suspect there was some illiteracy at play.  At least he had more hustle than the first driver.  We stopped for directions three times with people scratching their heads each time.  Finally we stopped at a telephone stall, which is a desk with a telephone on it that you pay to use.  Neither of the numbers for our hotel worked but the lady manning the stall did seem to know the street the hotel was on, so we jumped back in the taxi with a glimmer of hope.  I should explain that these taxis are not the air-conditioned wonders we have in Australia.  Air is via the open windows which lets in air as humid as Sydney in February.  It’s the kind of climate where it seems to get hotter just after the sun has gone down.  Every taxi has a cracked windscreen, rattling doors that don’t open properly and enough leg room to house a midget comfortably.  So driving around for three hours or so in two separate taxis was not great fun even though we did get well acquainted with many parts of the city.

At long last we spotted our hotel and zoomed in for the kill.  Our taxi driver came in with us to grill the reception about finding the place and left with a brochure of his own.  We gratefully jumped in the pool.

Dinner that night was guinea fowl so over-grilled that we had to saw it off the bone.  We sat in the open air upstairs in a large room that looked more like a storage area.  Either side of the hotel they were building extensions.  It was slightly shambolic.  Halfway through dinner I noticed a very large mouse jump out of a grille on the other side of the room, sniff around, then jump back in again.  We weren’t that sorry to be moving on the next day.

For all you photo fiends, here is the full collection of Israel photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88657298@N00/collections/72157628772123053/

For all you photo fiends, here is the full collection of Israel photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88657298@N00/collections/72157628772123053/