Cotonou – Not the worst city in the world

When doing research for these travels I came across a blog describing Cotonou as the worst city they had ever visited. We can think of many worse places (Accra for a start, and Sarah doesn’t have good things to say about Guatamala City). Perhaps our standards had been successfully lowered. I’m sure coming to […]

Rwanda: Mountain Gorillas

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Seeing the gorillas was an amazing experience. You hike up through alpine meadows where the farmers grow a flower that looks like a daisy which they dry and then make into a natural insecticide (pyretheum). It is a lovely temperate temperature and the hilly farmland is as pretty […]

Abomey: Seat of the Dahomey

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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. […]

Possotome and Lake Aheme

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West African men do an impossibly cool hand shake where they slide their fingers down yours and end by clicking their fingers on your fingertips. Sarah and I are very white and find it impossible to do but just being part of it gives you a relaxed and cool West […]

Ouidah – Who do Voodoo like you do?

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.

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)

The Voodoo festival at […]

Togoville – Voodoo people

The full set of Togoville photos can be found here

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 […]

Kara and Koutammakou: The town made of mud

View more of our photos from Koutammakou and Kara

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 […]

Lost in Lome

Full set of photos from Lome

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 […]

Border crossing West Africa style

When you’ve crossed a land border in Israel the West African version is somewhat underwhelming. We got to the border in another tro-tro, this one ruthlessly fast but safely driven with no air-conditioning but plenty of air-cooling coming in the open windows. We were deposited in Afloa, the tro-tro station being a convenient walk […]

Kumasi and Lake Bosumtwi – A blissfully quiet NYE

View all the photos from Kumasi and Lake Bosumtwi

We had to celebrate New Year’s Eve somewhere and owing to circumstance we ended up in the centre of Ghana in a city called Kumasi, core of the Ashanti kingdom. While staying near the beach for eleven nights we had developed a habit of going […]