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 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.
Full set of photos from Lome
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