See more photos from Possotome
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 African vibe.
The transport situation is not always relaxed. Arriving at a bus station you can be pounced on by several competing touts offering to take you in a bush taxi. As a consumer it’s great to have competition but it can get heated occasionally. We just shrug and pick whichever car looks the most full. The car only leaves when it is full. Getting out of Ouidah we were stuffed in a car waiting for the last passengers and listening to the guys arguing away about something. We got underway without a problem in the end. You would think it would be too hot for such fierce arguments. We heard rumours of a petrol strike in Nigeria and started to see long queues at the petrol stations. In the country areas they don’t have petrol stations with pumps. Instead there is a woman or young man with a table on which is stacked plastic bottles full of fuel. The advertisement is a big glass jug full of fuel sitting menacingly in the sun. The drivers we were with bought five litres at a time which is poured into the gas tank using a funnel with a filter over the top. We haven’t seen many West Africans smoke but I imagine even fewer would be smoking around these would-be Molotov cocktails.
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.
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.
Recent Comments