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 Cotonou directly after London would have provoked a similar culture shock bad impression. As it was we took it easy, had a couple of good meals of Chinese and Moroccan, no mean feat in West Africa, and generally found it an easy going place. True, you can list the attractions of the city on one hand and we didn’t even bother looking at the beach but it came at the right time to relax a little before our overnight flight to Kigali.
One of the attractions was the Foundation Zinzou gallery, a surprisingly modern space which was showing a series of photos of traditional Beninese hunters from the north of the country. There were about thirty photos taken by a Belgian photographer, the hunter crouched down in front of the jungle with his antique gun and talismans. The photos had the hunters in colour with their amazing traditional fabrics and the jungle background in black and white which really made them leap out. Our guide knew the name and age of each of the hunters, some of whom he claimed were over 90. They didn’t look anywhere near this age which our guide put down to all the healthy plants they were eating but I point down to the slim chances they actually know what year they were born in.
We took a bush taxi 45 minutes up the road to the smaller capital city of Porto Novo, lured by the description in Lonely Planet of leafy streets and colonial architecture. I guess in Africa colonial architecture can be from the 1950s and not all that special. Porto Novo didn’t have anything remarkable about it in the slightest but we at least discovered an Internet cafe that was functioning after the recent nationwide net shutdown. That was really the highlight of the journey.
We stayed at Le Chant D’Ouiseu in Cotonou, accommodation attached to a nunnery in a big four-storey block with high walls around the inner courtyard to keep the riff-raff out. Religious hotels are spartan but clean and well run and luckily do not require a religious test before giving you a room. It was pleasant to wake up on Sunday morning with the sound of church singing drifting up from beneath us.
The quiet time in Cotonou was to prepare ourselves for the horrors of an overnight flight in Africa. Sarah had been bricking it about this flight practically since we planned the trip, and not without reason. Africa doesn’t have the best air safety record and looking at the state of everything else in the country doesn’t inspire confidence. On the road to the airport there was a van with “Air maintenance” for one of the local airlines stencilled on the side. It had a flat tyre two days in a row.
Cotonou airport was even less confidence inspiring. It is one of the smaller airports I have been in and the technology dated from the 70s. There were no flight information boards, just a guard who told us to line up and wait before we could even get into the terminal. We waited for about an hour then were waved through to the security check which was a cursory manual check of our bags. I suspect that the x-ray scanner was broken.
Our flight path was Cotonou to Nairobi via Ouagadougou then a change of planes before flying Nairobi to Kigali via Burundi. If this sounds like a tiring overnight flight you are right on the money. It’s a very African way to organise a flight schedule, picking up people in round trips to fill the plane up. I guess we should have been grateful that there was a flight with Kenya Airways at all but it didn’t feel like a blessing at the time. Thankfully the service was good, the planes are modern and the flights went smoothly. It was quite cool coming into Ouagadougou and seeing the burning off fires across the landscape. We made it through the rest of the travels in our zombified state with no complaints and found ourselves in the hilly and pleasantly temperate capital of Rwanda, Kigali.
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