The Power Of The Voodoo

Voodoo Lounge
After my experience churning in the machine of Cotonou, Benin, I escaped for a day trip out to Ouidah, a town that was a huge player in the Portuguese slave trade. Ouidah charmed me immediately, colored in pastel yellows, oranges and pinks, countless colonial buildings seemed to quietly decay while life moved slowly along in the surrounding streets.
After repeatedly running into two local men who were seemingly wandering like I was, they suggested that we should wander together. One, named Fredi, spoke a bit of English and the other spoke none at all, so I struggled with French and a bit of English as we continued to walk thought the neighborhood. We were interrupted when the men saw a man wearing the typical African pajamas and a cloth hat. They spoke in a tribal language and the men indicated that we should follow this other man. We approached a white stone wall painted with a few pictures of a man with his legs crossed, a snake, and a few other animals. Fredi, sensing my hesitation, assured me that there was nothing to be concerned about, but didn't tell me where we were going.
We entered a dirt courtyard where some chickens scurried out of the way and a woman stood in the corner fanning a fire with a large cauldron resting on it. Some naked children stopped playing in the dirt as we were led to the doorway of a small white building in the courtyard decorated with more painted snakes and people. I watched as the men took their shoes and then shirts off, and indicated that I should do the same. We were handed a plastic mug full of water that smelled strongly of eucalyptus and I followed as the men rinsed themselves with it. We ducked our heads under the low door and entered a hot, tiled room where the man in the pajamas sat perched on a stone. There was a half-wall that reached from the wall to the man, obscuring a portion of the room that he seemed to speak to and gesture at.
The man spent a lot of time speaking in a language I didn't understand and it seemed inappropriate to ask for translation, so I sat patiently on the white tile bench, drenched in sweat, next to the other two men.
The pajama man took a stone in his hand and repeatedly smacked it against a larger stone on the floor next to him while saying things in the direction of the area obscured by the half-wall. He took a liquid from a bucket and periodically threw it at the area behind the wall. I wondered what was back there. A person? An idol? I began to suspect that I was witnessing my first voodoo ceremony.
I knew that voodoo was a key belief of most Beninese, regardless of whether they had also chosen a more Western religion, but I had not yet seen anything clearly related to voodoo, so I was just guessing.
After a while, the pajama man handed three green kola nuts to the first man. The man grasped them tightly in his left hand and muttered things to them before handing them back to the pajama man. The pajama man pounded on the stone, splashed water, tossed the nuts on the floor and sprinkled powders over them while chanting.
He then picked up the nuts and a couple small shells and tossed them on the floor a few times as if they were dice. Eventually, he turned to Fredi's friend and spoke to him in the tribal language. I watched the man's face as he listened with grave seriousness. The man asked questions, seemed to protest, and eventually, his chin began to quiver and tears began to stream down his cheeks.
The man protested again and the pajama man shouted for an aide who brought in a book full of symbols and showed it to the crying man, confirming whatever it was that he had told him. As the book was passed to Fredi I leaned in and took a look. Some French words were written in there, indicating something about fortunes and astrology. I was definitely witnessing my first voodoo ceremony.
Fredi went through the same process without tears and then three kola nuts were handed to me. Fredi told me to mutter my dreams and wishes to the nuts and then hand them to the man, who I later learned was a Fa, a voodoo practitioner who channels messages from voodoo spirits. The same process was repeated and Fredi translated what the man told me.
My fortune seemed to me to be a bit of a gimme; obviously I was a visitor, so it didn't take a ton of voodoo to know that I was in the middle of a journey. In any case, I the Fa divined that gem of information and then told me that if I did a small task of giving, I would be assured of safety and good fortune for the rest of my trip. The Fa listed off some very specific food items I would need to buy and then hand out to strangers on the street. If I did that, I was in the clear. If I didn't, horrible things were certain to happen. Easy enough.
As we wrapped up the ceremony and were led out of the room, I finally got my glimpse at the area behind the half wall. There was a large wooden object covered in years of melted candle wax, surrounded by once-green plants that were now covered in white powders. Lots of stones, coins, and two dead chickens.
As I walked through the town and handed out candy and bread to strangers, I asked what had been told to Fredi's friend. Apparently his future doesn't look so bright, involving his business partners stealing from him, and necessitating lengthy voodoo ceremonies involving animals, money, oils and herbs or it was destined to occur. That the man was so clearly petrified of his fortune underscored just how real the Beninese consider voodoo to be.

Slime and Snails or Puppy Dogs' Tails?
I never had to seek out voodoo. Voodoo is such a key element in the daily life of the Beninese and Togolese that spending enough time there wandering neighborhoods or markets, I seemed to stumble into it regularly.
In every market in every town, there was at least one person selling the devices or ingredients known as fetishes, which are used in voodoo ceremonies. Strolling through the aisles of smoked fish, yams, spices, and Chinese sandals, a distinct odor would rise above the smoked fish and chili peppers. I knew I was close to fetishes.
Voodoo fetishes seemed to fall into three categories: tools, such as bells, rattles, or iron instruments to hold while dancing; ingredients, such as herbs, tree barks and shells; and finally, animals.
The stench that directed me toward the voodoo stalls were the rotting flesh of birds, mammals and reptiles.
In Abomey, Benin, I met a French-Canadian girl named Marie-Michelle who was working as a Physical Therapist in Togo for a few months. Fluent in French and insistent on total immersion in Africa, we would grab lunches at the roadside stalls and I would watch with wonder as she would drink from the communal water mugs.I was comfortable eating with my fingers, but this was one step I was not keen on taking.
"Oh, I suppose you're still sticking to bottled water?" she'd ask with a smile. Marie didn't hold back. She had come to terms with the sweat, the filth, the daily challenges of power or water shortages. With French as her first language, she was a quick retort to the incessant catcalls her gender and race would attract as we walked down the street.
Having been in Abomey for work for several months, she hadn't done much exploring for it's own sake, so for a few days I would meet her when she finished work and we'd explore the market or neighboring Bohicon.
In Bohicon, I identified that distinct stench of rotting animals and took Marie to see her first voodoo fetishes. As ever, the inventory was highlighted by a brutal array of animals. The main table was a selection of decapitated animal heads, eyes missing, mouths open and teeth exposed, their faces frozen into fearsome grimaces or screams, their missing eyes staring blankly at passing shoppers. Monkeys, leopards, pythons, birds, dogs and cats. Next to the heads were the skulls of cows, donkeys, warthogs, and crocodiles. The rest of the stall displayed woven platters piled high with dead weasels, porcupines, chameleons, and crocodiles. On the ground, woven mats covered in dead birds, ranging from rather ordinary looking birds to vultures, owls, and large horn-bills.
We started haggling with the vendors, as a ploy to get some photos, and also to see if there was anything non-animal that might be interesting to purchase. We each bought a couple fetishes used for protecting the home, as well as two that are used for protection on a journey. One of them required a small ceremony which we were instructed to perform on the spot.
The fetish was a short clay rod with two little clay cups, facing opposite directions on either end. Feathers, goops, and strings adorned the device and we were told to put a dollop of water in one of the cups, suck it into our mouths and then immediately spit it out.
So, in the oven-like heat of the African afternoon, under the shelter of a row of stalls where animals rotted all day long since time immemorial, we poured a little local water into the device and sipped it into our mouths, fleas, disease, stinks and all. But it was all in the effort of making sure I return home safely, mom!

Voodoo Chile
It's a strange phenomenon that has happened to me quite a few times when I have wandered into the fringes of smaller towns: being the first white person that a small child sees. Sometimes there is a clear sense of wonder, and sometimes there is nothing short of abject, unbridled fear. About ten times or so, my whiteness has sent small children screaming and crying, gasping and grasping for their mothers.
At the fetish stall in Bohicon, I noticed that the daughter of one of the sellers was sitting in the dirt, wearing only a t-shirt and a small fetish to protect her. She was pulling the feathers and guts from a dead and flayed bird, and stuffing them into a piece of paper like filling in a burrito. I snapped a photo of the scene and when the parents gestured that I should say hi to the girl, she looked up and noticed me for the first time. Surrounded by frightening dead animals, and holding portions of one in her hand, the little girl took one look at my face and began screaming, scrambling backwards and away from me, tears streaming down her face, with a dead bird in her hand.
Just one of life's little ironies, I guess. Some of the things that horror movies might be made of back home were nothing compared to the face of a stranger in the market in Bohicon.

Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
When I returned to my hotel that night, after having dropped off my fetishes in the early evening, it was apparent that there is an inherent curse that comes with voodoo. One of the items Marie and I each bought was a leather belt-like device that we were to wear as protection on our trips. As I wound it through the loops of my shorts, I realized that the leather too had picked up that stench of rotting flesh. I washed it thoroughly and still could smell that smell. Oh my god, that smell.
Thankfully I brought a few Ziplocks with me, as these artifacts are going to require a good long and strenuous decontamination process before being put on display anywhere back home. Unfortunately, that means that one of my voodoo trip-protection insurance devices is not in its prescribed place around my waist.

Goat's Head Soup
Marie, her colleague and I located another Fa as Marie had never had her fortune read. With her bilingual fluency, I was finally able to get better translations of what was going on.
This Fa was initially very reluctant to perform anything for us yovo. He let us see his shrine where he had recently helped a family that had received a child after conducting a fertility ceremony. The shrine involved another large wooden object covered in wax, feathers, coins, and shells. The walls were spattered with blood and a large pool of blood covered the floor along with a few dead chickens. Apparently upon receipt of the baby, the couple had to return to perform a thank-you ceremony or terrible things would happen to the child.
"He killed a goat, used the blood in the ceremony, and then created a stew out of the goat. He's now put a pot of the stew on the floor here as an offering to the voodoo gods. If it is accepted, everything will be OK," Marie explained.
"OK, can you ask him how he will know whether the voodoo gods accept it?" I asked.
The Fa didn't like that question and I was sternly told not to ask such things. Maybe I wouldn't be getting all the answers I had hoped for after all.
When she thought the Fa wasn't looking, Marie's colleague took a photo of the scene. Unfortunately, the Fa saw and was upset. When a local arrived and asked for a reading, we offered a few extra Francs, and were allowed to watch the man's reading before having ours performed.
This room was vastly different than the one I saw in Ouidah. Dead and dying chickens were strewn everywhere, attracting a formidable army of flies who incessantly expressed their interest in us. Three "shrunken heads", which I am guessing were made out of wood, sat in dried gourd bowls. Again, that stench of rotting animals. The Fa divined the local man's fortune through pieces of metal hanging from chains. He performed similar chants as the Ouidah Fa, and paused to yawn, readjust his genitals, or answer his mobile phone while he told the man of how the future will affect his business, wife, and children. For something so serious and real to the recipient, this Fa certainly didn't seem to give the process a lot of reverence.
My fortune this time involved the Fa explaining that a deceased relative of mine watches over me while I travel, and he conjured my mother's spirit to have her join us in the reading. My fortune involved my previous success in the working world and sibling competition from my sister. He told me that I needed to perform two ceremonies or my sister would take all of my success and luck in the working world. I wanted to know what the ceremonies would involve. The Fa listed and Marie translated.
"Buy 7 eggs, 7 needles, some red palm oil, and some palm nuts. Put these in a dried calabash and mix them together." Easy enough; I could find all of these items at any market out here. "Place red flower petals on your body. Do this twice." Sure thing, I could do that in my hotel that night.
"That's the first ceremony. Here is the second: take 2 red roosters and 2 carrion birds and place them in a calabash. Buy one goat. Kill the goat and pour its blood over the other items. Place the calabash at a cross-roads to open up your future."
Uh, no.
So, if I get laid off when I come home and Maya really starts taking off in her new position, I just might need to return to Benin to kill a few goats.
The Fa remembered the surreptitious photo again as we prepared to leave. He became upset again and said we would need to give him a few things to make the situation better. Somehow I remembered that I had one of Mike Barkelew's passport photos in my wallet, which he had given me on the motorcycle trip. I gave the photo to the Fa, implying it was a photo of me (us yovo all look the same to them), and told the Fa to go ahead and perform a ritual on it. I snapped an amazing picture of the Fa holding the photo and one of his dead chickens. Mike, if things really start to go wrong in your life, I apologize; we'll need to make a trip out to Benin. If things start going really well, you owe me one!

The Power of The Voodoo
Working as a physical therapist in Benin, Marie was witness to many of the affects of voodoo. Since voodoo is trusted and much more affordable than medical care, the Beninese will generally turn to voodoo first.
Marie had a lengthy list of such stories, but one was the man who had smashed his arm and shoulder in a motorcycle accident and was unable to use the arm. The voodoo doctor performed a ceremony involving further agitating and pummeling the injury over the course of a month. When the man arrived at the hospital after having seen no improvement after the voodoo treatment, Marie had the man x-rayed. Due most likely to the pummeling, the bone fragments were now pointing every-which-way and would never heal in anything approximating the natural state of the bones without major surgery.
There was the story of the man who survived a stroke yet whose arms were involuntarily tensed afterwards. The voodoo procedure to treat this painful condition involved
making countless cuts in the arms, and briskly rubbing a variety of voodoo powders into the cuts. Worse than lemon juice on a paper cut, in my mind.
Time after time, patients would be sent to Marie and she just wished she could have intercepted them before they went to voodoo treatment. Countless patients would have faced better prognoses without the voodoo procedures, yet who is she to challenge their deeply-held beliefs? Without an education involving the sciences, medical strategies and devices must seem just as dubious as feathers, bones and goat blood must to us.
And then there was the story of the melted girl. She was brought into the clinic with her legs clenched so her feet touched her rear. The skin near her knees appeared as if it had melted, fusing her legs in this position. Her parents explained that she had been normal all her life until one night she was walking home and saw a ghost-like apparition on a darkened trail. She called her brother to see it and he couldn't see anything. The next day, the skin was melted like this.
I could understand, from a psychological perspective, how a traumatic event could lead to the girl fixating in that position and something eventually happening to the skin, but the parents insisted that it happened overnight.
There, at the Swiss-sponsored and quite modern hospital, the general manager declared that this was in fact the work of voodoo. Rather than cut the flesh and begin physical therapy, she was directed back to a voodoo doctor who declared that the only way to fix her was to
find the person who had originally had the hex placed on her, and then to perform some voodoo rituals. Marie has yet to work on fixing this girl's problem.
Voodoo doesn't just reared its head in medical situations. From the neighborhood shrines, to the larger fortune telling houses, I saw it daily.
In Kara, Togo, I crossed paths with two German students who were running the same circuit I was. We happened upon the local district football championships and joined a few hundred screaming and drumming Togolese in their local stadium.
In the midst of the game, a nasty fight erupted, involving someone on the underdog team being tripped, and then erupting in countless shouting and shoving matches and a lengthy delay of game.
We chatted up a few of the guys on the field through the fence and eventually were filled in on the true cause of the disruption: the winning underdogs had been accused of dropping a voodoo charm on the field prior to their goal. Who is to say that rubbing powders in one's arms might not help relax flexed muscles? Who is to say that a fetish might not allow the underdogs to win a football game? There is a lot to be said for the placebo effect. In medicine, sports, and in most aspects of life, one's mentality may have just as much affect on an outcome as exercise or medical treatment. If a voodoo charm or procedure causes the person to believe they can overcome, it has worked in a way.
My trip has been going well and I have largely had good fortune, possibly as a result of the giving I did at the Fa's instruction in Ouidah, or perhaps as a result of the spit procedure Marie and I did in Bohicon. Yet when the most devastating thing yet to happen to me on one of my trips occurred, I had to wonder.
In Accra, Ghana, I plugged in my portable hard drive to write this blog entry and post some photos of the stories I have just told. When I opened the drive's main folder, alongside the internet cafe's attendant, I noticed that all but the previous day's pictures were gone.
"Something's wrong, I only see one folder."
"There is only one folder."
"Uh, no, there are 5 other folders that should be in here."
"Oh, we have a very robust anti-virus program. It probably identified them as a virus and deleted them. Sorry."
No quarantine, no questions, no photos. 5 weeks of a once-in-a-lifetime trip, gone.
So while I post pictureless blog entries and research data recovery software, I do have to wonder... would this have still happened if I was wearing the fetish belt that was supposed to protect me on this trip? Was my inability to cope with the voodoo stench somehow related to my computer misfortune? There's just no way to know for sure.

Here Cowboy Bars and Dance Clubs Don’t Exist

Rom, Flo, Nicolas, and Guillaume invited me to join them on a trip back south to Grand Popo. I had read that this was the most tourist-oriented town in Benin, which isn't saying much, but that it is essentially a lazy beach town. That’s not the type of destination I usually choose, as after about 15 minutes sitting on a beach I am ready to walk around and see a town again. But I was really enjoying their company and figured they hadn’t yet steered me wrong.
Rom and I took the ancient Renault while the others took their Toyota 4-Runner. The trip was only an hour, and we pulled to a stop on a dusty cobblestone street in front of a church. There was a red yellow and green painted sedan parked there with paintings of Bob Marley and other Rastafarian symbols on it. A tiny hand-painted sign pointed to a path beside the church that said Lion Bar. As we walked along the side of the church, the reggae music could be heard.
Lion Bar was a small concrete structure with 3 windows facing the ocean (the left one’s frame painted red, the middle yellow, the right green). Inside the structure was a tiny counter, a large stereo, a small collection of bottles, and countless photos, pictures and paintings of more Reggae artists and Rastafarian symbols. I sat at one of the 5 barstools perched on the sand facing the windows and was served a cocktail made of fresh pineapple juice, ginger, lime, and rum by a man with a clumpy collection of dreadlocks and a smile that never seemed to fade from his face. His name was Gildas and he was the proud proprietor of Lion Bar. Behind the bar was a short row of about 7 clean concrete rooms with a mattress on the floor, a fan painted red yellow and green, and more Rasta stuff painted on the wall. Each door had the portrait and name of another reggae artist. The Bob room, the Peter room, the Culture room. There was one pristine toilet, and one pristine shower for the whole place.

Gildas behind the counter at Lion Bar

Gildas opened Lion Bar just about one year ago. He is another African success story: after working 14 years as a zemi-john, he scrimped and saved to buy the car I saw parked in front. He used that to give little tours to the occasional tourist, and kept saving to cerate the hotel he dreamed of. With a little business advice from Flo, Guillaume and Rom, Gildas kept things as basic and “roots” as possible. The place was only known by word of mouth and Gildas rarely had a vacant room. A devout Rastafarian, Gildas served the day’s catch, cooked by one employee named ILoveJah, after a short blessing to Jah, and afterwards the dishes were cleared by his other employee, Cofi.

The bar looked out to the Atlantic, with a small concrete platform for reggae bands to perform, two hammocks and a handful of palm trees being the only things that stood between Gildas’ little home and the white sand and blue ocean and sky. That’s it, that’s all, there ain’t nothin’ else.

Gildas spends his days serving drinks and food and selecting choice cuts from his large CD collection. You can hear anything you like, as long as it's reggae. Though in 24 hours, I never heard a single familiar tune.
On the beach were three simple straw huts for shade and when we sat in them I looked to the right and left and saw the beach fade off into the ether, without another soul visible on it as far as the eye could see. Over the afternoon and evening at Lion Bar, I kept track of who crossed this plot of land:
- 1 curious village boy
- 2 women with water buckets on their heads
- 1 goat

The view from Lion Bar


As we sat on the beach, I thought about how amazing this was, yet not quite what I was interested in. Yet when that Rasta vibe set in, it all made sense. I realized that I could spend some time without walking around, without seeing anything. That it is good to slow down and chill sometimes. I rarely do that.
Rom mentioned the stresses of traffic, of weather, of life in the west. “I don’t understand these things anymore,” he said.
As Rom and I chatted, our last talk before he had to go to Cotonou to meet his girlfriend, we returned to the topic of tourism. “Look at Gildas: with an investment of about $4500 he made this, and it pays for itself within a couple months.” It was impressive.
“You know, since you have worked in and are interested in tourism, if you want to come out to Possotomé, I think we can work something out. There are a lot of ideas left to do.”
That was a heavy proposal.
“Where do you see your life over the next 10 years?” he asked.
“You know, I have never really known, my long term plan has always been blurry. I just kinda go with what feels right at the time. With what brings me what I want at the time. What about you?”
“A wife, some kids, a nice house. But I am going to do it this way, not with the stress. I want to be free.”
It recalled a story that my old manager Maja told us at work one day about taking a simple route to the good life, which had the unintended consequence of contributing to my friend and colleague Warren’s decision to sail the world for a few years.
I always think of myself as too type-A to live the simple life. That I thrive on the variety of stimuli that I seek in the city, with my friends and family, and in my travels. Would I be happy without those things, but also without the stresses of the western world? It’s not an option to be taken lightly. It really would marry my passions tourism and business. There would be many sacrifices but also many challenges and successes.
That night, the reggae music and rum served in coconuts kept Gildas, Nicolas, Guillaume and me up until the wee hours, dancing in the sand as the wind rattled the palm fronds and the waves crashed quietly just a sand dune away.

That Sinking Feeling

(This entry will be republished again later with more photos when I can find a cooperating computer)

A few French guests arrived at Chez Theo in Possotomé, a few friends that Rom had met previously in Benin. Floriane was an English teacher in Cotonou, and her husband Guillaume was working toward the exams to become a teacher in Benin as well. Flo’s younger brother Nicolas was on his first trip into the third world, spending his 2 week vacation to visit his sister and brother in law, and to finally understand the feelings sights and sounds they’d been trying to convey in email and phone calls for the past year.
Rom had mentioned to me that the others wanted to rent motorcycles for the day and ride around the lake. Did I know how to ride? Did that sound fun to me?
Rom arranged for the bikes to be delivered at 8:00, knowing they would arrive around 10:00. At 11:00, we finally had the bikes, and headed out on the road. They were little 100cc Suzukis covered in stickers praising Jesus as many bikes in Benin are.
I immediately had a little trouble with my bike. First the clutch cable was so loose that the bike was having trouble shifting. As the other bikes pulled away, I sputtered to a stop. Locals jumped at the opportunity to help out a struggling Yovo and dragged the bike to the little shack on the road to tighten the cable. I was still having a hard time getting the bike to ride, until I realized that the bike was built to shift in the opposite direction from the bikes I learned on and rode in China. This one required that I stomp down on the shifter to shift up, and click up to downshift. I had been racing the engine to get the thing rolling in a high gear.
Once I figured that out, I was on the road, the red dirt moving quickly beneath me, the fascinated smiles of the villagers following us. The feeling on the bike was very different from the one in China, mainly because it was actually the right size for me. I could place both feet flat on the ground, with room to spare, when I was at a stop. The bike was lighter than any I have ridden, and I was confidently in full control of it.
A few minutes along the main road, Rom suddenly pulled off to the right, nearly causing us to ram into him. He dismounted and we all did the same, following him over the ditch and into the brush where a group of people were digging in the dirt. Rom began to talk with someone overseeing the operation and then translated for me a few minutes later.
Apparently the people were digging for and then sifting out small stones from the ground. Discarding the soil and sand, they dumped the stones into buckets all day under the punishing heat. One man would use a pickaxe to break up the dirt, then dig it out with a shovel, tossing it to a woman who would throw it at a metal screen to sift it. A child would then shovel the stones into buckets.
“Can you believe these working conditions?” Rom asked me, as I swam in my own sweat and acquired layer after layer of red dirt from the occasional vehicle passing on the road. “They make 300 CFA (70 cents) per bucket. A good team might make 10 buckets in a day, but most make about three.”
For some perspective, a beer costs 500 CFA and a small dish for lunch on the side of the road will cost about 100 CFA. A ride on a zemi-john across a small town will cost about 200.

Breaking up dirt for stones


I asked Rom whether he knew these people before we stopped.
“No, I just saw them there and it looked interesting, so why not ask?” Rom and I got into another conversation about tourism. This is exactly the type of thing I think about: rather than going on a pre-programmed track where every other tourist goes, talk with the man on the street and learn that way.
Back on the bikes, we left the main road and traveled by a small foot path through tiny villages. With the wind on my face, a few bikes ahead and behind me, and the occasional villager standing in awe, I was ecstatic. I howled into the wind, unable to contain my excitement. We were a sight, and the locals loved it. One boy was so shocked to see us that he tipped right over on his bicycle and fell into the brush on the side of the road.
We continued around the lake, and joined up with a main road. There was a restaurant in the middle of nowhere and we all pulled over to grab some food. When the orders were being taken, Flo turned to me.
“What do you want to eat?”
“What’s good?”
“Want to eat a rat?”
“How is it?”
“It’s good!”
“Well, why not?!”
I was served an Agoutie, some member of the rodent family, large, furry with coarse straight hair, cute when they are little and a bit ugly when they are grown. It, like all African meat, is tough and required effort to chew. As Elvis commented back in Cameroon, “I can not handle that soft meat you people eat in the West! I need my meat tough, like the bush!”
It didn’t taste like chicken, more like beef jerky. It was served in an incredibly spicy tomato sauce on rice, and was reasonably easy to get down with the exception of my portion of skin with some fur still intact. Really chewy and not the type of thing I want to go through again. It did the job though.
Back on the road, we each took our turns with some bike issues. Nicolas had all the spirit in the world, but did seem to struggle with his bike. I wondered whether he was having shifting issues too, as he often had trouble getting started. At one point his accelerator got stuck at full throttle, and without a kill switch, it took some fancy shifting for him to kill the engine.
Nicolas’ struggle with the bike was very familiar to me. I always felt like the weakest link on the trip in China, hesitant to go off road or do water crossings because the bike was harder for me to manage than it was for my larger friends. Here, I just sat back and smiled while Nicolas took his turn to learn the things I had to learn in China. And when Rom was disappointed because Nicolas couldn’t handle some of the off road stuff he and I wanted to do, I understood, and had no problem going back to the road.
After a day of getting coated in fine red dirt, we were hot, filthy, and tired. When we returned to the hotel, Rom suggested we go into the lake. Perfect.
Rom, Nicolas and I hopped in one of the hotel’s pirogue canoes and clumsily paddled out into the lake. It was a struggle, owing to our collective lack of coordination and the fact that the wind was brisk, causing small breakers to form in the lake.
Lake Aheme is a freshwater lake that mixes with the ocean, raising its salinity a bit. When we jumped in, the water was hotter than a bathtub and the most relieving feeling I had felt in a long time. The lake is only about 5-6 feet deep, with the bed consisting of a thick layer of mushy clay filled with tiny pieces of sticks, stones, and who-knows-what. I did my best to keep my feet out of it.
After a bit of a swim, we wiggled our way back into the boat, taking with us a fair amount of water. As we splashed the water to bail it out, the increasing wind and waves just kept adding more water to our situation. Within a minute, there was so much water in the boat that Rom told us to jump out.
Within seconds, the heavy wooden boat was full and resting on the soft clay at our feet. I tried to think of how we righted canoes back at summer camp, but was unable to coordinate the effort with the others. Rom said he was going to head back to the hotel to get help.
As Rom made the long swim home, Nicolas and I balanced on the tips of the boat, struggling to keep upright despite the waves. We chatted and told stories and tried to keep a hand on the 3 paddles, palm branch and various clothes that had come with us into the lake. Eventually, on the horizon, we saw the hotel’s large boat approaching. However, it seemed to struggle in the wind also, continually diverting and not making it any closer to us.
As our bath approached an hour, local fishermen began to approach in their pirogues. Finally, one boat reached us. Shouting at us in their local tongue, we were pulled into their boat as two locals jumped off and began to swim around the other side of the boat. In a moment, the boat had swung around a few times and moved a short distance before the captain drove his palm branch into the clay and tied his boat to it as an anchor. The men swam farther away. Nicolas and I kept saying bateau, bateau and pointing to where we had been standing on it, but after a moment it was apparent that the men swimming for the boat thought it was over where they were. Now everyone was confused. I jumped back in the water, trudging over to where I thought the boat was, dragging my feet across the clay to feel for it. Nothing. Reports from the other fishermen indicated the same.
Occasionally, I would brush against a branch or a stone, my heart leaping for a moment until I realized it wasn’t the boat.
The fishermen chatted with each other while they searched, and I got very intimate with that muck that I had tried to hard to avoid earlier. The wind continued, splashing the green water into my mouth, it was slightly salty. I noticed the sun was quickly approaching the horizon.
Additional pirogues arrived, manned by young men, their dark bodies in stark contrast to the sky above me. I looked up as their boats passed by my bobbing head, their palm frond stabbing into the clay as they passed.

Pirogue captain with his palm branch


Rom arrived in another boat, along with Guillaume and a couple of the hotel’s staff. Now with a large crew we were sure to find the boat. But the sun had just reached the horizon and I suddenly got concerned. I thought back to previous trips, about how the scariest moment of my life was when I was nearly killed in a desert for accidentally ruining a local artifact. The Bedouin’s voice echoed in my head: “You can’t just go and make another boat! You can’t just go and buy another boat!”
Was the boat lost? Could it have sunk into the clay by now? How would Theo react? Whose fault was this? How much would a new boat cost to commission? My mind raced in the gathering darkness. Things were looking bleak.
I thought about losing a ski in deep snow and how the strategy to find it requires making a cris-cross pattern in an organized fashion across the hill. It was entirely possible that we’d moved past the boat dozens of times but due to its oblong shape, just missed it. I had no idea how to convey this to the fishermen who were becoming more and more difficult to see in the darkness.
Eventually my path crossed with Rom’s. “We need a strategy,” he said, and I agreed. “OK, each of us, 2 meters apart, move that direction.” He repeated the instructions in French to the others, and then it was translated to Fon for the fishermen.
In a line, we moved across the lake. And finally, my foot brushed against something hard. After feeling around it for a moment, I let out a cheer. The boat was found. There would be no threat on my life. And sure enough, the boat was just 10 feet from the boat that picked Nicolas and I up, right where he and I had pointed at it in the beginning.
That night, after swim-walking the canoe across the lake to the hotel, I discovered they had a bottle of Johnny Walker. I had a nice glass of it after a delicious meal and some fresh pineapple, and eventually dozed off in my chair in the cabana.
“Fatigué?” Flo asked me.
“Oh you know, just an average day for me: riding a motorcycle, eating a rat, losing a boat, finding a boat. Nothing unusual.” She translated my response into French for the others and as they all chuckled, I headed off to bed.

Start From Scratch

A hotelier in Porto Novo pointed me to Chez Theo in Possotomé, on Lake Ahémè. I had liked the guy and his hotel enough that I was willing to take his recommendation, despite it being one of the lower options on the Lonely Planet list.
Possotomé is a tiny town on a lake that is reached only by a dirt road which is currently under construction. My book doesn’t even give a map, just mentions the town and a few hotels. When I asked the reception for a map of Possotomé, he took me around the corner and down a well-kept path under arches of bamboo towards the lake. A nice little surprise; I didn’t even know whether I was near the lake. Out on the water was a decent-sized cabana built of bamboo and straw. The bartender there handed me a bottle of Possotomé water. Apparently my French isn’t that good. I explained I was looking for a map and he then took me to a younger man with curly hair and a short goatee who was sitting at a table talking with a couple older Yovos, probably French tourists.
He turned in his chair and we did the name game in French. Then, in English, he asked “what do you need?” I explained my situation and he directed me to sit with him. The older French folks left the table and he and I got to talking.
His name was Romain, known as Rom. He was French and employed at the hotel. I figured he was one of those slightly jaded guys who take a job at a third world hotel to hit on the tourist girls that come by. The type of thing rampant in Greece and Spain. I began to wonder what type of hotel I had arrived at.
“What type of work do you do for the hotel?”
“Mm, how you say, I manage the project?”
“Really? That's part of my work, also!”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Well, I work for an online travel agency. Maybe you know Expedia.fr?”
“Yes! Of course! We should talk – I want to get this hotel more customers, and maybe we can do something!”
So we got into a conversation on the economics of internet travel. Rom was far from a jaded slacker looking for a way to while away a couple years after college. He had first been connected with the hotel as a final project for his MBA program. He had 4 months to help develop the fledgling hotel into something more. Rom talked of his work and how he transformed the place from another generic concrete African hotel to one that feels more unique and natural. The project was such a success that he decided to commit to it indefinitely, and here he was.
It was immediately apparent to me that Rom gets it. He spoke of developing the hotel with a keen business sense, but also with a sense for sustainability.
“Africa is free. I can do what I want. For this hotel, I use local labor, I use local materials, I use minimal cement.” I looked around and noticed that the pathway was lined with locally made clay pots which he used as decoration and path markers. Local baskets and weaves were used as trim and decoration. The cabana was built on sticks pounded into the mud of the lake as the nearby stilt villages did.
We walked down the path and Rom pointed out the onsite garden where he hopes to produce enough vegetables to make that the primary source for the hotel. The hares which are commonly eaten here are raised on site. And the fresh fish is purchased right out of the lake from the local boys in boats who ply it daily with their canoes and nets.
“Come, let’s go into the bush.”
We hopped in an ancient white Renault which was rust red on the inside from years of the dusty road. As we drove, Rom explained that Theo, the hotel’s owner had worked his way up from the humblest beginnings. “One bag of cement at a time”.
“First stop,” Rom said. We climbed out of the car and walked into a tiny village on the side of the road. There, Rom pointed out the well that the villagers were digging, the cages where they grow the giant rats they eat called Agoutie, a room where they raised snails to eat, and the vegetable crops they were working on. Rom explained that these villagers worked on some of his projects, so he helped them get their projects going. We picked up a villager and got back in the car.

Digging the well with a metal bowl

“Second stop,” Rom said as we climbed out onto the red dirt road again, and this time walked off into a forest of small manioc (tapioca) trees and of young teak trees.
“30 centimeters tall in October. Now, three meters!” Rom pointed out how some of them had been pruned by machete, against his directions. “I bought them a clipper and pay them 5 CFA per tree to do this the right way.”
“How do you know the right way? Do you know about agriculture?”
“My first degree before business was agriculture.” Wow.

Children hunting crabs among the mangroves

We continued toward the lake and entered a mangrove forest, where millions of little feelers were prying their way up toward the hundreds of branches attempting to link with the ground below. Within the forest, four children were carefully poking around for small crabs which they took home in old coffee tins for dinner.
“What do you think, bungalows among the mangroves?” Rom asked, gesturing out a paradise of a hotel in this untouched area.
The land all belonged to Theo. Theo knew he should do something with it, but needed a visionary with useful skills to get things going.

A captured crab

The third stop was down a painfully dusty side road that approached the lake from above. There was a plot of land that had been dug out in preparation for a home. A large baobab tree sat adjacent to it and the view went from the red dirt to the green mangrove forest to the blue lake. “This will be my home. All local wood, local labor. The land is so cheap, maybe 20,000 Euros all the way to the lake.” I looked at him with a sense of wonder.
“Africa is free. To-tally free.”
The paved road to Possotomé is slated to be complete in a year or so. At the moment the lake is dotted with a few villages and a couple rarely-visited hotels. Fishermen fish, kids hunt, locals labor. The villagers don’t need clothes, and water is pulled from wells or the hot springs down the road. By chance I arrived the day before the annual gathering of all the lake villages for a huge voodoo dance off. At night, looking across the lake, one can see a few fires and a handful of electric lights indicating the villages. There are no motorized boats on the lake and Rom would never want to introduce them.

Children fishing on Lake Ahémè

Africa, or Benin at least, is free, and this little slice of it is within Rom’s control. The lake has potential for immense tourism, with countless activities and sights in the area. This could turn into something big. At the moment, Possotomé is untouched and unspoiled by tourism. Starting from this potential, Possotomé and Lake Ahémè have the opportunity to introduce tourism in any way they like. Under Rom’s vision Possotomé will not become an ugly place ruined by tourism, but will move toward a balance of respect for the past while benefiting the locals and a responsible number of guests for the future.

Voodoo dancer in Possotomé

Don’t Go Around Breaking Young Girls’ Hearts

Cotonou was much more pleasant than I expected, so I spent a few more days than the average tourist. I then headed west for a day trip to the coastal town of Ouidah. Ouidah was one of the largest ports used in the slave trade back in the day. This city was run by a variety of colonists, all in the business of buying rural Africans from coastal Africans and shipping them across the Atlantic to Brazil, the Caribbean, and finally the US. The slaves brought with them animist religious practices called vodou, or voodoo in English, as well as a lot of musical inspiration which became the Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian sound that I had heard in the past but had never thought about its genesis.
As I explored Ouidah and then Porto Novo, I found that the locals reacted to me much friendlier than the Cameroonians did. I still had to ask permission for photos, still got a man really pissed off for taking a photo of his black market fuel for sale, but largely didn’t get the look of suspicion I felt in Cameroon. Even the children seemed to have a friendly little song that they all sang to me whenever they saw me.
“Yovo yovo bon soir! Ça va bien? Merci!"
It took me a couple days to learn that Yovo is a Fon euphemism for whitey… so the song goes “Whitey whitey, good evening! Are you well? Thank you!”
I can’t imagine the nerve or the violence that would result of anyone singing such a song to any other race in my country, but here they don’t mean any harm and to them it seems a perfectly acceptable way of greeting a stranger. Having singing and clapping youngsters lurking behind every corner is at least more pleasant than I have experienced in other countries.

Black market fuel from Nigeria


Along with the singing, I felt it nice to be travelling alone again. I was able to manage just fine, keeping myself out of trouble, figuring out the bus/taxi/zemi combinations required to get from here to there, and even getting countless marriage proposals. It’s a fun game to be offered someone’s daughter and to be able to speak enough of the language to joke around with their proposal. At this point, it is possible my family would prefer to hear that I am betrothed, but so far I have turned down all of the offers in the end.
On my own, I have been able to stumble through enough French to have a girl explain some voodoo fetishes to me, and even convince a local fisherman to take me out on his handmade boat for a little tour. On the placid lagoon of Ouidah, he stood perched in the rear of his long thin canoe, stabbing a long branch from a palm frond which looked like a giant’s eyelash into the shallow waters. We met his brothers who were using nets and rotting palm fronds to attract fish for their family’s meal and income.
A local family welcomed me into their courtyard and gave me a glass of soldabie, the local swill made of distilled palm. Even though I have been drinking straight alcohol for a few years now, I find this stuff hard to sip.
Africa’s got soul, there is no question about it. In general I have a whole collection of little games, stupid human tricks and the like to distract children asking for a handout when I travel. One time, in a little village built on stilts above a lagoon, the children were getting a bit intense and I needed something to do. I did a little dance move and saw the whole swarm imitate me. One kid started clapping a rhythm. Hm.
So I directed him to continue while I started grumbling the bass line to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. I then pointed at more kids to have them clap, which they did. I then did the “hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo” rhythm vocalization that Jacko did, and after getting that going, pointed to a few kids to have them pick it up, which they did. Getting a few others to carry the bass line, I then did my best falsetto over the band to sing Billie Jean. All of us stomping in the dirt, and laughing at the end. It was the end of the Yovo chant and the money requests for a while and a great laugh for all of us.

A boy in Ouidah


Every one of my trips seems to have a brush with death in some way or another. As I was walking the road that the slaves walked to the waiting ships on the coast of Ouidah, I saw a group of youngsters ahead on the otherwise vacant sand path in a long forest of palms. The kids were all in their briefs and as I approached, they started shouting at me with a clear sense of urgency. They were speaking so fast that I couldn’t understand them. One seemed to be gesturing me away from the opposite side of the path, the side I was walking down. I had time to squeeze out one “Je ne comprend pas” before another boy in briefs and a blue t-shirt pulled over his head like Cornholio burst out of the foliage, running at top speed directly at me.
My first instinct said this was some sort of trap, a mugging, but within a fraction of a second, I saw that he was flailing his arms wildly all around his head. Was this kid totally nuts? Goofing off? I kept walking toward him. And then I noticed the black cloud following him.
My brain had enough time to tell me “African killer bees” before I turned, and started running too, flailing my own arms as a portion of the cloud diverted to me when the kid ran by. A few seconds later, my cloud was clear, sting-free, and Cornholio returned, obviously relieved that he too wasn’t hurt. I thanked the kids profusely for the warning and apologized for my not understanding, and they sent me on my way with big waves and smiles.
It’s too soon to say whether that is my only brush with pain or injury on this trip, but let’s hope so!

Welcome To The Machine

I arrived in Cotonou, Benin late at night. My Lonely Planet refers to Cotonou as “A dangerous city” which is “like being locked in a car with a chain-smoking speed freak.” This was not something to be taken lightly. Definitely not the type of place to arrive late at night.
I took a zemi-john (moto taxi) from the airport to a hotel and was able to ask in French for him to take me to an ATM first so I could pay him. Thankfully ATMs are guarded by men 24 hours a day in Africa. In the darkness, the city was quiet. The air was breathable, and nothing like what my book described as we cruised down poorly-lit dirt roads and vacant city streets.
My hotel was on the main drag, Ave Steinmetz, and as it turned out there was a big road construction project in front of the hotel, so there was no traffic there either when I first stepped out to Cotonou in the morning.
In fact, it took me a while to find the insanity that my book described. I slowly walked northeast toward the Grand Marche, the enormous market at the heart of the town. As I approached the large intersections closer to the market, I could hear the grumbling of engines, and see the change in air quality. As I approached, the roar grew louder and when I arrived at the main intersection, it was as if I were standing at the point where two enormous gears mesh together. There were controlled intersections, something I hadn’t seen yet in Africa, and a mind-boggling number of zemis, taxis, cars, trucks, and people, all moving in coordinated chaos. Every truck, every car, every bike, and every head was loaded down with more cargo than it should be carrying. The roar of the engines, the exhaust, the countless moving object, all made for a phenomenally chaotic space. I followed the flow of traffic and made a clockwise circuit around that intersection before being spit out on the other side, and as I continued down the block, the machine grew quieter. Not quiet, but not as intense. So I turned around, and dove back into the machine and allowed myself to be spit out on the other side again.

Welcome to the Machine


I ventured into the endless, smelly, overcrowded Grand Marche one day and allowed myself to get lost. There was no use in trying otherwise. As dusk was approaching and the vendors were beginning to close down, I hailed a waiting zemi and asked him to take me to a restaurant I had to try: Le Roi Du Schawarma. The King of Schawarma. Now that’s a place I had to try!
The zemi was ecstatic to drive me and I don’t think he understood my directions. He just let me get on the bike and immediately kicked it up to 3rd gear, the dense crowd be damned, he began screaming like an ambulance siren, bobbing and weaving, people jumping out of the way for their very lives. As the driver wailed and we caught air off of the lumps in the dirt paths, I screamed “doucement!” between hearty laughs at the expressions of the fearful vendors and shoppers.
The screaming and wailing took me deep into the city, far from my intended destination. I eventually just told the driver that the spot over there was what I was looking for and gave him twice his requested fare for the memorable experience. I caught the next zemi back to my hotel; he got thoroughly lost, but I got a nice tour of the city in the process.
Cotonou, to me, didn’t seem to be the brutal beast my book warned me of. Perhaps I have seen bigger and more dangerous. For me gears of the machine were a game I could play by choice, and when I needed some asylum in the city, I could find it by heading a few blocks in any other direction.
Inside the Machine

Where Are You Going?

It's a question I have been asked with the emphasis on each of those words, and usually followed by "and why?".
Right now, it's 4:30 in the morning, 15 minutes before Linda is taking me to the airport and I still have a handful of things to prepare before I go. I don't have a lot of time to explore the why question right now. For now, the where:
- 2/10 Fly Seattle to London
- 2/11 Fly London to Yaounde Cameroon
- 2/22 Fly Yaounde to Cotonou Benin
- Travel overland through Benin, Togo, & Ghana
- 3/24 Fly Accra Ghana to Freetown Sierra Leone
- 4/4 Fly Freetown to London
- 4/10 Fly London to Seattle
And to be quite honest, that's about all I know. The rest I will figure out once I am on the ground.
Generally, when I list off my destinations, the "where" portion of the question is repeated. Most of the people I know don't know of these countries, couldn't point them out on a map, and have no idea what happens on a daily basis in these places. Not too long ago, I couldn't either, so the first part of the "why" might be so that I can learn about these places. And if you're following along, you will too.
Take a look at the map below, and I'm going to get back to getting ready to go there.

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