I knew going in to the Festival in the Desert that I was doing something crazy. I traveled all the way from Nigeria back to a desert outpost outside Timbuktu in Northern Mali so I could participate in this Tuareg music festival. The whole drama of waiting for a Niger visa in Abuja, Nigeria, put me off a bit and I ended up on this crazy series of flights back to Bamako, then paid a painful chunk of cash for a supposedly comfy and dependable 4×4 ride to Timbuktu and back to Bamako, missing the final day of the music festival so that I could return in time to catch a flight from Bamako. Instead, the 4×4 had engine trouble and I ended up having to rent a vehicle with only a few hours to go before my flight left the airport.
The flight from Bamako, Mali, to Accra, Ghana, was the first in an incredible arc of flights planned across the continent, traveling then on to Johannesburg, South Africa, and finally to Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. After a lot of travel aggravation with South African Airways, I ended up instead skipping the Congo portion of the trip and heading on after a fourteen hour harangue in the Johannesburg airport to Harare in Zimbabwe.
Written December 22, 2007, Hotel Diganga, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
More catchup–
Then, I went to the main market in Lomé to change my Ghana cedis into CFA used in Togo, Benin, and other francophone West African countries. I managed a not-so-great rate, then tried getting a taxi back to the hotel, which didn’t happen until after I got hot and tired wandering through the market. The guys at the hotel were nice to me and helped me get my bags into a taxi and on my way to the Togo-Benin border.
At each of these borders, it amazed me how the immigration officials were taking bribes to let people pass through despite minor infractions of law or policy. So many of them tried to get me to give money, but I refused. Since I carry a US passport and pay a big visa fee already, I can get away with it.
At least at this border, it was the same shared taxi who waited for us on the Benin side who had dropped us off on the Togo side. I got the ride to Ouidah, then got overcharged for a ride to the Jardin Brasilien, a delightful hotel on the beachfront.
Written December 22, 2007, Hotel Diganga, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
More catchup–
At the Jardin Brasilien, they had a swimming pool filed with sea water.
What a great place to relax from the stress of travel, with the sound of the pounding surf soothing my sleep. I showered in the room before heading over to the pool with the lifeguard came running over before I jumped in to let me know I had to shower. I explained I had already showered, but he was concerned about the sand on my feet getting into the pool. I washed off again and enjoyed a delightful swim just as an elderly fellow was getting out of the pool to go for a walk with a woman I came to find out is his wife. On the way out of the pool, I met a French fellow named Jacques and we agreed to eat dinner together that evening at 8pm. I was so exhausted from travel and a big of digestive trouble that I napped for a few hours before rousing myself for dinner.
Jacques, an older guy from the Mediterranean coast of France, was on a fascinating quest. He served his French military service 40 years ago in Benin, specifically in Parakou in the central to northern part of Benin. While serving, he went to a village where he took some pictures. One guy got upset at him for taking one of the pictures and, after resolving the conflict, Jacques promised to retunr one day to give him a copy of the picture. Jacques had returned to honor his promise after 40 years, but unfortunately the fellow had already died, so Jacques gave the pictures to his family. Jacques searched in another village nearby for a baby who had appeared in one of the old photos. When he found her, the bonded instantly. Jacques ended up asking her what he could do to help her life in the village. She answered that she was trying to set up a nice shop for food and other items, so Jacques financed the operation. He stayed for a couple of weeks, living on pounded yam (igname) every day til the place was set up. I encountered him taking a break to relax from his travel to the village. He had met Isaac (?), the chief lifeguard at the hotel, who asked Jacques if he could help him with some fishing equipment. Jacques agreed. He spent a few days getting the fishing operation set up, impressed by Isaac’s determination, persistence, and courage, for example swimming for nearly an hour after dusk to put the nets out from the shore. The first night they caught nothing, but after placing live instead of dead bait on the hooks, they caught a few man-of-ray’s, including one that delivered two babies on capture. Apparently, people do eat the rays, so Isaac was on his way to town to sell the fish, except for one Jacques and some of the other hotel guests hoped to eat themselves.
My first morning in Ouidah, I met Henri and his girlfriend Natalie who were visiting, biking around, and on vacation from their jobs in Filingué, a few hours drive outside Niamey in Niger. I talked mostly with him, since she wasn’t feeling well with something that sounded exactly like what I had. I found him quite attractive. They ended up inviting me to come visit them after New Year’s in the village, and perhaps I will. He works with cattle breeding and she works in the local radio station.
Off I went to town, on a motorcycle taxi (called taxi-moto or zemi-john) after Jacques’ encouragement to transcend my fears about that mode of transport. On the sandy road, I actually felt safe riding along at a reasonable speed with the sand to cushion any fall. It was only on the cobbled and paved roads that I got anxious.
I stopped by the residence of the main chief of Ouidah, Daagbo (see entry of December 11). He asked me to return later that day to snap photos and see the ceremony for the initiates who spent nine months in preparation. Before returning for the ceremony, I visited the local history museum, the Musée d’Histoire de Ouidah, where I met Olivier Coyotte, a Belgian playwright of Turkish origin, and Simon Kind, an attractive Québecois fellow.
I walked to Kpassezoume, or the Kpasse Sacred Forest, which had wonderful sculptures of the various Yoruba divinities, as well as a rare iroko tree said to be the tree King Kpassé turned himself into while fleeing enemies. One finds in the forest the works of contemporary sculptors Cyprien Tokoudagba, Theodore and Calixte Dakpogan, and Simonet Biokou. According to this quote of Dana Rush from an African Arts article of December 22, 2001:
Sometime between 1530 and 1580, Kpasse became the second king of Savi (located nine kilometers north of Ouidah) and founder of Ouidah. When he learned that two jealous enemies were plotting his demise, he alerted his two sons, telling them that although he would never die, he would disappear one day. If it should happen that he did not come out of his room before sunset, his sons were not to open the door but understand that he was already gone. After nine days they would see a specific sign from their father which, once understood, would protect them and their families for generations to come. One day these events did come to pass. Today the sign is still a secret associated with the Kpasse vodun, known only to the direct descendants of the king.
Soon after King Kpasse disappeared, his family living in Savi saw a bird they had never seen before. It led them to the Sacred Forest in Ouidah. Upon entering the sacred grounds of the forest, the bird turned into two growling panthers (male and female). The family was frightened until they heard the soothing voice of the king. He gave them an important message: if at any time they were having problems, they could come to the forest and pray to a specific iroko tree that houses his spirit. The tree was then just a little sprout next to a sacred clay pot. Today, behind the ruins of the old French administrative house in the Sacred Forest, abandoned because the spirits were “too strong” for the French, one finds active shrines, including a clay pot, next to the tree in which Kpasse’s spirit resides (interview with the current King Kpasse, July 19, 1995).
I made a wish by touching the iroko tree said to be King Kpasse and leaving an offering (last picture above).
After leaving the sacred forest, I rode a zemi to the python temple where they tried to gouge me for cash to take photos which I fortunately refused because the temple was interesting, but rather small. They had a roundhouse full of pythons who stay inside during the day then go out at night to feed on rodents. Residents of Ouidah respect the pythons and return them to the temple if found on the streets. Every 9(?) years, a ceremony takes place at the temple, the details of which the guide would not really elaborate, somewhat infuriatingly repeating the same stock response over and over while also asking if I had any more questions. You can read more and see photographs of this python temple at Xeni Jardin’s blog.
After the pythons, I walked toward Daagbo’s residence. On the way, I chatted with a few guys hanging out in a telecom shop. I took a picture of this sculpture carved from an old tree to represent the history of Ouidah.
After the W.E.B. Dubois experience, I went back to the Millennium Guesthouse to get my bags and off to the bus station for Lome.
Lome is a pit. I took only this one picture and I managed to lose my Dell laptop power adapter.
I have to say that crossing the border from Ghana to Togo, then arriving in the city of Lome, was my least favorite part of the trip so far. That probably has to do with the difficulty of getting across the border dragging my bags along uneven pavement and gravel without any helpful signage or people to make it any easier, not to mention random people yelling out “white man” at me as I walk by, the sun setting and my anxiety about getting a taxi to the hotel, negotiating a fair price with a driver who claims to know where we’re going but then somehow doesn’t know once we’re underway even though I’m giving quite clear directions from the travel guidebook. Worst of all though was losing my laptop power adapter somewhere along the way. That was a real disaster! I hoped maybe I had left it in the last taxi and that the driver would return it to me at the hotel, but no such luck. He tried to charge me more money because the guidebook said Hotel Digbawa instead of Hotel Degbava. Anyway, I checked into a strange room with a window out to the reception area of the hotel. The place was pretty dumpy. I did manage to walk to the bank in the morning, then to the anemic Musée Nationale de Togo.
I managed to sneak in a visit to the W.E.B. DuBois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture before departing from Accra. Two very kind and informative gentlemen gave me a wonderful tour of the premises. We had a frank discussion in the beautiful tomb room.
After exploring Kumasi, I took a day trip out to the Asante traditional shrine at Ejisu-Besease. It took awhile to persuade the taxi driver that the place really exists but, after interrogating a few passersby on the way, and following my intuition we managed to find it.
Written on December 21, 2007, Lixborr Hotel, Benin City, Nigeria
I had to wait until I could look in the guidebook to continue catching up the story of my travels.
In Kumasi, I somehow made it the Fosua Hotel… ah, now I remember! I astonished some of the taxi drivers at the station by simply rolling my luggage past the VanefSTC bus station gate and onto the street to the hotel. When I arrived, the lift was out of order so a couple of guys helped me cart my luggage up the six flights, well maybe it was four flights, to the plush decay of the hotel lobby. The receptionist gave me a room at the far end of the building. I settled in for a shower and to relax a bit, but kept nearly jumping out of bed each time there was a large crashing sound in the ceiling. It took awhile to figure it out, but I finally realized large birds were landing on the thin aluminum roof at twilight making loud crashing sounds as they landed. Luckily, it didn’t last all night. I snuck out of the hotel to walk over to Vic Baboo’s Cafe for dinner. I got to order some reasonable Indian food. Although there were other travelers at the Cafe, as well as some locals, I barely talked with anyone and felt a bit conspicuous eating alone. I wandered back to the hotel and crashed out early.
The next morning, I ate breakfast in the room, then headed out to try to get a taxi to the National Cultural Center complex. Eventually, I caught a cab there. I arrived in front of a building where a ceremony involving lots of women was taking place. I asked a woman out front and she sent me over to the administration building where another woman pointed me to the women-run craft center. I bought an Akweba wood carving that is a fertility charm.
Then, I walked over to the Prempeh II Museum which contains a lot of history about the Ashanti people and particularly that king, including some talking drums, the slit drum style. After the museum, I walked over to the Okomfo Anokye Teaching Hospital where, in the courtyard near the hospital, a small museum houses a sword which has been in the ground for three centuries. According to legend, an Ashanti sorcerer drew the Golden Stool from the sky at this place. If anyone succeeds in pulling out the sword, the legend goes, the Ashanti kingdom will collapse.
Walking back from the hospital after unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a taxi, I met a nice fellow along the way who was on his day off from a job within the diamond industry.
We stopped for a drink on the way and he invited me back to his place to meet his family, but I went back to the hotel instead. I ate lunch at a restaurant one floor below the hotel, during which I conversed with a fellow from Holland(?) off to meet some friends he had met on the Internet. I was a bit worried for him, but he didn’t seem concerned.
Next stop was Kumasi with a rather rough bus ride through terrain more tropical than I had experienced so far on the trip. Bus rides over roads pitted with potholes end up as speed racers routinely careening across the center line to avoid serious damage to vehicles or bystanders. Seatbelts in shared taxis are rarely functional, although I think in Ghana there is a law requiring the driver to wear one.
I stayed at a nice hotel on top of a hill called the Prospect Lodge. I met a nice guy on the bus named ???. Ghana overall has much less litter than the other West African countries I’ve visited so far, due to a government campaign to get people to dispose of litter properly along with the trash pickup at least in major cities like Accra.
Cape Coast has a main street. I walked from the hotel past a statue of a crab down to the port area and then past a lagoon in search of a vegetarian restaurant called Assase Pa currently closed for renovation. Instead I ended up at the Castle Restaurant where I ate redred, a bean dish.
It was a dark and somewhat stormy night, at least in the sense of rough seas. A guy wandering on the beach, saw me and came in to sit by me in the restaurant. By now, I’ve grown suspicious of most unsolicited encounters and I was right to be suspicious of this one. After awhile, he made his pitch for 2 cedis, i.e. more than US$2! I just told him “no” and he wandered off. I walked back to the hotel to find the jeans I’d washed already quite stinky with a mold or something from the moisture.
The following day I headed off to Elmina to visit the slave fort there. On a nearby hill is Fort St. Jago (first picture below).
Then I returned to Cape Coast to visit another slave fort, where i met some friendly travelers.
The forts are quite understandably run-down yet the history of slavery there is quite palpable, the horrific role of the colonizers as inescapable as the slave forts themselves. The museums, especially at Cape Coast, were also impressive.
It was a total drama getting the taxi driver to find the Millennium Guest House, located in a well-known cathedral compound, but perhaps it is a game the drivers play to try to get paid more. I am beginning to wonder, since it happened quite often.
I had to wake the security guy at the hotel to enter, since the flight had arrived quite late and my baggage search took awhile. But finally I succeeded in laying down my head to rest on the comfortable bed in the modest room furnished with a bible, a TV, and a glow-in-the-dark Jesus, as well as a much-appreciated air conditioner and a shared bath/shower.
The next morning, I visited the National Museum, a short walk from the guesthouse. The woman taking tickets at the front entrance helped me buy a SIM card even though it was Sunday. I met a Czech guy working in Belgium who was on a trip related to encouraging and financing sport events on behalf of the European Union. Michal Krejza and I finished at the museum by trying to locate the linguists’ staffs.
The museum had excellent exhibits from a variety of west African countries, as well as a section on the slave trade, but I couldn’t find the linguist staffs mentioned in the guidebook. Turns out the staffs got entombed inside a wall when one other exhibit was updated, so it wasn’t possible to see them.
I found the 13th to 19th century figures from Komaland (pictured below) especially intriguing.
Michal and I walked past banks where I tried to withdraw cash using Visa cards at ATMs without success. We made it to the Kwame Nkrumah memorial and museum which was very interesting. Nkrumah, the first president of the first colonial African country to gain its independence, was a pan-Africanist and published some rather radical books. Perhaps that is why a military coup toppled his government and sent him into exile in Guinée. He married an Egyptian woman and both of their remains are now at the memorial.
Next we walked, then taxi’ed to the lighthouse near the Fort James shanty town. Michal bargained for us to enter at half the price the little girl who met us had demanded, then an adult man led us past the ancient generator and the rusting spiral staircase to where the light once shone and will apparently shine again if a planned renovation takes place. I was terrified by the rickety ladder to the top and the minimalist railing, although the view was impressive. I descended before the guy had a chance to also ask me for more money, although he couldn’t resist once we were getting back into our taxi.
I purchased a half dozen oranges for about 20 cents. We tried to eat lunch at a place closed on Sunday, as was the second place we tried, so finally we ended up at the Hotel Paloma Restaurant, where I tried palaver, a traditional dish of spinach and other vegetables and spices. It was delicious, even though I discovered a fish bone in it. We went our separate ways after a delightful discussion, including the topic of the white slave trade. I crashed at the hotel and left the next morning for the Nigerian High Commission office where I successfully applied for a visa after keeping a taxi on hir to go get photocopies. It wasn’t easy, but they accepted the application with a US$100 fee and I then left for a two-day trip to Cape Coast.
I boarded the Air Senegal flight in Bamako worried because it left late for Abidjan. That meant that I and several other guys missed our onward flight to Accra on Air Emirates. The following Emirates flight to Accra was in two days! So I opted to purchase an Air Ivoire ticket (because they wouldn’t accept the Emirates ticket) and to seek a refund for the Emirates flight later on. I ended up spending the night on Air Senegal’s dime at the airport hotel in Abidjan. The Abidjan airport is quite nice and modern. I met a couple of women there, as well as a creepy guy who tried to scam me as I was eating my dinner, also paid by Air Senegal, as was breakfast the next morning. I actually managed to get a lot of work done on the book since I had no distractions in the airport hotel, then during the eight hours after checking out and before the departure of the Air Ivoire flight.
I felt quite triumphant boarding that flight, despite a nasty airline employee who told me that the yellow rice sack I used to carry my excess luggage was not aesthetique (esthetic). She forced me to pay to have the sack wrapped in plastic and check it in rather than carry it on. OK, so I finally arrived in Accra and — guess what? — my bag checked in at Bamako hadn’t made it to Accra, despite several possible flights on which it could be sent.
After getting the runaround between three different lost luggage counters, I managed to file a report. I also noted the sign on the way to baggage claim that said (paraphrased): “Pedophiles and other sexual deviants are not welcome in Ghana. If you have come here to engage in such activities, please leave.” I felt warm and welcome all over, especially since I had heard recently from Andre about the Ghana government arresting a British citizen who was found with pictures of him having sex with a man in Ghana — who was apparently also arrested. The more I think about it, the more it seems like a sting operation or an attempt at extortion. This, and a prior incident in Dakar left me feeling not at all sexy, and I remained that way, except for fantasies about foreign travellers, even until today.
