Road Trip

Three happy children.

Releasing baby sea turtles into the ocean.

My beach boy

Over Christmas and New Year we took a road trip to the beach in Benin.   Approximately 15 hours by car…the journey was not without its drama’s, mishaps, humor, burst tyres, swear words and threats of divorce.  However it was very much worth it.

Benin is south East of Burkina and is quite a different land.  There is a stretch of around 10 km between borders which is disputed land, probably due to the fact that it is part of a wildlife nature reserve, so is of value to both nations, however it does seem as if the Beninoise made a decision to just give everything dry and unfertile to Burkina, and keep all land with the potential to grow anything at all, for themselves.  You cross the border into Benin and you are transported into the land of milk and honey…Rolling hills and valleys, pastures and fields, waterfalls.  As you head south the landscape bursts into tropical vegetation, palm tree’s heavy with coconuts, Banana and papaya plantations abundant with ripe fruit. 

Approximately 500 km into the 1150 km journey we stopped to picnic at Natitingou in the North of Benin.   We spent a wonderful and much needed couple of hours playing in the waterfalls and allowing our souls to be fed by the natural beauty of the place.  We then continued on a further almost 300 km, as we had been told that the second half of the journey would be hard.  We are very very glad we did.   The road became treacherous.

   Having been through four border controls and spent much futile time showing our paperwork, shaking hands and fake smiling at lots of mean looking officials, showing our paperwork again, counting our children, getting stamps in our passports, more fake smiling etc, etc, we were fairly confident that our paperwork was in order.  However December is a month where we in the expat community like to remind each other, “Tis the season to. …Keep your handbag closely guarded” and as Christmas approaches one knows that there are some folk around who are looking for a means to pay for their Christmas dinner.  

We slowed down at a road block, wound down our window, smiled our practiced smiles, shook hands, answered the usual questions…you know…. where have you come from, where are you going, how long for, and then…Blatantly, unashamedly, he says “So what have you got?” Our practiced smiles change to practiced confusion. “Excuse me? What do you mean?”  Tense seconds tick by, silence, awkwardness, at which point I pick up the Tupperware box at my feet and opening the lid, stretch out my hand and say “A candy perhaps?”

  I think I pissed him off.

 He demanded to see our paper work and after several minutes of him telling us we didn’t have the correct papers, and Richard arguing that we did, and him saying we didn’t, and that we needed to reach an agreement,  ‘a collaboration’ I think he called it, and me watching that expression come across my husbands face which says ‘I am a United Nations representative and I do not pay bribes’, and all the while we are thinking that the guys at the border have done this on purpose and we have basically been stung.

The outcome was that our friends who were in the car in front, decided that for the sake of 10 USD, they would pay for his Christmas dinner and be on our way.  The policeman seemed to accept two for the price of one and let our car off the hook. 

Its just one of those dilemmas we come up against in Africa.  

  I have to admit that despite the fact that I absolutely stand firm in our decision as a family not to “collaborate”, I was secretly rather glad that our friends take a slightly more relaxed stand, because we could have ended up by the side of the road, with our fake smiles stuck to our gums, disputing the ethical morality of paying a 10 dollar bribe, with lots of big African men with big guns, for a very long time.

At the next town we stopped and asked about the paperwork we were apparently missing, and if we could acquire it somehow, to avoid the same thing happening twice.  The official opened our passports, pointed to an official stamp and said, “ You already have it”.

 Excellent.

We continued on our journey, over potholes that were quite simply more hole than road, dodging donkeys and pigs, and sometimes driving in dust and fumes so thick that we were completely and utterly blind.   I found myself clutching the seat with white knuckles, holding my breath with my eyes tight shut for a majority of the journey, and got a sharp telling off at one point for actually grabbing the gear stick in sheer uncontrollable terror.

The next stop was a peage (toll) where they gave us our ticket and 12 condoms.  We had no idea what they were at first. The kids were very excited thinking they were Christmas candy.  On our return trip at the same peage, the guy tried to give us 12 more, and Rich said to him “actually we still have the last ones you gave us” to which he replied “You didn’t use them yet?”  We were like, “ Give us break, it was only a week ago….”

As we headed south we noticed that along the roadside there were stalls everywhere selling enormous bottles of oil.   Lovely, big, old fashioned, vintage, glass canisters which would look wonderful on the kitchen dresser with mixed olives and sundried tomatoes floating around inside.  I commented to Richard that we should definitely buy a couple on the way back, and imagined myself doing something stunningly creative and ‘rustic country kitchen’ with them.   I am very glad we made enquiries before buying, as it turned out they were jars of illegal black market petrol, and it would have been awful if I’d drizzled that on my salad.

We stopped for a bathroom stop at a maki (bar) and had a sprite then asked to use the bathroom and were pointed in the direction of a flimsy screen made of sticks with a pile of stones behind it.  There can be little more undignified for a British girl than pulling her knickers down in the knowledge that everyone can actually see her bottom, and then peeing all over her feet.  It was dreadful, and I got back into the car making a silent solemn promise to myself, that I will never ever again complain about the triviality of there being no toilet paper in Starbucks.

We stayed overnight in an Auberge, where I had to send back my beer because it had several dead ants floating in the froth, and an open topped water barrel in our bathroom had around 50 mosquito’s breeding beautifully in its stagnant water.

I started to be a tad concerned about what was ahead.

However I didn’t need to be.  One flat tire and three grumpy children later we reached the beach, and it was wonderful.

On Christmas day we saw dolphin’s dancing across the waves right in front of our beach, not even 30 meters away from the waters edge.  The kids got to release baby sea turtles into the ocean as part of a conservation project, and we had hour upon hour of delight wrestling with the waves and eating coconuts which the beach guard knocked off the tree’s and macheted open for us.

Benin is a land of incredible national resources. Every day we would watch the fishermen and women pulling in their nets bursting with capitaine, Tilapia and other enormous fish, the beaches full of people buying, selling, exchanging, sometimes brawling over the fish. 

It is still incredibly poor, but I cannot help but think that the people still have a quality of life, which is much richer than that of the Burkinabe.  You cannot grow anything in a dessert.

  This year a famine is anticipated in Burkina, Niger and across the Sahel.  It is predicted that between 100 – 150,000 children will die of starvation.  Not enough for it to make major headline news in the West, but its happening. 

Children. Children like Peter, Sammy and Esther.

I digress.  As the thoughts come, I write them down.

So, Benin.  The people are not as warm as the Burkinabe.  People told me that the Capital, Cotonou, is hostile and the people can be quite aggressive.  When I asked about this, one Cotonou resident told me she believed it might possibly be due to the great presence of voodoo in Benin.   People are suspicious, guarded, defensive, afraid of one another, and this has an impact on the nation as a whole.  If there is no trust between individuals, or groups, people cannot work together to build communities and develop as a nation.  People are afraid to progress, to be deemed as successful, as they might be cursed by a jealous neighbor.  Suspicion and mistrust is tightly woven into the very seams of the culture. A nation dictated by fear.

The Voodoo temples are everywhere.  We visited one.   Sometimes I forget to take off my Western head with its western expectations, and when someone say’s “There’s a place near here where you can see pythons and hold them and stuff” I think “cool. Pythons. The kids will like that.”  Then we arrive and I’m like “Ah. Yes. Of course.  Silly me, thinking we were visiting a zoo”

It was educational, but we were glad to leave.  60 writhing pythons with dead ancestral spirits living inside them?

 Not really my thing.