Bon soir, Benin!

In Benin and in Togo, white people are called "yovos." This may be related to a word that the Dahomey Kings of Benin used to used for missionary (yovogan). Anyway, when adults in either of these countries saw us on the street, they would often greet us with a "yovo, bonjour" or something like that. (The word "toubab" is used similarly in most of the other Francophone West African countries we've visited--that word coming from the Senegalese city of Touba, where Islam first came to subSaharan Africa along with "white" Arab traders.)

In most of the towns we've visited in West Africa, a white person walking down the street is kind of the show of the day, so Andy and I get a lot of (mostly friendly) attention. Kids especially seem excited to see us (and occasionally frightened to the point of tears or running away). In Mali especially, kids would often chant "toubabu! toubabu!" and follow us down the road, and want to shake or hold our hands. Our walks between the Dogon villages especially often turned into little parade scenes out of the pied piper.

But in Benin, the kids have a whole special song for us. It goes like this:

"Yovo! Yovo! Bon soir! Ca va bien! Merci!"

Which translates roughly to:

"Whitey! Whitey! Good evening! I'm doing well! Thanks!"

It's hard to explain the enthusiasm with which kids serenaded us with this song in every town we visited in Benin. Even toddlers know it. In Cotonou, a group of enthusiastic two-and three-year-olds sang it to us on a street corner, while also dancing and clapping their hands, at around 8:30 AM (it can be the "soir" at any time of day in Africa, it seems--adults also start saying "bon soir" well before noon). We suspect that the words of this song might be the only French these little kids know.

Bottom line--kids in Benin are insanely friendly. Adults are pretty darn friendly, too. In fact, I'd venture to say that the good folks of Togo and Benin have been the most friendly to us of any country yet in Africa, making our time in these two tiny countries a whole lot more enjoyable than we may have expected they would be.

On to the pictures.

After crossing the border from Togo, we arrived in the city of Natitingou in northwestern Benin. It had great street food, like this fresh juice stand.

Psych! That's not a juice stand, it's a gas station. All over West Africa you'll find these roadside setups with reused liquor bottles full of different grades of gas and oil for filling motorcycles, cars, and trucks. You just pull up and a person (usually a woman) runs over with a bottle of gas, a funnel, and a piece of cloth to help filter, and fills up your tank. (Andy did think they were drinks stands the first few times he saw them, though.)

The coolest thing in Nati was probably the swarms of bats that filled the colorful sky at sunset. No pic of that, unfortunately, but here you can see a bunch hanging upside down in trees beside the road before their night flight. They were HUGE bats and made a lot of noise chirping in the trees.

Our real aim in visiting Nati was to get to the nearby Pendjari National Park, which we managed to do thanks to finding a Swiss tourist who also wanted to go and was willing to split the high costs of getting there (4WD rental, gas, and driver/guide) with us. So we set off at 5AM the next day to go see some wildlife.

We didn't get to see any lions or leopards (though the park has them), but we still did pretty well with sightings of various types of deer and antelope, big birds, wild dogs, baboons, warthogs, and...an elephant! Just one, but we turned a corner and there he was, RIGHT near the car. We got to watch him dismantle a tree and eat it for a while.
Here is a great shot Andy took of a Cobb antelope. These guys and their does were all over the park.

At the hippo-viewing station near a little lake (one hippo with baby spotted in the water, though you could just really see the tops of their heads), Andy found this cool iridescent bug.

Not a bad trip, though probably not quite as cool as Mole National Park in Ghana, since we got to walk around there. Pendjari was our first car safari, and we learned some important things--for instance, if you're supposed to stay in the car and you wander off a little bit on foot during a stop, your guide will yell at you. Also, it's REALLY easy to fall asleep during a car safari...

On our way back from the park, we stopped to swim at a nearby waterfalls. Very beautiful and relaxing. Also entertaining, as a local guy climbed up to the edge you see near the top and leaped into the water from there.

Our next stop in Benin was Abomey, home of the once very powerful and greatly feared Dahomey Kingdom. We took a two-hour walking tour of the historical sights around the city, and since they are spread pretty far apart, we were walking almost the entire time. I think our elderly guide would have preferred us to take zems, or motorcycle taxis, around, but those things have no helmets and scare the heck out of me (I did ride one in Togo with a borrowed helmet, but really prefer to avoid them). They are the way most Togolese and Beninese people get around, however.

First we visited the cemetary where French soldiers were killed by women warriors in the 1800s during their first attempt to colonize the area. These warriors are called Amazons locally and were extremely strong 12-14-year-old virgins whose preferred method of combat was apparently break your spine while giving you a welcome hug. Given how women seem to do pretty much all the work in West Africa, Andy and I were not surprised to learn that they used to make up the army, too.
The main square in Abomey has this statue of the Dahomeyan king who stood up against the colonizers.

Nature break--Andy spotted this tiny lizard during our tour of Abomey.
And this grasshopper. OK, back to the tour.

The town had many old palaces of the different kings, but they all had the same design and the same symbols on them. Each king had his own symbol, so the line of previous kings' symbols (such as the buffalo and lion below) would be sculpted in bas-relief on every palace.

Andy managed to snap this pic of a fetish stall before people in the market started yelling and demanding a "cadeau" (gift or bribe). People in West Africa really don't like you taking pictures of fetishes unless you pay them. You can't really see here, but this stall sold some dead birds (bottom of pic), bones, and probably skins and such, too.

Our last stop in Benin was Cotonou, the country's largest city and financial (though not political) capital. It's on the Atlantic coast and is a big port. Our hotel in the center of the city, Hotel Babo, cost $14 a night and was the most expensive hotel we stayed at in Benin. (Unfortunately, it was not the nicest, but the view from our sixth-floor room was pretty sweeping.)

Julie asked to see more of our rooms, so here is our room at the Babo. I think it looks nicer in this picture than it was--the blue walls weren't quite so cheery in person, and the attached "bathroom" consisted of a tap and bucket we showered with and a toilet whose tank leaked half its water all over the floor whenever you tried to flush (we soon started using the bucket for this, too). But the fan worked, and when the municipal power went out (as it did daily), a generator started things back up again within minutes.
Andy says that Cotonou's candy-cane-striped cathedral looks like it belongs at the North Pole.

Cotonou's market, the Grande Marché de Dantokpa, was probably our favorite market in West Africa. It is huge, and filled with tasty things that you'll see pictures of in our next food post. At its edge is the city's lagoon, where we stopped to take some pictures of people arriving by boat...

...and some girls saw us with our camera, and wanted to see the pictures we were taking. They were really fascinated by the camera, but clearly also kind of afraid of it--when Andy offered to take a picture of them, they practically ran away. But then--after seeing us take a pic of a nearby boatful of people, and seeing that none of the people in the boat had died--one of the girls decided she did want her picture taken, and so gifted us with what's definitely the best voluntary portrait of our trip so far.

She loved seeing her picture, and then she and her friends were off--no asking for money or a gift or anything. (In some of the more touristy places we've been, kids will try to get you to take their picture, then demand money for the service.)

It seems that the rest of our Cotonou pics are of food, so I'll just say here that we liked the city a whole lot more than we expected to, considering that its calling cards are generally considered to be smog and insane motorcycle traffic (both true). But the market is wonderful, and the free (yay!) modern African art museum, Fondation Zinsou, is truly fantastic. Plus the kids and street vendors we met were all just really welcoming and nice. Oh, and it didn't hurt that the food we bought was incredibly cheap and delicious...

From Cotonou, we took a day trip to see the stilt village of Ganvié. In the 1500s, a group of people fled encroaching slavers out into the middle of a lagoon, where they built homes on poles and developed a system of fish-trapping/farming. Apparently, a religious custom forbade the slave-hunting group from entering the water, so the people who lived on the lagoon were safe from them there.

Here are some typical structures--no electricity except in a few of the bigger public buildings. The wooden houses need to be rebuilt every 20-30 years due to, you know, rot.
In Ganvié, the men do the fishing and the women take the fish to market. Here you see some boys and men setting up the fronds that are used to help entice and trap the fish.

Everyone travels around the village, and between the village and the mainland, by boat. A few of the boats we saw had nice sails, like this one.

So that's Benin. It also has beach towns, old slaving forts, and voodoo centers--none of which we visited, but they are there for those who are interested. Not a bad place to spend four or five days--we spent some very bons soirs, indeed.

Togo Party: Show me your tatas!

Togo is a country that may not have a ton of notable sights, but which we enjoyed. Most people we knew who had been to Togo told us that we could certainly skip it and wouldn't miss much. But it had a few interesting sights, and we had a really great time there thanks in large part to Peace Corps.

One of Tara's friends was a Peace Corps volunteer and she gave us good advice on places to go and foods to eat before ever arriving. Then, in Burkina Faso, we met Jorge, who invited us to stay with him and his wife, Danielle, who is a Peace Corps volunteer working in Lome, Togo. So, of course, we did. They were amazing tour guides and really great to spend a few days with.

We arrived in Togo the day before the 50th anniversary of independence. We expected great celebrations--instead Jorge and Danielle told us we needed to stay in the next day because of the expected protests against the government. Fortunately, the protests didn't amount to anything and no violence occurred. But neither did any celebrations.

The ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) tower is the largest in Lome and also looks really nice and has this cool domed structure in the front. And as a side note, the money used to build it probably couldn't have fed quite the entire population of Togo for the year, so why shouldn't it have been built?

Every time it seems that someone can't be carrying more on his or her head, we see something crazier. Here are two women with snowmen-like structures of charcoal on their heads who also happen to have babies strapped to their backs. Yet, Tara still complains sometimes that her backpack is too heavy...

In Lome, we went to a private museum called the Gulf of Guinea Museum. It is the private collection of West African objects owned by a rich Swiss guy who married a Togolese woman and then decided that the museum of West African objects probably should be in West Africa.

This mask would be worn by a man for dancing during a celebration in Ivory Coast. There is a similar female version to go with it. Maybe Tara and I will return home wearing them.
Some of the oldest well-preserved artifacts in West Africa are the 2,000 year old Nigerian nok terra cottas. They are from the northern part of Nigeria where we won't be going due to ethnic conflict, so we were happy to get to see one in very good condition at this museum.
Carved ivory elephant tusks were used in the past to record histories of ethnic groups and tribes. This is one example.
This guy is a animist fetish. To tap his power, you drive a nail into him. This is probably from Benin, home to voodoo, but the nails in this case were meant to help you get your wish rather than to harm someone represented by the figure.
Jorge described this church as the Notre Dame of Lome. That might be a bit much, but it is a lovely church and it has a nice blue sky that does not let on how hot and humid it was. A huge rain storm came a few hours later.
From this angle, I look monstrously tall. I'm not. These are Jorge and Danielle, our wonderful hosts in Lome, along with Tara and me.
From Lome, we took the Postal Bus (called Courrier), which also carries the mail, to Kara in the northern part of the country. On board, we were luck enough to meet another Peace Corps volunteer, Liza, and Charley, her boyfriend. They kindly agreed to let us stay with them for a couple of days, so we stayed entirely with Peace Corps volunteers while in Togo. From Kara, we took a day trip to see what are called tatas, which are fort-houses first built by people who were fending off Muslims, then used again to fend off slave traders. The people apparently refused to wear any clothes at all until the 1970s, and they aren't exactly strict about it now, either.

Here is one of the tatas in all its glory. Like a personal-sized fort. The mounds outside the entrance are for sacrificing whatever may need sacrificed to appease the spirits. Might include a chicken, a bowl of porridge, or a bottle of schnapps (apparently, Dutch explorers convinced most of animist West Africa that their ancestors' spirits would really, really like a sacrifice of schnapps, and this tradition lives on even today in many places).
People keep the livestock on the ground floor and then live and sleep on the top of the compound so that they can better defend it. Everything is only accessible through small entries. Here is Tara in the bedroom, which was surprisingly roomy once you crawl through the tiny hole.
They harvest the beans of a tree (maybe some kind of locust tree) and then separate out the fruit part inside the pod. They let us try some and thought it was hilarious that we had never had any (it is a staple for them).
This is the granary, the equivalent of a silo. It stores corn, millet, and the yellow stuff is the fruit from the beans above. The woman is also being saved to be eaten later. Or maybe she was just showing us around her house.
The landscape around the tatas is really nice hills and small mountains. Here are some tatas set on the side of a hill.
Tara is shown here modeling a traditional female celebration hat. Well, at least that's what they told us when they wanted her to buy one. Rather stylish, don't you think?
They took us inside of a giant, hollow baobab tree where a family of four used to live. The guide was not sure if the family were hobbits. Like all their living quarters, the opening was tiny so as for easy defense. Here I am crawling out of the tree.
And that wraps up our adventures in Togo. Thanks to all the Peace Corps volunteers who made our trip easier! Onward to Benin!

Something fishy in Ghana

Food in Ghana is as cheap as anywhere we have ever been. In addition to standard street food, Ghana has what are called Chop Bars. This is a deceiving name since most don't actually serve alcohol or have a bar of any kind. Chop is slang for food in at least Ghana and Nigeria. These are buildings that are just a step above eating on the street and are often little more than shacks with a couple of lightbulbs hanging from cords and a stove for the women to heat up the food (men don't actually work in most of West Africa and I have never seen one working at a street food place other than at a grill, which is apparently an acceptable masculine cooking role the world over).

Most of these places have some combination of rice balls (rice pressed together into giant balls), fufu (normally yams or potatoes boiled and then pounded forever until they form a dough like a giant gnocci, or rice with a variety of sauces. Most are not known for their hospitality. The first time we visited one, they really didn't want to help us figure out what anything was. So, we got two rice balls with palm nut soup (palm oil mixed with some spices) because we knew what it was. The funny part about this is that we had just got to Ghana and the woman said it would be "6". As it turns out, Ghana cut four zeros off their currency a few years ago, but apparently most people haven't gotten the message. The woman meant 600 of the old currency, which is about 45 cents, but we thought that food was just expensive in Ghana and that it was 6 of the current currency, or about $4.50. So, I gave her a $8 bill and proceeded to get in a huge fight with her because she said that she couldn't change it. It seemed crazy that she couldn't change it for a $4.50 meal. She finally found change after I told her it was the only way we could pay, and Tara and I were rather embarassed to discover that the real cost was only $0.45, which we could have easily paid for with a coin...

In any case, here were those rice balls with palm nut soup. Very tasty.

Similar to fufu is a staple that is called T.Z. in Ghana. (Pronounced T-Zed if you are a Ghanian or British). We don't know what it stands for or what it is exactly, but we think it is basically like fufu that has been slightly fermented so that it is like a sourdough fufu. This one is pictured with some kind of sauce made out of leaves and a bit of fish sauce. Tara says that it had no leaves and was a peanut sauce. I saw leaves. And it definitely had fish.
After our travels are done, we are likely to be awarded honorary Ph.D.s in fried objects. This one was filled mostly with onion and a bit of fish as well.
This brings us to an important point about Ghana: they absolutely love fish. They use fish like most countries use water. In fact, if you took any recipe that called for water (soup, dough, juice) and added some combination of fish juice and fish pieces, Ghanians would love it. This made it really, really hard for us to buy street food because the conversation always went like this:
Me: Does this have fish in it?
Woman selling food: No.
Me: So, you didn't use any fish to cook this?
Her: Of course I did.
Me: Okay, do you have any item here that you didn't cook with fish?
Her: No, but this one only has fish sauce.

Here is one of the few that I found where I couldn't taste the fish, though I suspect it was in there. This one is beef rice jollof. Jollof is a Ghanian specialty that must translate to something like "spicy tomato fried rice".
Most exciting of all in Northern Ghana was this "apple pie" (more like apple bread pudding) ala mode. It wasn't American pie, but it was really good. Feel free to visit Luxury Restaurant in Tamale the next time that you are in the area.
Speaking of fried things, it is in Ghana that we first found sweet fried things that might be called donuts. These pictured were my favorite and are easily identifiable by the extra-crispy KFC look on the outside. A yummy dough inside. Oh, and for some reason, people seemed furious that we were eating in this market. We really didn't understand since we bought it right there. If anyone from the Kumasi area is reading this, feel free to fill us in.
While walking through the market, we found some ladies with huge bowls of peanut butter. We needed to buy some, so I asked one of the women if I could taste it. She said yes, so I stuck my finger in the huge bowl and tried some. Tara was slightly horrified. Then we bought some. 70 cents for this bag, which makes it on par with American peanut butter, though this is more like natural peanut butter and needs some sugar or a lot of jam.
In Ghana, we tried a product that we had first seen in Burkina Faso--Fan Milk. We originally thought that they just had yogurt and chocolate milk. but would later discover that they also sell ice cream! Here is Tara with a cold strawberry yogurt. Like most things in West Africa that come in a bag (which, come to think of it, is most things), you bite off the corner and suck out whatever is in the bag.
I bought this sucker because the only ingredients were butter and sugar. It tasted disappointingly like a normal sucker and not like a pat of butter with sugar on it.
Here is Tara with Fan Ice! Fan Ice is the soft ice cream made by Fan Milk. For 30 cents, this is the best deal going in Africa. Vendors are everywhere in Ghana, Togo, and Benin, and the quality is very good. We often eat several per day. Eating it is sort of like having your own tiny soft-serve machine--you rip off a corner and squeeze it into your mouth.
In Ghana, one of the most touristy neighborhoods also seems to be the place to go to get fun plantain items. It seemed as though every 10 feet someone was selling a new item, almost always fried, that they told us was made of plantain. We had to try them all. This woman had what might be described as a massive muffin tin with slightly larger holes than a standard tin over a wood fire that she would fill with this batter to cook it. Seemed to be a combination of plantain, ginger, palm oil, and spicy. Rather good.
This is a classic British meat pie. A doughy pastry filled with ground beef and onions with some spice. Not bad, but we have had much better meat pies in other former British territories. We'll let you know about the meat pies of Nigeria if possible.

Back to plantain concoctions. These were shredded plantain and who knows what else deep-fried into a ball. It was a little too cooked for me, but Tara enjoyed it.

One of the difficulties of living with no refrigeration for Tara is that she cannot easily keep cheese unless it is shelf-stable cheese. Most people know Laughing Cow as the most famous example, but Tara actually prefers the Austrian knock-off, Happy Cow. She found some on clearance at a supermarket in Accra and here she is that night with her prizes.

We found this juice that is made by Fan Milk, so we had to try it. I liked it, though it wasn't the best we have had. Sort of like a Sunny-D type drink, but with more sugar added...

While staying at the Green Turtle Ecolodge on the beach, Tara felt compeled to order the Muesli because it had been a long time since she had had anything resembling an American breakfast. She was a bit disappointed by it, but still happy to have an Americanish breakfast.

Also at the Green Turtle, Tara decided to try some of the Happy Hour cocktails. This one was called a Black Star, which is also the symbol of Ghana, so I guess they consider this the signature cocktail of Ghana. I don't know what was in it, but Tara liked it, and it must not have been all that strong since she was able to walk the 100 feet to our room after.

Tara had a different cocktail the second night. This one had one part alcohol and four parts well-blended smurf.
After a long absence from our lives since South America, we were happy to make it back to somewhere with street pineapple. We were able to buy a pre-sliced half-pineapple for maybe 25 cents. It was really, really good. It made us happy just before going to learn about how many million Africans died in the slave trade.

Porridge on the street is popular in Ghana and down through Benin. It differs quite a bit from person to person, though. We had some (no picture) in Accra that was made of corn and had lots of sugar and evaporated milk added. It was a fairly standard porridge in the Western sense of the word. This one is millet, but is more of a drink and had no lumps. It actually remided us of the quinoa drinks in South America, but somehow wasn't as good.

This is red snapper with cassava (yam) and palaver sauce. Palaver sauce is some leaves with palm oil and spicy sauce. Quite good, unlike the fish. Tara, however, did an admirable job of eating the fish until I started to crack its skull open so that she could eat the brains...

One of the best places that we went in Accra was to a local chop bar where you could get some rice balls (baseball-sized globs of compressed rice), groundnut stew (peanuts with oil and spices), and a piece of chicken for less than a dollar. We liked it so much the first night that we went back for a second night.In Northern Ghana, we met a Canadian named Tim who was volunteering in Accra, so we had dinner and some drinks with him in Accra. We really appreciated him showing us around and to the chop bar where we got the great food pictured above.

This one is called red-red. Part of the red might be because of the spicy bean concoction, which you might call Ghanian baked beans (though I like them much better). I don't know what the other red is for, since the other half of the dish is plantains and even when fried in palm oil they aren't really red.A staple dish from street vendors in West Africa is rice and pasta with a sauce of some type. In Ghana, most of the vendors actually use a mix of rice and beans rather than just rice. We ate this for breakfast almost every morning in Accra (you can find almost the same for lunch and dinner) and it costs about 30 cents for a big bowl of it. The concept of breakfast food being different than any other meal doesn't really exist in West Africa.

In the main market of Accra, we found a woman selling fried things that we had never before seen. Shocked that anyone might have a fried object that we had not yet tried, we asked her what it was. At this point, another woman comes running over, shoves the first woman aside, and insists that we buy from her. Ignoring this woman, we asked the original woman and she explains that it has cornmeal and ginger and spices. By this time, the intruder has her friends coming up to us telling us that hers are much better than the woman to whom we are speaking. We bought some from the woman with whom we started and they were really excellent. Sweet, gingery, and fried. Sadly, we never saw them again, so they aren't a common food if you are in Ghana.

At one of the Western-style supermarkets in Accra, Tara found this green apple flavored yogurt. Now, as far as I know, green apple is a made up flavor that can only taste like a Jolly Rancher. Apparently, Tara didn't know this and thought it might have some incredible, authentic apple taste despite the neon green color. She was disappointed to discover that it did not taste like a real apple.

We kept walking by baskets of these nut-looking things, so I stopped and asked a lady selling them what they were. She said some name that I didn't understand and offered me one. She then laughed as I asked how to eat it. But, after learning that you just crack it open and eat it, being careful to spit out the seed, I discovered that these little "fruits" taste a lot like the baobab fruit. We bought a bag of them. Still don't know what they are called.

Plantains in Ghana are often sold just grilled. Plantains aren't as sweet as bananas, so I need them fried to bring out some sweetness. Tara, however, likes many things with less sugar than me, so it is not surprising that she really liked grilled plantains. She also likes the recycling since most of them come wrapped in someone's homework assignment or old newspaper.

Wow, that was a lot of food. When I started this post, I had no idea that we ate that much in Ghana. To summarize, food in Ghana is really cheap. If you can find it without fish, it is also really good.