The Lost Obroni Speaks

Note: This letter was never sent out to the group but I hope you all find and enjoy it here!
Greetings one and all!

As always, I hope that this note finds you well and in good spirits. Enjoying the day wherever you are and generally being happy! It has been months since last I’ve written and in the meantime I’ve hopped across countries and continents and states, celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas with family, explored the U.S. capitol city with friends, passed out valentines to strangers, gotten accepted to graduate schools, and crossed the equator. Having just typed that all out I realize that catching up in one letter will be next to impossible but I’ll do my best, as always, at picking up where I left off.

As I write I’m sitting on the sun drenched porch of our newest family home in Antananarivo, Madagascar, listening to the birds sing and the breeze whistle its way through our beautiful garden. I’ve been here a week now and I have much to say about this country and my experience already but I can’t in good conscience write about new adventures without first completing the record of the old. In any event I have some wonderful pictures of my travels in West Africa that I’ve been promising you all since October and it’s about time that I delivered on that promise.

When last I wrote I was sitting in an overheated and dilapidated internet café in the capital of Burkina Faso getting ready to depart for Banfora, a town in the southwest of the country. We had read in the guide book and heard from a few people that Banfora was a great place to visit with a very laid back atmosphere. Also, there were a number of nature excursions within biking/mopeding distance of the town and since at most of our other stops had little or no natural component or the nature was too hard to reach in public transportation considering the state of our language skills we decided that we couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Besides, we had missed out on hippos in Ghana and figured we had a better chance of seeing them in a lake rather than a river.

The bus ride from Bobo to Banfora was probably the first truly uneventful ride (aside from the fact that the bus was crammed to the gills and we were unable to sit together) we had yet had on the trip. Only about an hour long we arrived right on schedule, so much as we had one, and were immediately assaulted by a horde of hopeful guides and porters. So much for laid back. After a few increasingly agitated exchanges we managed to get the guide book out and attempt to find our hotel on our own. Normally this would have been easy in a town with two streets but, already frustrated it took us a couple tries. Once located, the hotel operator turned out to be a wonderfully nice man and he and I made friends. A fact that would shortly become critically important, as you’ll see. The room left a bit to be desired. The temperature was infernally hot and since we were unable to afford air conditioning at most places we were forced to suffer by with only a rusty, single speed(slow) ceiling fan, secured to the ceiling only by its electrical wiring.

The town, after escaping the crowd at the bus terminal, actually was charming in its own way. Small and compact you could walk everywhere. There were a couple of low budget hotels and some restaurants (we ate at a McDonald restaurant that I’m quite sure was not sanctioned by the franchise. Locally owned it served heaping portions of beef in every conceivable variation, dirt cheap since cows are one of the national industries, and the garlic potatoes were amazing. It definitely qualified as one of the best meals I’ve had in Africa that wasn’t strictly speaking African. Simple and yet delicious.) catering to a tourist crowd that favored places that were off the beaten track. We walked around the market and tried to stay out of the heat as much as possible. The first day we rented a couple of barely functional bikes from the hotel and rode a few kilometers out into the bush to the village of Tengrela. The village was beautiful and synced with my mental image of what an African Village should be. Wild lovebirds flitted about the tall trees. The lake itself was lovely and huge (dashing our hopes of easy hippos) part covered with water lilies (with saw tooth edges… no such thing as an easy meal here for anyone). We hired a boat (witch first had to be bailed out… no such thing as a watertight boat either) and were paddled out into the middle and back and a half hearted attempt to find some hippos. No such luck. It was still more than worth the trip out.
The basic plank boats I went hunting for hippos in. Tangrela Lake in the background was quite beautiful
A photo of me on the hippo hunt at the lake.

The next morning we had arranged to rent a moped (I had received instruction on how to drive it from my friend at the hotel) in order to get to the sacrificial pool and natural waterfall at Kartigula about 15 kilometers from the main town. Unfortunately our plans changed. Carly hadn’t been feeling well for a few days and overnight she came down with the telltale fever of Malaria… at least we finally guessed that it might be malaria since it’s notoriously hard to tell sometimes. First thing in the morning we located a lab that would do the simple blood test and we waited around for it to be completed. It came back positive and suddenly a trip to the hospital was in the works. My friend at the hotel guided us there and showed us where to wait and I put my French to the test to translate for the doctor and pick up the prescription from the pharmacy. I was surprised when the treatment turned out to be only 3 doses of medication to be taken over three days. We hoped for the best.

By the time we got all that sorted out it was past lunchtime. We voted to try and make the moped trip to the falls anyway, malaria and all. So we loaded up and attempted to follow the directions we had received the day before. It was supposed to be very easy and yet somehow we got mixed up and ended up covering miles and miles of back trails through the sugarcane fields, getting back on track only after about 5 sets of directions from locals. We were within spitting distance when the moped simultaneously broke down and ran out of gas. Thankfully, some men agreed to take it to the local village mechanic and have it fixed while we toured the falls (for only a small additional fee of course) and we were able to enjoy the falls and make it home (the right way this time) all in one piece.
A view of the Falls and the sacrificial pool at thier base. Most natural wonders became religous sites for the first inhabitants of the region
A view of the falls from the top.

With Carly on the road to recovery and our nature options exhausted we returned to Bobo to attempt to figure out transportation to Benin. As per our usual track record this proved to be not nearly as easy as we had hoped. With no direct bus available we were forced to take a long overnight ride back through Ghana and change over in Accra for a bus that went east towards Cotunu, Benin’s commercial capital. This actually worked out pretty well and allowed us to do an overnight stop over in a part of Ghana we would otherwise have missed out on in the town of Keta on the south eastern coast near the border with Togo. After a relaxing night to recover from the long bus ride we set off for Lome, the capital of Togo and from there to Ouidah, our first stop over in Benin.

Glossing over the transportation issues and the most bureaucratic border guards I have yet encountered Ouidah was awesome. We went there because it was supposed to be a center for Voodoo, which I am very interested in learning more about, and because it was one of the main depots for the sale and shipment of slaves (which is how voodoo made it to the new world in the first place.) The town is packed with history which is all displayed in poor museums filled with unenthusiastic guides speaking rapid-fire French. And yet the gravity of the place still manages to get to you. (And to be fair there was one museum on African women that was spectacular) The best parts of the town can be seen alone and on foot. There are fetishes on many corners and the road from the town to the beach where the slaves would have departed is lined with monuments and protective charms. On the beach itself is a symbolic monument called the Door of No Return etched with bas relief’s of departing slaves bound in chains.

This was an interesting yet typical meal. Ingredients: Tomato sauce, peanut butter, rice, noodles, hardbolied egg.
My favorite fetish in Ouidah. No idea what it means.
Another view of this intricate fetish.
A view of the Door of No Return looking out towards the ocean.
A closer look at the bas relief carvings on the ocean side (looking towards land)
One of the protective fetishes on the door of no return platform
I'm not a beach person but I could get used to scenes like this. Especially like the sack cloth sailboat in the background

From Ouidah we moved on to Porto Novo, the capital of Benin. It’s actually a very laid back feeling city because most of the hustle and bustle that is usually associated with a capital actually takes place in Cotunu. We stayed in another rundown hotel by the lake because we had heard that you could arrange boat tours from there to a village on stilts in the middle of the lake. Apparently, the slave hunting and blood thirsty kings of the Dahomey Empire had received word from their Voodoo priests that if any of their soldiers crossed a body of water the empire would collapse. They took this news rather seriously and forbade their soldiers the use of boats. The people whom they were hunting capitalized on this and built a village on a small island in the middle of a lake. All was well until the next wet season when the island ceased to exist. Not a people to give up easily they simply jacked up their houses and started carving more boats. Several hundred years later the village is a sprawling metropolis of more than 4000 people all completely inundated for much of the year. They have completely adapted to this environment, with fishing as a livelihood and handmade boats of all shapes and sizes. When we visited on a Sunday we saw many people poling their way to church. (Benin is a shining example of multi-faith tolerance. The floating village and every other city we visited had Christain churches, mosques and voodoo temples and for the most part they get along just fine.) Even the cows had floating pastures.

The stilt village on the lake outside Porto Novo. Called Aguegue
Another view of stilt village
A third stilt village view.
Floating cow pasture. The grass is replensihed each day by hand.
Our noble and tireless boatman... but unlike our other boatrides we had a motor for part of this one.
Last view of the stilt village.
Everyone headed to the church "parking lot"

Porto Novo also turned out to be a good place to take in some information about Voodoo. We hired our boat guides to take us around the city and introduce us to a Voodoo priest. It was an interesting experience though I’m still not sure what really goes on. The priest had a small living compound set up within his house where his personal spirit gods lived and communicated with him. We chit chatted awkwardly for a bit (how does one make small talk with a Voodoo priest and his resident ghosts?) and look at several other temples around the city.

The voodoo priest we met with in Porto Novo. He was a pretty intimidating figure.
Houses for the voodoo priests private spirits. They speak with him and are his connection with the spirit world.

Our last stop in Benin before heading back to Togo was the town of Abomey, formerly the seat of the Dahomey slaving empire. Each successive king swore that he would leave the empire bigger and stronger than he found it no matter the cost and each one built a bigger and better palace than his predecessor. Abomey is full of their ruins. We took a tour of one that had been restored by the government and were appalled at the barbarity of the human race once again. These were men that would quite literally kill you as soon as look at you and who made their livings selling their own countrymen into slavery. They decorated their palaces with murals and tapestries of new and interesting way to kill people. You would laugh at some of them if you didn’t know that they really happened to someone. Instead you want to cry. It’s certainly humbling and it’s almost hard to let yourself think about it too much.

We acquired, with our usual degree of difficulty, this time due to a long term taxi operators strike, transportation back over the Togolese border and on to the capital at Lome. I didn’t like Lome for a lot of reasons. It was a dirty congested city and it was difficult to get from place to place. It felt unsafe where most of the other places we had been in were different but still comfortable. Still, we managed to get out and see the Fetishers market where they make fetishes and sell ingredients. It’s become something of a tourist trap now but there is still an amazing collection of everything you could think to put in a witches brew. Dead birds, lizards, skulls, monkeys, snakes, organs, whole heads and tails of things, crocodile skulls and bits of things I didn’t even want to think about. There were hundreds upon hundreds of different things of all different species. We asked if they still collected specimens to sell or if they were only selling older models. Unfortunately they say they still collect regularly, though I hope they were just telling us that because that’s what they thought we wanted to hear. Everything was completely desiccated and older looking at least. I got roped into getting a travelers fetish from one of the venders but I must admit I’ve had pretty good luck since I “turned it on.”

Alas, our final experience of this phase of the trip turned out to be a negative one. We were robbed by a group of brigands on the main road by the beach directly outside the presidential residence as we were walking back to our hotel from dinner. We knew better than to be walking in the dark but misjudged the distance. The only good news was that they got away with nothing that would prove valuable to them. Nevertheless we were glad to escape Togo and return to Accra and our wonderful host family.
Ok.. there was ONE good thing about Togo. At least the Flag beer came in sizes bigger than 20cl!

The rest of the trip was a relaxed immersion into the culture of Ghana. Drinking palm wine in local cafes and eating local dishes at home and at our neighborhood restaurant, where we quickly became regulars. We screen printed more tee-shirts and hung our with the host fam, went to church and generally thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. When the time came to head back to the US it was the usual mixture of sadness and promises to keep in touch and the excitement of getting back home again.
Enjoying Palm wine with John and Prince. Made from tapping the sap of a plam tree. Its pretty good and gets more alcoholic the longer you take to drink it.
Enjoying a coconut from the tree out front.
Did I mention that religion was a big deal here?

Me and my new best friend and all around great guy, Kobby.

I headed down to DC where I would meet up with my family and friends for Thanksgiving and followed that up with a wonderful Christmas and New Years in Arkansas with my grandmother. Post holidays it was back to Boston for some time with friends and then again to DC where I took up temporary residence with my parents and explored all that the wonderful city has to offer.

Which… with the understanding that much was glossed over, left out or forgotten… gets us pretty much up to date with the sun porch and the bird songs. Of course, I’ll write soon with more details on life in the moment.
In the meantime, I would love to hear from all of you! Take care of yourselves out there. Do something exciting… remember to smile… The world is a magical place.
Until next time,
Stay well
Love and Luck in Everything
-Andy
The hope and future of Africa... and one mischevieous little boy :-)