Legba and chums

So anyway about this voudoun ceremony. The important things to remember are:

1. Yes, several chickens did perish
2. Yes, I did watch
3. Yes, I am therefore a very lapsed vegetarian
4. At least the chooks were drunk on palm wine at the time

It all came upon us a bit by accident. We were being taken out on a tour of some of the local villages by a man named Doctor Foue. He wasn't a proper doctor, but he wore a pair of gold-rimmed mirror shades so, along with the name, the whole setup commanded a bit of respect.

We'd cruised round the lagoon for a little while - peeking at a mangrove stand, eating coconut flesh, buying crayfish etc - when we came upon a village where the Doctor needed to get a wound on his foot seen to by a real doctor. Wandering through the backstreets, we can hear the sound of drumming coming from a neighbouring compound as he shows us a statue of Legba, a voudoun god who protects villages from thieves etc and in this instance was decked out in a petticoat and an alarmingly-proportioned phallus. As you can imagine, it's all feeling a bit Live and Let Die. However, casting such thoughts aside we ask to go into the compound and find ourselves in the middle of an initiation ceremony.

For the most part, this involves a lot of drumming on a snakeskin talking drum and playing of fish-shaped tubular bells. Some of the older women come up from time to time to do a dance, a samba-like shuffle with much circling of the hands about the hips. A quartered circle is drawn on the ground with white powder, and black powder ignited on top of it; singing is added to the mix, although I haven't the foggiest what it's about. We're sat on plank benches around a thatched shelter, and the "main street" of the compound is stretching away opposite; on the left is an alcove with some votive items in it: a bowl full of water and fresh water-weeds at the entrance, some feathers and reed brushes, paintings of mermaids, women carrying snakes, and three-headed figures. Under a basket next to the entrance to the alcove are the chickens, which are presumably having what they take to be a bit of a party.

Of all places, this is the first place in Benin where we get to encounter a load of English-speakers. One of the villagers - singing now, but normally a drummer - comes up and starts explaining the whole shebang to us. He's learned English because there is - of all things - a Finnish-Beninois cultural centre in town, and there are a couple of Finnish artists who are sitting watching the same ceremony. We're offered some shots of palm wine, which make the whole thing still more pleasant and hazy, and sit listening to the increasingly complex drum rythms. I haven't the foggiest how everyone keeps in time.

Finally the chook's last meal is approaching, and we go off to the alcove; inside a room just off it, something is going on but we can't make out what. A priest slits the chookie's throat and chucks it out of the room, and a young woman comes reeling out, doing the same samba-like dance and with a tear down one cheek.

This all seems very distant now because we've just spent the day grinding through the gears of Beninois bureaucracy. Our lives are now one long struggle to get visas. However, we did decide at lunchtime - when the smog, the bargaining, and the official intransigence, were getting to us a bit much - to splash out on lunch at Cotonou's premier pizza parlour, where we got fantastic woodfired pizza and got to peek over our shoulders at the city's business elite making and breaking deals.

Now don't be upset at me for not eating local food. I did that last night, and it had crab legs in it. Spent half the night with Guezo's revenge, or whatever they call travellers' diarrhoea in these parts. I'll stick to bread, plantain, and woodfired pizza for a few days.

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Cotonou, a week after arriving in the wee hours of the morning and
deciding it was all a bit much...

This ain't the capital of Benin but it's the biggest city, and it would
also be in the running for the "pollution", "noise" and "sprawl"
categories of the urban awards. So despite the fact that our
eye-wideningly pricey hotel had a lovely swimming pool (if you didn't
mind watching the cranes loading shipping containers in the dock just
beyond the diving boards) and a shower of sorts - when the water was on - we decided to split the town in favour a beach break in Grand Popo, a
villageish thing close to the border with Togo.

I'm told that "popo" is the word that French kids use to describe what
they leave behind after a more emphatic session in the toilet; so you
can imagine we weren't expecting too much of the swimming. But the name
isn't a reference to ahem outfall but to the local tribe, the Popos, who
have over the years hung out pretty much everywhere along the Beninois
coastline.

That said, the swimming was a tad intense in its own right. A huge beach
stretches almost uninterrupted along the entire West African coastline
from Cote d'Ivoire to the mouth of the Niger in Nigeria; the sand
continually carried eastwards by the pounding waves which carve and
scrape at the coast. Grand Popo itself, despite being a reasonably old
town, doesn't have any old buildings - they're all in the sea, swallowed
up by the advancing waves.

'Course, we thought we were sophisticated Sydneysiders, having got our
badges and proficiency certificates for being dumped by a big wave at
Bronte beach on Christmas Day. Nonetheless, the glance down
the 45 degree sand slope to the broiling briny was enough to put lumps
in our throats; and when we got in, there was a sudden and unexpected
step where we went from waist-deep to shoulder deep, all the time
watching a 3ft wave bearing down on us faster than we could outrun it.
In addition to which, we'd already been shown the old Portuguese cannon
which the locals use as a fetish charm to prevent shark attacks, which
isn't great for the confidence (although maybe it was - at least we had
a fetish charm to ward them off).

Anyway, this story is coming to an abrupt end because so is my timed
internet session. The long and the short of it is, we got in the sea and
it weren't so bad. We got a bit tired, is all.

Back in Cotonou now. Much noise and pollution. Much net cafes too - in
the next thrilling instalment, gasp as we watch a proper voodoo
ceremony, complete with unfortunate chickens.

Plastered of Paris

So we turn up at Gare du Nord armed only with crisps and tea, which counts more as an aid mission than an invasion to be honest. Catherine on the far side of the gate, who takes us home to Batignolles where we are to sleep on a giant lilo and be fed pain au chocolat and saucisson etc.

Actually, and shockingly, even Romain the Proper Frenchman doesn't know the names of all the various patisseries on offer downstairs at the bakehouse. This morning the shopfrauen n'ont plus de pain au chocolat so we got some pistachio and choccie drop turnover things which were a delight. But no one knew what it was called (except in the shop, where we were too discombobulated to ask). Then there's something called a Salammbo, which bears no relation to the rude novel by Flaubert, and lots of poppyseed stuff from the Jewish bakery in the Marais - where they also sold Yiddish sandwiches, which confuses me because I want to eat a sandwich, not talk to it.

So you may be asking why we're in Paris and not, as the below suggests, in Benin. Well you see to get to Francophone West Africa you need to go via France unless you want to remortgage the house or sell a kidney etc, therefore to get to Benin we needed to aller au Eurostar and take advantage of our friends. Which, given that I'm a Brit who has had a popular spare room in Sydney for two-and-a-half years, is an advantage I think I'm owed.

Last night we sat around quaffing martinis while Romain made regular sorties to the kitchen to rustle gyoza, croquette things, saucisson, gherkins, and those poppyseed jobbies. Then walnuts from the holiday home in the Loire, my goodness. All of us become a bit drunk, a bit happy, a bit exhausted, therefore bed. There is a photograph of a lipstick-stained martini glass and a rubble of walnut shells, which I might post some time.

Tomorrow we might make it to a cemetery, hopefully just for a walk. Though if we eat any more buttery boulangerie, a more permanent move wouldn't be out of the question.

Hanging with Dahomeys

Well.

This year's exile began when some sort of committee buried deep within the Ghanaian government decided, in is wisdom, that Kate and myself were Undesirables who shouldn't be let in, no, not even to look at their elephants. Thus our original plan - to spend two months teaching stuff to Ghanaian kids - is pissed up the wall and a protracted dispute with insurers begins so that we can prise our airfare from their grubby grasping hands.

Anyway, after a profound plan-change we're going to Benin instead, which older folk might have known as Dahomey after the 19th-century warrior kingdom of the same name. Country names in West Africa are confusing like that:

Imperialists gave BENIN the name of DAHOMEY; its territory is that of the old DAHOMEY kingdom and hasn't a lot to do with the BENIN kingdom in NIGERIA.

Imperialists gave GHANA the name of the GOLD COAST (in 1958 they dismantled the Gold Coast, loaded it onto a container ship and put it on the open market; some white-shoe property developers from southeast Queensland bought it in a job-lot along with a skip full of children's shoes and the rest it history); its territory is that of the old ASHANTI kingdom and hasn't a lot to do with the GHANA kingdom in MAURITANIA.

OK, I guess that's the only two.

This is really just a postette so that I can see what the blog looks like, so feel free to ignore.