Easter adventures in Benin, part 1

I learned a new word in French this weekend: doucement.  It means "softly," or, if spoken in a desperate tone with explanatory hand motions, "please slow down this taxi  before you kill us all."  I was hoping to expand my vocabulary a little further, and include things like, "if you stop clapping with the loud rap music and put your hands on the steering wheel, we won't drift into the opposite lane" and "why is there a shark on the back of your motorbike?"  These are things you can't find in your average French phrasebook, unfortunately.

The four of us started out from ship on Friday, walking with our packs to the nearest gas station, where we found a car driver who agreed to take us to the Togo-Benin border. His previous passenger (who thankfully spoke quite good English) thoughtfully bartered for us, and so we all piled into the backseat with our camping gear.  It was a tight fit, but we did manage to get the door closed.

We breezed through immigration on both sides with few problems, enthusiastically welcomed by the Beninoise immigration officials...Barack Obama?  Welcome, welcome!!   Melisa and I bought our dinner for later on the street - avocados and bread and Laughing Cow cheese and little mangoes - while Noel and Justin bartered for the taxi to Cotonou.  A few hours later found us bartering for a taxi yet again in downtown Cotonou, with about 20 zemi (motorcycle taxi) drivers looking on and offering helpful commentary and directions.  A young man named Alley helped us negotiate the system as we refused zemis again and again, and finally found a small motorized 3-wheeled vehicle with a driver that agreed to take us out to the hostel grounds where we would be camping on the beach.

We later learned that the beach was out well past civilization, 11 kilometers down a a sandy dirt road lined with occasional palm-leaf shacks.  We had made it about 7 km down the road and just past a police checkpoint, when our driver decided he had gone far enough.  We stopped at a small concrete building with a sign that announced the International Theater School of Benin.  The hostel was too far to go tonight, the driver said, so we would need to pay him more money.  Almost twice as much as we had discussed previously, in fact, and he also announced that he didn't actually know where the hostel was.  After some negotiation, a bit of walking back towards the police checkpoint for directions (on our part) and some sitting in the sand and refusing to discuss anything (on his), along with attempted directions in French and Fon from a rather drunk villager, we found ourselves on the side of the beach road with our backpacks...and no tricycle taxi.  As we started to walk down the road the rest of the way to the campsite, our thoughtful drunk friend woke up the Theater school staff and requested a ride for us.

We finally made it to the hostel, set up our campsite by headlamp and flashlight, and sat down to our avocado and cheese sandwiches, thankful that we had actually made it all the way.  Melisa tucked me into my mosquito net cocoon, and we fell asleep to a full moon and the rhythmic crashing of waves on the beach.

To be continued!