This weekend I will be heading to Parakou, a city about 6 hours from the capital of Cotonou, in central Benin. Thinking about this last night, I realized that I still have not written about my trip to Porto Novo, 3 weekends ago. But, better late than never! Getting this trip down in ink would be a good idea because it’s probably been my most adventurous experience in Benin. You cna also expect a post about my time in Parakou when I get back as well :)
I travelled to Porto Novo with my buddy Stephen, who is doing a volunteer placement in Cotonou. On Saturday morning I headed down to Cotonou and then we caught a bus at the market going to Porto Novo. It is about an hour and a half long drive, and it’s really gorgeous because there are plenty of lagoons and stretches of open greenery on the way there. It was nice to just sit and chat with Stephen a bit, especially since we talked a lot about how different it is for us here than back home in Montreal. The ride was therapeutic for me, because there was finally someone who could relate to a lot of what I had been feeling.
Porto Novo is the official capital of Benin, but that designation is a little cloudy because the seat of government is Cotonou. All of the embassies are in Cotonou as well, but the official government buildings are in Porto Novo. It’s a smaller city of about 200,000 people compared to Cotonou’s 2 million. It’s generally considered to be a cleaner, nicer place than Cotonou as well. Since I was expecting that, I was kind of shocked by what we saw when we finally got there. It seemed just like Cotonou, except less crowded. However, I learned that I had to hold off judgement, because we had gotten off at the wrong stop and ended up on the outskirts of the city, rather than the downtown area.
For our first sight, we decided to visit the Ethnographic Museum. Previously I had been to two museums in Ouidah, and this was by far the better experience, mostly because the guide spoke English. I learned a lot about Beninois culture and the voodoo religion. Pictures were strictly forbidden, but they had some really cool masks that used to be used in religious ceremonies for different purposes. Most masks were carved out of a single piece of wood. One such elaborately carved mask, about the size of a small projector style TV had a monkey bearing a terrifying facial expression carved into the surface. Once this mask was placed on an individual, that person had to die. The Fa of the community (the rough equivalent of an Oracle in ancient Greek tradition), would receive a message from God telling him who had to don the mask. There was a set up of a typical residence of a Fa, showing a tableau of figures participating in a Fa reading. Really cool stuff.
After the museum, we spent time wandering around downtown (we just stumbled upon it), checking out a church that we found and park at the heart of the city. One thing I noticed in Porto Novo was an abundance of mosques. I think we sighted at least 8, and this is a big change from largely Voodun Ouidah and Roman Catholic Cotonou. About 20% of Benin’s population is Muslim, 50% Voodun, and 30% Christian (mostly Roman Catholic).
After waiting about an hour and a half for an overpriced dinner, we headed to a hotel. We found, tracked, and murdered about 5 massive roaches in our room before going to bed, but the night was generally still quite paranoia filled and uncomfortable for me. Thankfully, we were outta there in the morning and back in the city. We consulted our list of sites to see and decided that it would be a good idea to visit the Songhai centre for stability, so we caught a couple motos going there.
I can honestly say that the Songhai centre is the most impressive infrastructure I have seen in Benin. The centre is a huge complex of housing, agricultural, and power generating buildings. The people who work on the farms and with the animals live in the complex. It creates its own power and so it sustains its own operation. There is a visitor’s centre with a restaurant selling food made exclusively from the produce of the centre, and the list goes on. Unfortunately, the centre was closed for Sunday, so we had to sneak in and didn’t benefit from a guide.
We had some fruit at the restaurant but decided not to have lunch there and took off for this place supposedly close to the government buildings, Place Bayol, but it ended up being the same park we had visited the day before! Thankfully the moto drivers took a route that showed us where the government buildings could be found. After seeing the main government building, and the much less impressive others, we visited another park close by where we were delighted to find monkeys J We hung out there for a while and then took off to explore the city a bit more on foot. We had an awesome lunch at this roadside place, and got to see many brilliant mosques and churches. By the end of the day, we realized that we had stumbled upon every tourist site in the city, and then some!
Tourism in Benin is not like it would tourism back home. To be honest, there’s not as much to see, just because the museums and similar tourist attractions are still quite underdeveloped. A lot of the older buildings have been destroyed or poorly maintained. Some of the best moments of the trip came just from walking through the city itself: I remember one time me and Stephen had to walk single file through a crowded market, and just taking in all the sights, sounds, and wide array of smells while being trapped so claustrophobically was such an experience. Since Porto Novo was quite small, all the sights were accessible by foot and so we didn’t have to take transportation from place to place, which just added to the experience. And finally, I ended up spending about 45 bucks on the whole trip. Not bad for a weekend away!
Here I've included some pictures which will have to suffice until I take the time out to put a slideshow into this page with more pictures. :)
More coming soon!
