Benin Part 3: Porto Novo

After the voodoo festival we made our journey Eastward toward Nigeria. We went to Porto Novo, a city highly influenced by the Portuguese. The town overlooks green lagoons full of little wooden boats and people digging sand out of the bottom of the lagoons to sell on shore. The city itself is on a hill which adds to the slightly European feel. Ornamented, brightly colored buildings, museums and monuments mingled with shacks and street side vendors.

We stayed at SONGHAI, a sort of agriculture/agro-business commune and education center where they promote local agricultural techniques. It was really quite astounding. You'll have to look it up, but I believe that the center has been there for approximately 25 years. It incorporates a wide range of agro-business: fish farming, soy, snails, bananas, moringa, essences, sales, edible oils, marketing, water sanitation, machines and more. They have a nice little hotel and several restaurants and their campus does give the feeling of an agricultural university. Although I didn't get to critically look at their statistics, they did claim to be 100% self-sustaining now. It gave me a sort of window into a potentially sustainable model of development in West Africa.

In town we also ventured off to see the monuments and the big mosque. The mosque looked rather Portuguese in influence and had bright colors of paint that were pealing in places. Above the back door was an analog clock (no longer functioning) that looked like it could be from the 70s. On the way we found a large white stone monument of a man in traditional clothing. I am not sure who he was, but it reminded us all of statues in Lord of the Rings.

Later that day we took a trip to a hotel bar that overlooked the lagoons. I had a coffee and fries while we lounged on leather couches and watched the boats pass by on their quest for sand.

One of the days we took one of the little boats up the lagoon to a village built on stilts. There are several such villages in Benin that were built to avoid slave trade or for other defensive reasons. They are built in areas that are covered in water much of the year, so everyone has boats to travel from house to house. Farm animals are tethered to an island made of hay that they slowly eat as the water levels drop. Even the clinic is built on stilts and has an aquatic ambulance. It was a very different feel than my dry Burkinabe village.

Porto Novo was my personal favorite city on the trip because of the architecture and the scenery. I have heard of others who didn't appreciate it as much. To each their own, I suppose.
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