This was our morning leaving Senegal for Benin. There is a particular kind of early morning airport departure that feels less like travel and more like being quietly processed by an invisible machine. You wake up too early, say goodbye to people who have somehow become part of the fabric of your trip, and then shuffle through security with the dull optimism of someone who believes coffee may yet save them.
We said goodbye to Birame and Djibe, tipped them, and headed into the airport for our flight to Cotonou. Security, mercifully, was a breeze. The travel gods, who so often prefer slapstick, gave us a small gift: I had been watching the flight like a hawk and managed to get us an exit row with an empty middle seat. At this stage in travel, an empty middle seat is not a seating arrangement. It is a spiritual experience.
Brendan still wasn’t feeling great, but skipping breakfast helped, which is one of those tragic adult realizations: sometimes the best meal is no meal. The flight stopped briefly in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where some passengers got off, and then we continued onward to Cotonou. We had been mildly sweating the fact that our middle names were not listed on our Benin visas — because nothing says “African adventure” quite like wondering whether a missing middle name will strand you at immigration — but nobody cared. Or at least nobody cared enough to make it our problem, which is the best kind of bureaucracy.
Benin sits on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, bordered by Togo, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Porto-Novo is the official capital, but Cotonou is the country’s largest city, chief port, and de facto administrative and economic center. Formerly known as Dahomey, Benin was under French colonial rule and became independent in 1960 before taking its present name in 1975.
We collected our bag and met Daniel, our guide, and Kossi, our driver, who whisked us the ten minutes to Maison Rouge Cotonou Hotel. After weeks of longer drives, border crossings, questionable stomach decisions, and the general logistics Olympics that travel can become, a ten-minute airport transfer felt suspiciously civilized.
Maison Rouge was a lovely boutique hotel filled with art — not the sterile “hotel art” designed to offend no one and inspire absolutely nothing, but real art with color, texture, and personality.
Our room was comfortable, and dinner that night was, without question, the best meal we had eaten in Africa up to that point. I had a poke bowl, which unexpectedly came with cooked fish. Was it still a poke bowl? Philosophically debatable. Was it good? Yes. CJ had a salad to start, and then we both had delicious ravioli followed by a light frozen cinnamon vanilla mousse. Finally: yum. Not polite yum. Actual yum.
The next morning, we set out with Daniel and Kossi to explore Cotonou. Our first stop was the Monument Amazone, a towering statue honoring the women warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey. The monument is 30 meters high and pays tribute to the Agoodjiés, or Minons, the all-female military corps that existed in Dahomey until the end of the nineteenth century. Standing beneath her, rifle and sword at the ready, it was hard not to feel the deliberate force of the image: Benin looking backward toward its own history and forward toward a future it wants to define for itself.
From there we spent most of our time along a long stretch of wall covered in murals — a kind of outdoor gallery telling stories of Benin, its people, its history, and its aspirations. There were scenes of daily life, cultural pride, and even visions of space travel, which I loved. Why shouldn’t Benin dream in orbit? Cotonou’s graffiti wall has been described as Africa’s longest graffiti mural, stretching more than 940 meters and involving dozens of artists from Benin, the wider African continent, and abroad.
There was something refreshing about seeing a country paint its own story on a wall. Not hiding the past. Not pretending the future will arrive neatly dressed and on schedule. Just putting it all out there in color.
After Cotonou, we drove north toward Lake Nokoué, where we transferred from car to boat and headed out to Ganvié, often called the “Venice of Africa.” I am generally suspicious of places described as the Venice of anywhere, mostly because actual Venice already has a lot to answer for in terms of crowds, dampness, and people pretending they are enjoying 18-euro coffee. But Ganvié was different.
The village rises from the lake on stilts, its houses balanced above the water, its streets replaced by narrow channels, its traffic made of wooden boats. Ganvié was founded by the Tofinu people, who took refuge on Lake Nokoué to escape capture during the era of slave raiding; today it is one of Africa’s best-known lake villages and has been on Benin’s UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 1996.
There was fishing activity everywhere. Men worked from boats, women moved through the water with goods, and reeds had been placed in sections of the lake to create fish farms — aquatic traps that attracted and concentrated fish. Kids passed in boats, drumming and slapping the water with paddles, turning the lake itself into percussion. It was chaotic and rhythmic and beautiful, though also clearly a living place, not a museum exhibit arranged for our benefit.
That is always the tension in places like Ganvié. We arrive with cameras and curiosity; people there are simply living their lives. We bought some local art, floated through the village, and then, almost before I felt like I had fully absorbed the place (but after I managed to drop my lens cover cap in the water which the boatswain luckily found!), we were back in the boat heading toward the car and onward to Ouidah.
Ouidah is one of those towns where history sits very close to the surface. It is known today as a major center of Vodun, the traditional religion that originated in this region and is still widely practiced in Benin. Every January, Ouidah hosts Vodun Days, drawing worshippers and travelers for ceremonies, music, exhibitions, and public celebrations meant in part to counter the cartoonish stereotypes that have long distorted Vodun abroad.
Our first stop was the Python Temple. There, in one of the more surreal moments of the trip, we draped a friendly python around our necks. Friendly is, admittedly, a word I prefer to apply to golden retrievers and bartenders, but this python was calm and tolerant in the way of an animal who has clearly met many tourists and judged us all accordingly.
More interesting than the photo-op was peeking into the temple and seeing a whole mass of pythons balled together, writhing gently in the dimness. Daniel began explaining Vodun traditions to us, especially the idea that an object can become a fetish — not in the Western pop-culture sense, but as a sacred object or intermediary — if people believe in it, pray through it, and treat it as a conduit between the human and divine.
It was a helpful reminder that religions are often stranger from the outside than from within. Every tradition has objects, rituals, symbols, intermediaries, and things outsiders misunderstand. Some have candles and incense. Some have relics. Some have pythons. Humans, across cultures, are always reaching for the unseen and then arguing about whose ladder is more reasonable.
Lunch was at a local place owned by a Belgian woman. Brendan ordered the reliable chicken and rice, while I ordered a burger and received what can only be described as a conceptual burger: bun, toppings, general burger architecture, but with chicken nuggets in the center where a beef patty traditionally performs its duties. She said it wasn’t bad, and it immediately reminded us of the hot dog sandwich incident on a cruise years earlier. Travel has many gifts. One of them is the ongoing destruction of food taxonomy. The Belgian owner also seemed generally nonplussed when came down the stairs to the bar kiosk to ask for ketchup, which she had to squeeze directly from a huge bottle onto my plate. I kept saying “more” and she looked aghast. Likely due to the expense of importing foreign products which she had told us about earlier, but possibly because of the pure Americanism of the request.
From lunch, the day turned heavier.
We visited the square where enslaved people were auctioned, and then continued toward the beach and the Door of No Return. Ouidah was one of the major ports of the Atlantic slave trade along the Bight of Benin. The Slave Route in Ouidah commemorates the final four kilometers walked by enslaved Africans before being forced onto ships bound for the Americas, ending at the memorial known as the Door of No Return. UNESCO has also supported work connected to Benin’s efforts to identify, preserve, and nominate sites associated with this route and its wider historical memory.
There are places where language fails because the facts are too large for any one sentence. Standing by the Atlantic, looking at the surf, it was impossible not to think of movement in its most brutal form — not travel, not wandering, not exploration, but forced removal. People taken from home, marched to the sea, and pushed into a future they did not choose. The same ocean that, for us, meant breeze and horizon and hotel views had once meant rupture.
That is the contradiction of travel in West Africa. Beauty and grief live beside each other. A bright mural in Cotonou. A lake village built from survival. A python temple full of sacred breath and muscle. A beach that remembers what humans did to each other.
By late afternoon, we settled into our beach hotel, Casa del Papa, where we were given the bungalow farthest from the main office and, therefore, farthest from any realistic hope of internet. We did what modern travelers do in such circumstances: migrated toward the bar like digital wildebeests to suck down Wi-Fi and pretend this was a normal survival strategy.
Dinner was technically a buffet, but they made us fresh pasta on the spot, which was very appreciated. Food in Benin was already looking better than what we had encountered in Senegal and The Gambia, and I say this with deep respect for all places and a very practical love of not being hungry.
Then, just as we were getting ready to leave dinner, the power went out. It had started raining, and our bungalow was, of course, located in what felt like a different administrative district. We had brought our Kindles to read by the bar earlier, which now left us with the classic traveler’s conundrum: get soaked, abandon reading material, or attempt diplomacy with the front desk. Since I had already completed both my chapter and also a grad school recommendation letter for an employee (which I had put off unfortunately until the last minute), we decided to check with the front desk.
I went to ask for an umbrella. The front desk had one, but would not give it to her because she couldn’t bring it back immediately, and apparently the umbrella was “for people.” This is literally what the front desk attendant told me. This was fascinating, since I was, unless I had missed some important paperwork, people. The logic had a very French flavor to it — elegant in theory, useless in practice, and somehow delivered as if we were the unreasonable ones.
Thankfully, Brendan remembered we had our own umbrella. So he offered to take theirs, walk me back, and then return it using ours. This worked, technically, though Brendan’s feet got soaked in the process. A small price to pay for resolving the Umbrella Crisis of Ouidah, which historians have somehow failed to adequately cover. Note: hotel guests at Casa del Papa are not people, and are unable to use the hotel umbrellas since the umbrellas are only for people.
Benin had only just begun for us, but already it felt layered in a way that demanded more attention than a simple itinerary checklist. Cotonou gave us art and ambition. Ganvié showed us adaptation and survival on water. Ouidah brought us face to face with Vodun, colonial memory, sacred pythons, and the unbearable weight of the slave route. And somewhere in between all of that, there was ravioli, chicken-nugget burger confusion, and a bureaucratic umbrella standoff in the rain.
Which is to say: travel, as usual, refused to be one thing.
It was beautiful. It was uncomfortable. It was funny when it had no business being funny. It reminded us that countries are never just their monuments or their tragedies or their hotel dinners. They are all of it at once — the sacred and the ridiculous, the remembered and the improvised, the official story painted on a wall and the unofficial one told by wet shoes in the dark.
And Benin, from the very beginning, seemed determined to tell us all of it.