The next morning started with a big drive ahead – the Benin to Togo border crossing. We started the day early with breakfast not starting when breakfast was supposed to be available. This is one of those small details that sounds petty until you are the person standing there, mentally calculating how much coffee, protein, and patience you can fit into a shrinking window of time before getting into a car for several hours.
The answer, in this case, was: not much.
So we ate what we could, surrendered the rest to the chaos gods, and headed west toward Grand-Popo, a coastal town in southwestern Benin near the border with Togo. Grand-Popo sits in the watery world of the Mono River delta, where mangroves, lagoons, beaches, fishing villages, and river life all blur together. UNESCO describes the wider Mono Biosphere Reserve as a landscape of mangroves, savannah, lagoons, floodplains, forests, and sacred forests, where many residents live from agriculture, coconut and oil palm, forestry, and fishing.
Daniel told us that “Popo” meant “big bottoms,” supposedly referring to how local women in the area were described back in the day. I have not verified this etymology with a panel of linguists, historians, and women with opinions — and frankly, I’m not sure I want to be present for that hearing — but it did make for a memorable introduction to the town.
We enjoy being on the road from Benin to Togo because you see a slice of life that you wouldn’t otherwise see if flying. For instance we got to see chickens being transported on the roof of a car, as well as salt, nuts, and palm oil being sold at various road side stops.
Along the way, Daniel stopped and bought us kuli-kuli, which he described as fried peanut butter. That description is both accurate and completely inadequate. It came in crunchy little rings, salty and rich, with the dangerous quality of a snack that pretends it is just a snack while quietly becoming your whole personality. I liked it. Brendan loved it. He would continue eating the rings over the next couple of days with the commitment of a man who had discovered both a new food group and a new religion.
When we arrived in Grand-Popo, we met our local guide, climbed into a boat, and pushed out across the water toward a remote village where local women made salt. There is something about traveling by boat that makes a place feel older and more intimate. Roads impose order. Rivers negotiate. The boat moved through a world of reeds, palms, mudbanks, and water that seemed to belong to no single category — neither river nor sea, neither village nor wilderness, but something in between.
When we arrived at the village, children came running from every direction. They yelled, sang, laughed, grabbed, and surrounded us in a swarm of small hands and very big energy. It was not my favorite moment. I like children in reasonable quantities and durations, preferably when they are not all attached to me at once like a human Velcro. Brendan handled it better than I did, which is good, because one of us needed to represent maturity.
The salt-making process itself was fascinating. The women worked with the local materials and water, turning the landscape into something practical and essential. It was physical, repetitive, and rooted in place — the kind of work that reminds you how abstract modern life has become. Most of us buy salt in a cardboard tube with a girl holding an umbrella on it and never think about the labor, water, fire, and knowledge that once stood behind something so basic.
I was glad we saw it. I was also glad the stop was quick. Both things can be true.
From there, we continued by boat toward the estuary, where the river meets the ocean. The Bouche du Roy area near Grand-Popo and Comè is recognized for its mangrove ecosystem, birdlife, endangered species, and community conservation efforts; one conservation project notes that the area includes more than 9,600 hectares and involves more than 17 villages. The water opened wider, the Atlantic appeared with its usual dramatic self-importance, and we watched fishermen working along the edge where river current and ocean force collided.
We also found more shells to add to our growing collection from Mauritania and Senegal. At some point, a traveler picking up shells becomes a person with a shell collection, and a person with a shell collection becomes someone who must justify luggage weight to themselves in increasingly elaborate ways.
Because it was Sunday, Daniel suggested we stop at a Celestial Church service. The Celestial Church of Christ was founded in Porto-Novo, Benin, in 1947 by Samuel Bilehou Joseph Oshoffa, and today it has parishes far beyond Benin. Daniel described the service we would see as a blending of Christianity and Vodun-influenced practice, though the church itself formally identifies as Christian and explicitly rejects fetish practices in its membership rules. As with almost everything in West Africa, lived reality seemed more layered than the tidy labels outsiders try to put on it.
Brendan was less interested than I was, but we stopped anyway. Daniel arranged permission, and we sat quietly in the back on different sides (men and women were separated). The service was in a language we didn’t understand, but we had clearly arrived during the sermon portion, and some things are universal. Namely: people trying not to fall asleep in church.
There were heads nodding. Eyes closing. Bodies doing that heroic little jerk back to consciousness. I have seen this in churches, mosques, temples, lecture halls, corporate trainings, and probably at least one mandatory safety briefing on a cruise ship. Humanity may disagree on theology, but we are united in our struggle against long speeches in warm rooms.
Then the music started.
Unfortunately, Brendan was sitting directly behind the speaker system, which had apparently been calibrated for communicating with ships offshore or possibly low-flying aircraft. A woman began singing — or screeching, depending on your relationship to pitch — and the sound hit such a sharp frequency that Brendan’s left ear, the same one where he had ruptured his eardrum diving in Iceland, started to hurt. He excused himself and retreated to the back of the church, where he could preserve what remained of his hearing.
From my safer vantage point, the lively portion was interesting to watch. People danced, clapped, swayed, and gave themselves over to the rhythm. A baby wrapped to its mother’s back bounced along as she danced, completely unfazed, as if being carried through a wall of sound was just a normal Sunday morning activity. We left shortly after, while the service was still going strong. The singer was decidedly bad, really bad, but no one else seemed to notice.
Then came the Benin to Togo border.
Brendan had his Benin e-visa on his phone. A perfectly valid, government-issued electronic visa. The kind of thing one might reasonably assume could remain electronic, given the name. But the border agents wanted it printed. I had mine printed, because sometimes my travel anxiety accidentally passes as preparedness. Brendan was pretty annoyed that I also didn’t print his out.
This meant Daniel and Brendan had to go into the nearby village looking for a printer on a Sunday. This was not, as you might imagine, a quick errand. They asked around, followed leads, found nothing, asked more people, and eventually located a man who brought them to a friend. The friend raised a garage door and revealed an entire computer-and-printer setup, like a secret immigration-office side quest.
Then came the next challenge: getting the visa from Brendan’s phone to the printer without internet. There was fumbling, hotspot hunting, WhatsApp relaying, and the special kind of stress that comes from knowing a border crossing now depends on whether a PDF can successfully move through the ether. Eventually Brendan got onto someone’s hotspot, sent the visa to Daniel, Daniel sent it to the printer man, and the sacred document emerged on paper, as the border gods apparently required.
The whole thing took at least an hour.
When they came back, Brendan drenched in sweat, we went through the normal irritating hoops to leave Benin and enter Togo. Even though we already had the necessary information in our visas, we had to write it all down again, including our parents’ names and phone numbers. The agents didn’t understand where our addresses were in America, which was fair enough — why would they? — so phone numbers became the compromise. Border forms often feel less like security and more like ritual theater: write the thing, stamp the thing, pass the thing, repeat the thing you already wrote on the other thing.
You must, of course, remain pleasant. Border agents may be irritating, but they also temporarily hold your destiny in their stamp pads.
Finally, we made it through the Benin to Togo border crossing.
We stopped for a quick lunch in Aného, just across the Benin to Togo border. I finally got the burger I had been craving, while Brendan ordered chicken in peanut sauce. He had hoped for chunks of chicken and instead received a whole leg with skin, which required a bit more archaeological work than expected. But after border bureaucracy, almost any meal feels like a diplomatic breakthrough.
From there, we headed toward a remote village to see a Vodun ceremony. But as we arrived, Daniel noticed a Vodun funeral happening in a neighboring village. So we stopped there first.
And this, unexpectedly, became one of the lovelier moments of the day.
We were welcomed in, and some older women pulled me (and then eventually Brendan) into the dancing.
The funeral was not somber in the Western sense. It was full of music, movement, color, and community — grief expressed through celebration rather than silence. Everyone was kind, generous, and open with us, even though we had arrived as strangers on the edge of something deeply personal.
Then we walked over to the original village for the ceremony we had planned to see. Before entering, there were special rites. Something was poured out before us. Gunpowder was lit. Only then were we welcomed into the space.
We sat and observed while the drumming built and held steady. The music was excellent — layered, urgent, and relentless in the way ceremonial music can be, less like entertainment and more like a current people step into. Dancers moved through the dust. The air thickened with heat, rhythm, and attention.
We saw at least four people — three women and one man — enter trance states. Daniel explained that, within Vodun practice, this is understood as a moment when a spirit inhabits the person and conveys an important message to the community. I won’t pretend I understood everything we saw. I didn’t. But I understood that it mattered. Sometimes the respectful role of a traveler is not to interpret, but simply to witness without trying to own the meaning.
Eventually, we had seen enough and were ready to continue onward. The day had already contained salt-making, river villages, shell collecting, church naps, speaker trauma, printer drama, border forms, peanut sauce, a funeral, and spirit possession. Honestly, a lesser itinerary would have called it quits somewhere around the secret garage printer.
At last, we reached Lomé, the capital of Togo. Togo is a narrow West African country running inland from the Gulf of Guinea, bordered by Ghana, Benin, and Burkina Faso. Lomé sits in the far southwest of the country, pressed close against Ghana, and its western edge runs right up to the border.
We drove in on a Sunday evening, passing beaches lined with restaurants and people out enjoying the night. The city felt alive and coastal, full of lights, movement, and that particular end-of-weekend energy where everyone is trying to squeeze a little more life out of Sunday before Monday ruins everything.
On our way to the hotel, we saw Lomé’s Independence Monument which commemorates Togo’s independence from France on April 27, 1960. Its symbolism is direct and powerful: a man breaks the chains of domination while a woman holds the flame of independence, which is relit every year before the national holiday. After crossing from Benin into Togo through the usual paperwork gauntlet, the monument felt like a fitting reminder that borders in West Africa are modern lines drawn over much older histories.
Our hotel was the tall, modern Hotel 2 Février, positioned at Independence Square. The hotel’s own site describes it as a Lomé landmark, 102 meters tall, opened in 1980, and the tallest building in Togo. The name refers to February 2, 1974, the date associated with Togo’s nationalization of its phosphate mines after President Gnassingbé Eyadéma survived a plane crash earlier that year. Brendan thought it was a stupid name for a hotel. I can’t say he was wrong, though I respect any country willing to turn a politically symbolic date into a luxury hospitality brand.
The hotel itself was very nice and modern. Our room may have been the best of the trip, competing only with our room on Gorée. After the long day we had just had, walking into that cool, comfortable, high-rise room felt like entering a different universe. One with elevators, soft bedding, lighting that worked, and no urgent need to produce printed visa documentation. And the view from the room was overlooking Independence Square.
We wandered around the hotel a little, enjoyed the oversized furniture, visited the pool area with an Indian Restaurant, and then did something we had not done all trip: ordered room service.
The hotel had an Indian restaurant, so we ordered garlic naan, chicken biryani, kadhai subzi, and I tried a 228 Djama beer. The food was excellent. More than a little spicy, but excellent. Hands down, it was the best food we had on the Africa portion of the trip. If that Indian restaurant existed in Denver, we would order from it constantly and then pretend we had “cooked” because we put the leftovers onto plates.
It was a great night in.
And after a day of river villages, Vodun ceremonies, border bureaucracy, and the ongoing international war against Brendan’s left ear, a quiet hotel room with spicy biryani felt not like an anticlimax, but like grace. Travel does that sometimes. It stretches you thin, overwhelms you, fills your head with drums and your pockets with shells, and then hands you garlic naan in a bathrobe.
Which is honestly one of the better endings a day can have.