The Door of No Return monument on the beach in Ouidah Ouidah is a significant town on the beautiful Benin coastline because of its historically significant slave trade sites. Among these is a famous “Tree of Forgetting” that captured slaves would walk around in circles – men nine times and women seven times, in an attempt to forget and leave behind their memories of their West African lives before being forced into slavery. The tree marks the spot from which there was a wel

The Stilt Village of Ganvie The bus journey was actually quite comfortable. If you can stand the fact that they insisted on blaring loud gospel music for hours starting at 6am, followed by God-awful Benin-ois soap operas played back to back for hours on end, all of which had essentially the exact same plot. There would be a room of men shouting at one guy, the victim. He would eventually get beaten with a stick and have his shirt taken from him while all the men continued

Beautiful bird in Penjari The night in Fada N’Gourma luckily passed without incident, unless you count the fact that Mike and I both got up in the night and had to pee in our shower, since our bathroom was sans toilet. We had to get transport to Pama and then onto the border with Benin from there, so the first order was to find a ride to where minibuses were heading south. We had been seeing these tricycle trucks that were flatbed trucks being pulled by a motorcycle, and I