Football - Blogabond

Benin is a forest, denser and denser as you head south. The towns all have big shady mango trees, each with benches and gas stations and women selling baskets of food under them. A gas station is a wooden stand with beautiful bottles of different sizes containing what I thought was tea but what turned out to be diesel: every town has several.

Diesel

Gas Station

In the north the land is corrugated three hills to every five kilometers...take my word on this. Bicycling was either top gear or bottom gear with nothing in between. There is a haze to the air, an excretion of the forest perhaps, but also smoke from the production of charcoal. The air smells faintly of it, and wood is stacked everywhere along the roadside.

My route was expedient but unwise. Traffic was minimal but almost all trucks, and meeting a truck coming from ahead was like having sand and smoke and diesel fumes literally flung in your face. The forest is cut back so that there is no shade on the road at all, and the heat after 11am was barely tolerable. Benin should be explored by bicycle on the back roads I now know, but I plunged ahead on the highway nonetheless. The highway is narrower than your average American residential street, narrower than two trucks and a bicycle should they all try to pass at once.

Futbal

I limped into Gberouboue on a tire going flat, and here I decided to ask if there was a church where I could plant my tent. The pastor was away at a conference, and the woman I talked to wasn't prepared to help me. Orou Adamou A. Roufaye came to my rescue, volunteering his father's home for a refuge. It turns out he is the son of the Most Important Man in Town, the house was concrete, and he was happy to have me pitch my tent on his front porch. Orou took me off for a drink, I met some old guys and treated them to a stiff one, and then we all went to the football game. The good guys won.

Futbal

Afterwards I met Orou's wife (I thought he was too young for that, but I hadn't yet shifted from my Niger/Algeria/Tunisia mentality), and then went to his mother's house for some food. It was fish, and it looked appalling, and for the first time on this trip I seriously considered excusing myself from the proceeding. Then I ate the darned stuff and it was fine.

Futbal

Orou needed to talk to me about his business ideas, and whether I had the "force", the power, to help him buy a car so that he could start a taxi service in his town. He also wanted to start a boutique selling perfume and other nicities in town because there was nothing like that available.

Futbal

My finely tuned business acumen certainly came in handy. I suggested he go to Cotonou, buy five bottles of the most exquisite stuff he could get his hands on, put on his nicest clothes, and sell it on the street personally. I told him to waft every woman and man that passes with just a touch, a teaser, until noone could resist. Then go back and get 10 bottles, and get two nice looking kids to woo and sell for him in just the right way while he worked on a plan to open a store. If he did it right then people would come, and if they came he would have his car soon enough. If anyone has a better idea, leave your comments below.

Futbal

I went to sleep on his father's porch, woke up early, fixed the tire, rode out as far as the main road, saw the tire go flat again, and yanked both tube and tire in favor of the other fatty so that I was now all dirt bike front and rear. I left my Tioga City Slicker and inner tube with the boys in Gberouboue, and they were ecstatic! Then I rode off, and all those nubs hitting the asphalt sent pleasant vibrations through my seat post and I was pretty happy myself.

written by

roel krabbendam on February 22, 2007 from Gberouboue, Benin

from the travel blog: Harmattan

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your perfume idea sounds a bit like that of all the major department stores here...Where is Ms. Lauder now? they might recruit you yet!

written by p on March 2, 2007

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