Gridlocked

Day 11 - Gran Popo to Ouidah

Today is the start of the three day Ouidah Vodoun Festival. Ouidah in particular is a focus for these ceremonies, and thousands of adepts, traditional chiefs and fetish priests gather here to perform fascinating rites and rituals. It is explained that unlike Western perceptions it's not black magic but animist religious traditions, rituals and ceremonies that have some things in common with religions like Catholicism.

Our first ceremony of the day was in a traditional village where we were entertained by what our guide called "masks" but looked like man sized hair pyramids, dancing and spinning to the beat of the drums, with the occasional bit of magician showmanship. They would move and spin around the dusty area, then a couple of men would tip them over to show they were empty (though one of our group said they could see someone's shoes poking out). 

There were also two men who ground up a beer bottle and swallowed some of the glass, another who was wrapped in cactus leaves and hit with a weight. 

Second visit of the day was an official looking ceremony by the beach, which was set up with concrete bleachers and shade. It was the middle of the day and very hot, through there was a little bit of relief closer to the ocean just behind the stands. Here we saw endless speeches (which are always boring regardless of the culture), and us not being able to understand French didn't help. There was a bit of dancing and drumming as groups of people would parade at the front of the stands, past the officials dressed in their finest clothes, but by the end of our visit we were happy to move on.

We moved on to an area inside the city of Ouidah called the Sacred Forest, under the shade of large trees where groups of people in colourful costumes took turns dancing in the centre of a crowd of onlookers. The rhythm, beat of the drums, and the costumes reminded us of the lion dance of South East Asia. It was very busy with lots of locals and visitors, so at times we had trouble getting a good view, but overall it was very entertaining.

From there we went to another part of town to see more dancing, the crowd was even bigger here so we weren't able to see much, we were told we had to be careful with our things because of pickpockets, but one of our group still had his phone stolen.

That was the end of the day's activities so we jumped into our bus for a short trip to our hotel on the beach .... or so we thought. A huge West African music festival was happening near the beach, and we needed to pass it to get to our hotel. With the deluge of people converging on Ouidah this meant we entered a massive traffic jam. There were hordes of people walking, on motor bikes and in tuk-tuks, buses and cars. The traffic jam was so bad it verged on comical. 

After two hours of only moving a couple of kilometres the decision was made that we would get out and walk to the next junction where a vehicle from our hotel would collect us. The half an hour walk was very dangerous as it was now dark, with traffic whizzing past us and motor bikes on the walking track. There were holes and poles that we needed to avoid, and a huge drop to our right. 

By the time we made it past the festival and to the junction we'd all had enough, and we eventually arrived at our hotel around 9pm, where a dinner buffet had been waiting for us.

The hotel was in a nice beach location and the facilities were decent, so we looked forward to spending the next two nights there.