We left on Sunday for the Grand Popo resort town where we walked along the beach drinking fresh coconut milk.
We would go for the occasional swim in the salt water pool, dry off and eat a delightful seafood meal on the veranda as we watched the sun set ober the beach.
Sound like something off a postcard? It truly was.
And if you are thinking hey that's sounds like my sort of vacation, Grand Popo is only about 2.5-3 hours drive from Lome, so if you are ever in the area we could head there for the weekend. :)
Since I come from a family that has difficulties just relaxing on vacations, we also took a few day trips out to a few different places including the stilt village on the lake called Genvie also known as the African Venice.
Genvie is a 20 minute motor boat ride from the outskirts of Benin's captial city Cotonou. The town of Genvie has a population of 18 000 people and was established because of the slave trade. Since certain slave trading tribes were afraid of the water, hiding in a stilt village became a way to avoid capture.
The trip would have been quite lovely, unfortunately, a man tried to appoint himself as our guide and rudely demanded we pay him an obscene amount of money. This sort of took away from the atmosphere of village life as he was on the boat with us the whole time.
It was still a beautiful scene to watch villagers dart between buildings on their pirogue boats.
The market in Genvie consisted of 20 women sitting in their pirogues selling fruits, vegetables and poultry.
Stilted schools held large audiences of children who would be picked up by boat and ferried to their various forms of houses.
There were three tourist shops in Genvie that we stopped at along with one hotel and two restaurants.
Instead of eating at the restaurants in Genvie we tried fried manioc balls (they look like a plain timbit but are salty and spicy instead of sweet) and finger bananas.
They held us over until a pre dinner snack at one of the most expensive resorts in all of West Africa.
The Casa de Papa in Ouidah is at the end of a road marked only by rows and rows of palm trees along the beach.
At the end of the sand road, you reach the resort, which costs $200 per night, has 3 swimming pools and the most expensive sandwiches we've encountered in West Africa. But they were good.
We headed back to our much cheaper accommodation in Grand Popo (with no TV at all, no swimming pool and more mosquitoes) for the night.
The next day D and I returned to Ouidah to explore the city some more, as it is home to relics of the slave trade and even some cool tourist traps.
We returned to the resort that night and began packing up. We ate one last seafood meal on the beach. After a dip in the pool the next morning as well as the chance to release 5 day old sea turtles back into the ocean, we began the relatively short trip back to Lome.
Overall it was a lovely trip. It was wonderful to get away to do some sightseeing, hang out with new friends and just relax on a beach. We both felt rested and refreshed ready to take on new adventures or return back to old ones. Here are a few pics:
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