I figured its about time I sped things up a bit, looking at the map I dont appear to have travelled much in the last few months.
I spent one day and night in Ouidah, this is another important town in Benins history. It was and still is an important voodoo town, and was also the old slaving port for Benin. The ancient Dahomey empire captured allot of slaves which they sold to us Europeans, we then shipped them out to Brazil, Haiti and such like. This explains the importance of voodoo in certain Carribean islands, I found all of this out from the fairly boring museum in the town.
Next on my whistlestop tour was the ‘route de esclaves’, this is a 4km walk from the town to the beach. For me it was quite a pleasant walk, not so sure about the slaves back in the day, down at the beach there is a big archway commemorating the ‘point of no return’. It was pretty hot so I got a moto taxi back into town.
The final site on my list of things to do was the ‘Temple Des Pythons’. Snakes are very important in Ouidah, and so it makes sense to have a temple of snakes. The friendly chap at the gate gave me a monotone, from a script, style talk - none of which I understood. He then opened a door and voila! lots of snakes, happily sleeping. It wasnt exactly Indiana Jones, he put one round my neck and asked if I wanted a photo. No Thanks, goodbye.
