Into the Wild Spaces

If you were to send back only one photograph from your trip to Benin, it would be of Ganvié. A lacustrian stilt village of fishermen, floating markets, and long, wooden canoes, Ganvié is in many ways, amazing. "The Venice of Africa" the pamphlets say, home to 20,000 who make their living by fishing and trading, and a lively market daily on board the graceful wooden pirogues that provide transport from the mainland.

But I avoided Ganvié for the first year and a half I lived in Benin, the way I avoided Borobudur in Indonesia until nearly the end of my stay in Yogyakarta, and the beaches of Sicily until the end of the year we lived in Italy. It seemed there was no reason to go. Every traveler's report from Ganvié was negative: a filthy, trash-blown dock and thick swarms of hawkers, boatmen, and cons vying with each other in an unpleasant sort of aggression, shallow waterways overrun with tourists in sun hats, and a forced lunch at your tourguide's cousin's restaurant, for which you pay the "special" price. I spent my free time instead at the beach. But a friend convinced me to accompany him to Ganvié in the final days of his visit to Benin. I acquiesced. "There's apparently a back way," he explained, and we set out in the early morning hours to find it. {mosimage}

The morning was heavy and overcast; the harmattan winds hadn't yet turned from the north but there was rain in the air. We bargained with a boatman, who led us in his wooden pirogue through the back canals onto Lac Nokoué and into the stilt village. The weather kept the other travelers at bay, or we were simply early enough to beat the crowds, and Ganvié was for the moment, involved in ordinary village life. Young boys and women queued their pirogues at the communal water tap to fill jugs, then paddled uneasily home, loaded to the gunwales, lake water lapping at the edge. A team of uniformed rowers passed us en route to a dance performance; a woman selling stewed fish in pepper sauce pulled up alongside one wooden dock to sell. {mosimage}

Venice of course, it was not. The water was clearly polluted, and we noted a number of reed shelters perched on stilts over the water that confirmed the lake doubled as a city sewer, which is to say the Ganviéns live much the way they did when they first arrived in the 16th century, fleeing the rapacious Dan-Homey slaver tribe and bondage to Portuguese traders. Religious beliefs kept the Dan Homey landside, and the Tofinu people settled into an uneasy lacustrian existence that continues to the present. Outside of the village we passed enormous reed and straw akadja pens pressed into the lake's silty bottom. Fish, attracted by the still waters and the shade, accumulate to breed, producing a sort of small scale fishery. The whole landscape, bathed in the harmattan dust, was eerily silent. Beninese friends commiserated with me about the lost potential of Ganvié. "It used to be better; they had professional boat services, advertising, and more." "What happened?" "Nobody knows." The paper a week later sported a critical opinion piece about how Ganvié had gotten decrepit. How?

But I thought back and realized we'd had a great time. We avoided the crowds, the hustlers, and the garbage in general. And instead we enjoyed a lot of birdlife on all sides of our pirogue, including this gorgeous Northern Carmine Bee Eater (Merops nubicus), King fishers, egrets, herons, and more. {mosimage}

Great tourist sites can quickly be ruined by bad management: lack of investment, lack of control over vendors, pollution, and the overwhelming influence of travelers themselves. Sites worth seeing quickly become overrun with travelers and fall prey to the myriad hawkers and touts, the pollution and filth, and the annoyances that drive away the same tourists who made the destination popular in the first place. Avoiding this trap takes careful resource management that eludes many poorer countries, diminishing the industry that could, under other circumstances, provide such benefits. Appreciating such places' charm requires traveling on the off hours, or taking the alternative route. And of course the issue of sustainability should not be understated: Ganvié will be around only as long as the fishing and the waters sustain the village. When pollution and disease worsen, Ganvié will be gone.