Steve and Cathy's Blog

As Cathy and I can tell you, if you are in transportation, even the most meticulously crafted schedule will go awry if one of the myriad steps goes wrong. And a cruise line is, when you get right down to the basics, in the transportation business. In the case of the Insignia, fueling a cruise ship in West Africa was that step.

The previous evening, Cruise Director Leslie got on the public address system to bring us some news. First he tells us that, because the process of fueling the vessel in the port of Lome’ did not go as planned, we would be pulling out of port on time but dropping anchor enroute to be fueled (called bunkering in nautical parlance because the fuel is Bunker C grade petroleum) from a tender offshore. He assured us this would not result in any delay getting to Benin by the appointed 8am tomorrow.

Small, totally unrelated topic change: Steve’s stupid indulgence in espresso an hour before bedtime had the common impact of his not being able to sleep.   All during the night, he would get up, peer out the veranda door, and notice a string of ships all in a row. One after another, all lit up. And despite his inexperience in being at sea, he determined that they were at anchor and that they all appeared to be tankers. This was a fascinating phenomenon to the freight geek, and he surmised that their proximity to Nigeria, which has an enormous oil industry, meant that they were awaiting their turn to load in that country. Isn’t that interesting?

Okay, back to the “bunkering” story. So when we awaken and see that we are nowhere near our destination, we figured that the Insignia’s plan for fueling had fallen victim to Murphy’s Law of Transportation, which generally states: “When things begin to go wrong, everything goes wrong until such time that everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.”

I am guessing that this became the problem: As mentioned in yesterday’s post, we saw that this ship was taking on four tanker truckloads of fuel. What was not mentioned is that this process took all day. Why? Probably because the tankers had no apparatus to pump the fuel out of the tank, so a portable pump had to be supplied. The pump, I would guess, was inadequate to the task, and that the original plan called for far more than four truckloads. So at 5:30, the captain went to Plan B, which was to fuel the ship at sea expecting that the fuel barge at least would have pumping equipment with enough capacity to give the ship enough fuel in short enough time that the cruising schedule would not be disrupted.

But the tender did not, and the fueling took two or three hours longer than expected and thus we are now that many hours behind. Now this is conjecture on my part, backed up by the fact that, when we returned from our excursion in Benin the next day, the ship was taking in four more truckloads of fuel.

So instead of an 8:00am arrival, ours becomes a 10:30 arrival. The three excursions that are planned that day (ours kicking off at 8:45am) need to be rescheduled. Destination Services did a fantastic job, and all of that was accomplished, with our four-hour tour leaving at 12:15pm. No harm. No foul. At 8:15, after breakfast, we read and … yes … snooze.

Our arrival in Cortonou, Benin was an event. This small country that lies just west of Nigeria receives few cruise ships.   As we back down the channel and into position, everyone that works there in the port is watching. The longshoremen are taking pictures with their cell phones, and you could tell that the arrival of this gleaming white cruise ship was a somewhat rare occurrence. By the way, the same could be said for our previous stop, Togo, and our next stop, Sao Tome. Oceania Cruise Line touts their small ships as an advantage as that allows us to visit out-of-the-way places. These three countries definitely qualify for that description.

The port itself is essentially a container port (more entertainment for Steve!) with dockside facilities for unloading bulk freighters, of which there are four. We spot the dozen tour buses and contingent of soldiers as evidence that we are in the right place. The port facility is pretty large for such a small country, and we later learn it serves as the port for two other inland countries, Berkina Faso and Niger.

Cotonou is the largest city in Benin, and yet most all of the government offices are located here instead of the capital city Porto-Novo. There are 800,000 inhabitants in the city, with approximately 1.2 million in the metro area. The country is home to 11 million. The economy is basically agricultural.

Benin has an interesting history. It was the Kingdom of Dahomey and the city-state of Porto Novo beginning in the 16^th century up through the mid-18^th century. The kingdom made a phenomenal living in the slave trade, especially after the Portuguese arrived (they had a pretty brisk domestic slave trade already).   Porto Novo was the slave port. When slavery was outlawed in Britain in 1808 and other countries over the next half century, the industry dwindled and the kingdom along with it, so the king made a trade agreement with the French in 1868 to keep them at bay. This was only partially successful, as the French fought two lopsided battles during the treaty period that eventually resulted in a French takeover in 1892.

This was a French colony until 1960, when Benin achieved independence. While they did have a shaky 12-year period to start, with the customary questionable elections, coups and military interference, that era ended in 1972 with Lt. Col. Mathieu Kerekou. He ruled the country until 1990, first declaring a Marxist regime ruled by a military council. The typical commie economic and social failure of the country soon followed as all private economic activity came under state control and anyone with any sense or education fled the place. The regime financed its operation by first accepting nuclear waste from the Soviet Union and then from France.

This guy Kerekou was, if nothing else, a political chameleon. In 1979, he decided that the country should have elections, sham elections to be sure where he was the only candidate, but elections nonetheless. Marxism still ruled, while he first became a committed Muslim, then a born again Christian.   Meanwhile the country was in turmoil, the banking system collapsed, and Kerekou was forced to release political prisoners and hold elections in 1990.

I mention all this because there really is a happy ending to this story. Since the establishment of the Republic of Benin in 1990, the country has had much political stability, with praise especially for its handling of the 2011 elections from the international community. The country is ranked 18^th out of 52 African nations in the Ibrahim Index of African Governance.

Okay, that’s a lot of stuff about Benin government, but it is truly illustrative of what so many of these countries have gone through since achieving independence. Without the extraordinary natural resources of a Nigeria or South Africa, it is difficult for these small nations to develop peacefully.

Back to today…. We eat a quick lunch at Waves Grill and head for Insignia Lounge for our bus passes. Now we’ve been through this process about eight times already, and we have learned a few things from some of the “veterans” of cruising, of which there are many many on this ship.

The process is supposed to look like this:

Step One: Sit and wait until they tell you to come up to the front and turn in your tickets for bus passes.

Step Two: Go back and sit down until your bus is called (there could be as many as six busloads of people)

Step Three: When your bus number is called, walk out of Insignia Lounge quietly, go down to the deck where the gangway is, get your ship card scanned and go find your bus.

This is what really happens:

Step One: Immediately go up and badger the Destination Services people until they finally throw up their hands and issue bus passes even though you’re not supposed to be there for another half hour.

Step Two: The minute that you get your bus pass, leave Insignia Lounge, check through the gangway people and go to your bus twenty minutes before anyone else arrives. This will enable you to get a seat near the front of the bus, while all the suckers that follow the procedure as instructed by Insignia staff sit in the back over the howling engine.

Today, at the urging of a couple of cruise veterans, we opt for the latter procedure. But when we get to Bus 18 and we climb on board, lo and behold, at least a dozen people have already boarded. We apparently still have a lot to learn.

Okay, by the appointed time of 12:15, all are on board, and Bus 18, Bus 19 and Bus 20 head out of the port. The bus is nice enough, but you can quickly tell she has more than a few tough miles under her hood. The air conditioning sorta works, so we are not uncomfortable. There are two really nice young men on board as guides, but the audio system on the bus consists of a bullhorn. Cathy does way better at understanding what these gentlemen are trying to tell us, and I constantly lean over to ask “What did he say?” Despite their fluent English, a thick accent heard through a bullhorn renders Steve utterly puzzled, so he decides to take tons of photos through the bus window, if for no other reason to remind him of things he saw:

1. Many large, fairly modern government buildings. This is indeed the seat of government for Benin.
2. There are few taxis (this info Cathy gleans from the guides). Instead, there are hundreds of guys with yellow shirts on driving motorbikes. They serve as the taxi system for the most part. You just flag one down, tell them where you want to go, negotiate a price and hop on.
3. As for motorbikes, this is by far the preferred mode of transportation. There are thousands of them; so many that on the major roads, they have their own lanes separated from the cars/buses/trucks. And the word “lanes” should be translated loosely. Everybody steams along at full speed two feet from each other. They are very skilled.   And they do wear helmets.  
4. The architecture of many if not most of the buildings over one story can best be described as “Early French Legion Movie.” Concrete, flat-roofed, with concrete eves extending a foot or so out over the building, rectangular windows. Every former French colony must have had the same architect. I know that sounds snotty, but they all looked 1950s familiar.The retail economy is as far removed from the one we Americans have as you can possibly imagine. In the half hour we rode through Cotonou, we must have passed two thousand little outdoor stands, selling anything and everything you can think of. If we saw one tiny little place twenty feet wide set back thirty feet from the road selling motorbike tires, we saw fifty of them. You name it and they sell it: beds, bikes, furniture, vegetables, fabric, clothes, more beds, more motorbike tires, more overstuffed couches, everything you could possibly need. No Walgreens, no Raymour & Flanigans, nothing of anything remotely that size. Now that’s not to say that these stores don’t exist somewhere in the country, but it would appear from what we saw on this trip that thousands and thousands of small entrepreneurs eking out a marginal existence as shopkeepers are a huge part of this city’s economy.
5. Every traffic light is a bazaar. As cars come for a halt at a red light, people will appear hawking all manner of things. Not just clothes and food and such. Everything. Cathy spotted one guy selling stuffed Winnie the Pooh characters.
6. We also saw guys – not at intersections but on the side of the road – waving pairs of pants and shirts and other articles of clothing as we passed by at forty miles an hour. All of this selling of stuff by the hundreds of people on the side of the road spoke to two things: 1) These folks ain’t lazy. They’re out there every day doing whatever, selling whatever, to feed themselves and their families. 2) Benin has a long way to go as an economy. I suspect these little roadside stores are in business because there is no other avenue of employment. It’s this or nothing, and it became a bit unnerving to witness it all.
7. Cathy here, adding an observation: the people really wear African clothes! It is very cool. Sometimes we Americans get the impression (from TV news) that everyone wears Western style clothes now. Not here. Some of the men did, but most wore these really cool matching pants and tops that looked like short sleeved pajamas in wild colorful patterns, and the women wore fabric wrapped around their hips to their feet, a top of a different pattern, and cloth on head of yet another pattern. And the women carried stuff on their heads, many with things for sale like little cakes, fruit, peanuts or other small things.

Our destination today is Lake Nokoue’, which forms much of the northern border of the city. It is 12 miles wide and 7 miles long. It is actually what you would call a lagoon, because the average depth is no more than four or five feet. It is a lake, but is really consists of acres and acres of either vegetation or fish farms. It has an active fishing industry that supports hundreds of subsistence fishermen (and we do mean men. Benin culture leaves all the fishing to men, with the women left to bring the catch to market or perform other labor).

But what really brought us here is a chance to visit Ganvie, what is probably the largest lake village in all of Africa. We got off the bus into the 90-degree, 85% humidity weather, ambled across a dirt parking lot and up a ramp on to a long wooden dock. Now there are probably a hundred of us, with 95% of us being … let’s be kind … seasoned citizens. While there were guides from the bus and the crews of the boats we had yet to see, the language barrier became an issue. We all moved along down the dock, none of us knowing what the hell we were supposed to do next. Every thirty feet or so, a wooden ramp vectored off the main dock down to a waiting boat.

We slowly turned into a herd, with no one making any effort to give way or give ground, everyone concerned that somehow they would be left behind. It was confusing, made more so because boarding these wooden boats (a picture of one heads up this post) was challenging for even the most agile of us. Disney World this was not.

Well, we did all board one boat or another, and off our flotilla went. At first, the pilot of each boat poled the boat north for about fifteen minutes. Then one by one, each of the boats cranked up their outboard engines. It appears that Yamaha 15hp to 40hp ones are the engines of choice. For the next half hour or so, we motored north along a 100-yard channel lined with fish farms.

We came upon many fishermen in their small boats, fishing with nets. Many other boats passed by, poled by their occupants or driven with small, often ancient outboards. A police boat with three men passed by at one point, and it was then we found out that this was for our protection. The country is trying very hard to develop a tourist industry, and a safe environment is something they aim to sustain.

We saw public transportation boats as well, and we tourists would wave and the passengers would wave back. And the village of Ganvie is also seen as a very valuable tourist attraction, at which we arrived after about an hour on the water. The place is fascinating.

Virtually all of the houses are built out over the lake on wooden poles. 20,000 people, 20,000 people, live in this unique aquatic environment. Obviously, all transportation is by boat. There are boats as small as dugouts, and larger rowboat-design boats as large as 30-35 feet in length. There are small boats of every kind and description, the propulsion for which is a person with a 10-foot pole pushing the boats along. We did see an occasional outboard-motor powered craft, but they were the exception.

There are some structures that are on land. We saw a modern primary school, a maternity hospital, some other large concrete buildings that we couldn’t identify, and even a couple of silos. But all the housing exists above water.

We never did find out if the houses had electricity, but we have our doubts. We did see boats filled with firewood, so we did see that cooking fires must have been fueled with wood.

Some of the happiest moments we had on this trip were experiencing the reaction of kids when we passed by in our boat. Most of them just waved and did typical kid antics trying to get our attention.   Those who passed by in boats sometimes yelled “Cadeau, cadeau!” (Gift, gift! In French) but they were mostly doing it in fun.

Our first and only stop was at a cluster of buildings with a central wooden courtyard. Call it the Village of Ganvie Mall. It contains a store, a restaurant with a bar attached, and washroom facilities. We had twenty minutes to spend before beginning our return, and it was spent browsing through the store and chatting with other passengers. Steve actually did buy a pair of pants. The proprietor told me that it was $20 US. I shook my head and put the pants back on the pile, and all of a sudden the price was $10. I offered $8 and she ignored me, which told me bargaining was over. I paid the $10 – happily. I still think I paid a reasonable price. I then rewarded myself with a beer, while Cathy conversed with friends.

Back on the boat for the 50-minute trip back.

All together, I probably took a hundred photos on this trip, 95% of which will end up deleted, but I really want to post some of them on Facebook. This was a most interesting day, and both of us enjoyed every minute of our time at Lake Nokoue’.   After we arrived back at the dock and headed for the bus, Cathy went up to children offering them “Chocolat, chocolat?” She came up with the idea of bringing all of the chocolates left on our bed at night by our steward that we had been saving.   Once she ran out, we boarded the bus.

One of our delightful, charming guides

It was a quiet ride home, as we all had been out in the hot equatorial African weather and away from our air-conditioned ship for almost four hours. Our guide did brief us on the institution of marriage in Benin. Rather than a union of two people, it is considered a union of two families, and nothing happens until there is a family meeting between everybody in the two families. A dowry is a must, even if it is a symbolic one. Then a marriage ceremony can be performed. Should marital problems arise, certain family members of both families meet do discuss how best to resolve them. Dowry aside, there’s a lot to be said for an institution that puts such a high value on the larger families.

We are back around 4:30, read and nap (Steve) while awaiting 6:30 when the Grand Dining Room opens. Our maître’d Evitsa from Serbia gives us a table right at the stern of the ship, a perfect spot to watch the lines cast off shortly after 7:00pm. What a great finish to a very educational and enlightening day.