OUT OF GAS

[Martin Hash]

Out Of Gas.jpg

Benin is a country of motorcycles: the roads are filed with them. Three, four, even five people ride on one motorcycle: I suspect that if the manufacturers intended only four simultaneously riders, they should not have made room for five. Men in suits carrying women in long, colorful dress with babies strapped to their backs continually buzzed in-and-out of lanes. The traffic flow is reminiscent of platelets bumping along blood vessels. Taxi drivers wear yellow vests, incessantly beseeching paying passengers to ride their motorcycles.

In Abomey, we were in a convoy of ten or so motorcycles of varying speeds and riding capabilities. Our guide zoomed along on his motorcycle obvious to those following. First stop: the royal “palace,” a mud-brick compound along a dirt road occupied by a single boy of about thirteen who was chosen by the gods to be the next king. Apparently he was recognized as such by a Witch Doctor at his birth. The boy’s body was covered with ornate tattoos and I don’t think he was supposed to talk to us. The majority of the palace he lived in appeared to be walls containing the crests of past kings - presumably he also had a crest and a story to go with it just waiting to be emblazoned on the wall. His sleeping quarters was a tin-roofed room with a dirt floor covered in straw.

Our motorcycle, the one I was driving and my wife, Gwynne, was riding on as a passenger, had no clutch, no brakes, no mirrors, no speedometer, no lights, and apparently… No gas. About forty minutes into the “tour,” it quit sputtering and slowly whirred to a stop. No one noticed, looked back or even seemed to care we were missing. We pushed the motorcycle along the busy road to a audience of people smiling and laughing but eventually they guided us to a roadside gas station, which consists of a waist-high wooden stand holding a handful of old liquor bottles that now contained an orangish liquid that might have been a fuel of some kind, or a soft drink? The man at the stand took some money from my hand, poured the evil looking contents from one of the bottles through a strainer into the motorcycles gas tank then nodded. The bike started on the first kick and sputtered us off again, however, we had no idea where to go. Luckily, white people on motorcycles must be very rare, and news must travel fast, because as we rode along the street, people pointed in the direction we should go. With all the twists and turns and locals laughing, I thought they might be funning us but eventually we arrived at the “museum,” another mud-brick building with thatched roof and overgrown, dirt parking lot filled with the other motorcycles from our group. Our lost companions seemed genuinely pleased that we’d found them but they’d already seen the museum and were rushing off – we had to hurry to get turned around and catch up.

Next we stopped at the fetish market where roadkill is stored until somebody wants to buy it to use in a love potion. The open air stalls are filled with carcasses that must be years old, maybe decades. Every kind of creature is represented: monkeys, insects, rodents, lizards – dozens of vendors and thousands of stinking, pest-ridden corpses. You are not allowed to take pictures, and alarmingly, many of the proprietors want to shake your hand. I tightly wove the fingers of my hands together to discourage prospective well-wishing-dead-corpse-handling-hand-shakers. More perplexing were the passersby’s who put live snakes around your neck or attached slow-moving chameleons to your shirt front. I could not bring myself to buying anything from the nearby street vendors, let alone things they had to touch with their suspect fingers.

After our guide got into a big argument with the motorcycle-taxi-guild-leader, they took our motorcycle away and we bumbled along until we found our way back to the campsite, leaving us with an unforgettable excursion to say the least.