Benin
November 19, 2009
February 2009
We just drove through Benin without visiting something special. It is easy to obtain a 48-hour-transit visa at the border for around 15ooo CFA and that’s enough time to cross the country. Seen mostly from out of the car window, there isn’t much difference between Togo and Benin.
We went up north in Togo and didn’t drive along the coast because we wanted to avoid the coastal region of Nigeria, especially Lagos, and decided to head inland as soon as possible. We entered Benin at Kara without any problem (small border post) and spent the night near Parakou. We didn’t have any waypoints for accommodation and the Campement Chez Mimi didn’t exist any more or we couldn’t find it, so we ended up in the female monastery „Monastère Cistercien Étoile Notre Dame“ several kilometers out of town. The nuns were very friendly and nice, yet inquisitive (only natural). We could use toilet and bathroom of a simple, but tidy room. The nightwatch was muslim. All in all a pleasant place to stay for the night.
The next day we drove to Nikki in order to go to Nigeria (border post there is at Tchikandou). We had some CFA left which we spent on fuel (fuel in Nikki was cheap, so it was by the time a good idea to fill up). We followed the way in tracks4Africa and ended somewhere very far in the bush and definitely not at the border. Back in Nikki, we met Juerg Sollberger, a Swiss travel organisator and his group who did a self-drive trip through Western Africa to Cape Town. We didn’t meet Dirk and Nicole with whom we wanted to drive through Nigeria. So we went with Juerg and found the immigration/emigration and customs office IN town: it’s at a road left (east) of the main road and the road was BLOCKED so that every car had to drive through the office yard. There was no sign and at first we thought that the road was simply blocked. The road to Tchikandou is bad but not too uncomfortable with a 4×4.
Roman and Almu drove so far north of the Nigerian coast region that they drove through Niger (somehow via Zinder) which they said was expensive, dirty and unpleasant. The route we took was okay.
