Abomey is the center of the Dahomey kingdom, which lasted from about 1600 to 1900. There are lots of interesting sites all around the town commemorating this time.

We'd arranged a taxi all the way from Agadez to Cotonou, but it fell through. So our first segment was on a bus from Agadez to Dosso, near the Benin border. Steve, the guide, was on the bus with us which made it even more fun. This woman grabbed the headrest and I stole a photo of the tattoos on her fingers.

One taxi took us from Dosso to the border, and another took us from there to Abomey. We offered him a deal in Euros which was better than the deal in West African currency, but they insisted on the CFAs. So we stopped in a bank and Dave changed the money. Meanwhile, I witnessed hundreds of bats flying around a tree next to the bank.

Our hotel in Abomey also had loads of bright Margouillat, the red-headed rock Agama. Each of these was almost half a meter long.

These reliefs at our hotel represented the series of Dahomey kings. They are recreations of the reliefs found at the ruins of the palaces.

This wall is about all that's left standing of a palace of one of the kings. We're no longer in a place of negligible rainfall, and the mud buildings don't last long without the social structure to keep rebuilding them.  The first palace wall I saw I thought was a termite mound.  The local termites have very short mounds however, built around tree stumps and not freestanding.  I suppose they are very proud of their warlike heritage, too. The palace ruins are occupied for the most part by gardens and small factories and other bits of village life, in the style of Ayutthaya and Pagan and the old Petra (though Petra's inhabitants were evicted and I hear that Pagan is mostly tourist oriented now too).  The most complete remains have been made into a museum.

Across from the palace site were three photogenic sisters who as I recall didn't want their pictures taken; but pretty much everything of artistic interest is a violation, from Tomoko in her bath to HeLa cells.

Our guide Wils tells us about Dahomey history. He took us around town with both of us hanging on on the back of his motorbike. Notice how green everything is compared to Mali and Niger.

An amazing grasshopper.

Talking to a group of people next to the Zanhun voodoo temple. Some of the temples are quite the tourist attractions.

Getting the addresses of a couple guys who explained a bit of the religion to Dave.

Hmm. This looks like collection of bull semen. It actually seems to be the symbols of King Ghezo, a buffalo and a clay jar sieve.

Symbols of Kings Agonglo and Ghezo.

Gory reliefs on a palace. I like the bars on the window. My favorite relief of all shows sodomy with a foreign object, looked like cannonballs; but you can't take a photo cause it's inside the museum grounds. Google says that Amazon says that the Getty Museum supports this UNESCO site and has a book about it. Maybe the sodomy is in there. I distinctly remember, from a long time back, that Instant Access to All World Knowledge was one of the human desiderata. I know for sure it's on the Science Made Stupid checklist. What happened? We have it, right now, and about 200 lawyers, worldwide, have decided to frame the argument such that we can't use it. You know this wasn't Metallica's idea, or any of the other artists who have been persuaded to shill against their own popularity. If you had broken into their dressing room and said: "Dude! Bro! Tomorrow morning, every teenage boy in the ENTIRE WORLD is going to wake up listening to Metallica!" they would have been all, "RIGHT ON DUDE! BRO!" But that wasn't how the argument was framed. A lot of it depends on who gets there first. Many of these debates don't have an intrinsic polarity, any more than water intrinsically swirls one way or the other down a toilet. The tiniest little impulse gets it going, and then the drainage is established by game and traffic. Recall the recent "controversy" about the translation of the Star Spangled Banner into other languages. How many of you knew that was an issue, before you were told? It certainly doesn't have the visceral traction of flag burning, or cross burning (how's that for the same thing from "opposite" sides of the "spectrum"?). Suppose that the first voice heard on the radio commenting about la bandera estrellada had been Noam Chomsky and he was all about how American cultural imperialism was running roughshod over the rights of the Zapatistas and the Iraqi Resistance Forces to invent their indigenous governing ideals free from American interference? You can bet that Rush Limbaugh would have been all "Cancel My Rhumba Lesson, we're translating the Star Spangled Banner into Algonquin". Bush would have been singing the anthem in Spanish at rallies. Actually, he did that, according to page 142 of "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush" by Kevin Phillips.

A kid holding a campaign flyer for the man who won Benin's presidency, and was inaugurated a few days later. He insisted on getting attention.

A Voodoo chief and his entourage agree to pose for pictures.

Kids in the voodoo village.

The voodoo temple. It seems to me, after experiences that recur, that one of the essential elements of travel is that there are some places one simply cannot go. And, if you think you have gotten there, you are deceiving yourself in some way. A physical example is the grave of the Titanic. Steve Pinfield has been down there in a bathyscaphe but he wasn't really two miles below the ocean because humans can't live down there. There isn't oxygen and the pressure is too high. He went down in a little bubble of troposphere and watched through thick glass what he could have experienced more fully watching a robot do on a wide screen TV in Penzance. (You can deduce my opinion of space flight.) Today's example was a social one. A California boy can't know what it's like to be a Fon villager, a Bobo villager, a Fiji villager. I can't even explain to anybody what it was like to Live in Lincoln Village and Really Live! in 1959. You read the travelers' stories of explorers who pretended to be Muslims so they could sneak into Mecca, but that's not so much of a trick. Islam is open to the whole world and has always been so, since it is a religion you Profess and Live, not some mystery race you have to be born into like Judaism or speaking Hungarian. There isn't much difference between being a poser who pretends to observe the five pillars and someone who really does, it's like driving fifty miles an hour — can you fake that and say "well, I'm not really driving fifty miles an hour, I'm just pretending"? — and even at that, the pretenders usually spent a matter of months learning the rituals, just like any child would. And God only knows what Khameini really believes. Or the Pope. It's not open to me, in one afternoon, to know what's it's like to, say, drink kava, or practice voudoun. And if I pursue the matter, I'm going to end up in a rather uncomfortable social situation with a self-important and at the same time somewhat insecure petty chief who wants a great deal of money for doing nothing but lecturing Dave based on what he supposes Dave thinks about Voudoun and then begging to have his photo taken with us in as childish a manner as the dozens of ragamuffins upstaging him from outside the compound we have been hustled into, and without nearly the good humor. Voudoun may be an indigenous and threatened religion, but it is still a religion, and as such is populated by shysters who pretend to know what the gods are thinking based on nothing but their claim that it's so, and are continually asking for money from the gullible. He wanted 10000 CFA. The little village that Lonely Planet said was charming has become a thoroughly annoying self parody, and that was years ago. Now they even omit the self parody, they are like those conceptual art works that consist of big pieces of text describing what they would be if anyone had actually bothered to make them. They beg you to photograph their forbidden fetishes for money. This is a sacred place, where sacred means that you must make a donation to photograph it. What does the little kid think? He was playing peekaboo with me. For him this temple is a playground, for me it's a carnival, where's God?

At dusk, we visited a metalworkers' village. When we arrived, all the forges were shut down because Tuesday is a holiday, but a bunch of guys tried to start one up for us and were having trouble with the matches, which immediately reminded me of Gavin's tale of hanging with stoneage tribesmen in New Guinea and waiting for them to start a fire with traditional means in a cave in the rain, and getting impatient and using his lighter and the white gas in his campstove, and scaring them out of their wits. (if that really happened; when the Gavins of the world go home, do the stoneage tribesmen break out their gameboys and lounge around in their International Male dressing gowns sipping whiskey sours?) Someone led us to another forge where some guy was cranking out useless metal bells that sounded like crap in a two-and-a-half minute repetitive process using inappropriate tools of a century ago. I took a couple of photos because they were insisting. Dave offered 2000 CFAs at the end, and the guys turned up their noses and demanded 5000. They had done nothing, it wasn't even the "blacksmith" character doing the asking. It was some clown in a dirty tshirt. He wanted to show us his snake fetish and I refused to be interested, show some pride man, if you believe all this nonsense then you don't want me to violate your space and if you don't believe it then find some other line of work. Or find the same line of work, with more appropriate prices and attitude, like the drama students who work Renaissance Faires and Colonial Williamsburg and the Romanian Village Museum. Then he wanted me to take his photo and I said, not a chance. It was ten minutes to sunset and rain was threatening in the way it does at the start of the rainy season, a bit of lightning on the horizon and gloom. By the way, the sky was clear here for the eclipse, everybody we've talked to saw it of course. There was a broken down car frame that will have to exemplify the many others we've seen on the trip — the view is a little blocked by cute kids.

Wills Boco, our guide. We paid him what I hope was a good tip; the nominal rate was something like $15 but he spent nine hours with us. We were the ones who insisted he go to all these Lonely Planet-ruined spaces. We were the ones he had to speak so slowly for (in French, but West African French is easier to understand than the other kinds; plus Wils speaks so clearly that even if you don't speak French you can understand what he means. I'm not sure how that works.) Anyway, he is a great guy and if you are in Abomey, be sure to ask for him at the desk of the Hotel Guedevy.

On to Ouidah