EMPath2We rode into Benin to collect three visas and left more than a week later. The piece we had been missing on the Nigerian one was not something the embassy told us. We heard it from another applicant sitting in the same waiting room.
The easiest border we had crossed
We left Lome at seven on 4 November to stay ahead of the traffic, and the ride to the border took forty five minutes. At the Togolese police checkpoint on the way out we were asked for 2,000 CFA each. They pushed. We asked for a receipt. They stopped asking, and we paid nothing.
The crossing itself was the smoothest we had had. Togolese exit and Beninese entry sat in the same building, the office was not busy, and when we asked about a passavant for the bikes we were told we did not need one. We bought a SIM with 6GB of data for 28,000 CFA on the spot. The road on the Beninese side was good and nobody stopped us at any of the checkpoints.
We reached the Airbnb at eleven in the morning and could not raise the owner, who had gone quiet since we booked three days earlier, so we cancelled it and took a room at the Residence Easy Hotel nearer the coast for 20 euros a night. Cotonou was a paperwork stop. Three visas, Nigeria, Republic of Congo and Cameroon, and then onward.
The appointment
The next morning we had a 9:30 appointment at the Nigerian embassy. We had breakfast first at a cafe we had already adopted, deliberately, because we both knew what a visa morning does to a mood.
We arrived five minutes early and security told us to come back at eleven. We were halfway to a taxi when they called us back in. Bags and phones went into the security house, paperwork only past that point, and then we sat in a waiting room and turned the fan and the air conditioning on ourselves and waited.
When we were finally taken through, the conversation went badly from the first sentence. Max asked to apply for a tourist visa. We were told there was an administration fee of 25,000 CFA. We said we had already paid online, which we had. The response was that we would need a Benin residence card, and the meeting deteriorated from there. The parting advice we were given was to ride to the border and see whether they would let us in.
That is not advice. That is what you say when a conversation is over.
There was another applicant in the waiting room when we came out, an Australian, who had been going back and forth with the same office for a fortnight. We compared notes. He was the one who told us about the residence card and that it came from the town hall, which turned out to be the most useful sentence anyone said to us in Benin. He also declined to pay the administration fee we had been quoted, argued the point, and had his visa the same day. We swapped numbers and went back to the cafe.
Eleven days, and a card from the town hall
The residence card was the piece we had not known about, and it came from a municipal office rather than an embassy, which is not where anyone riding through would think to look. It was not the only thing that moved, and it would be a tidier story than the truth to say it was. A friend of ours in Denmark spent part of those days finding contacts in Nigeria who could speak to the embassy on our behalf.
We had the appointment on 5 November. We rode out with the visas on 14 November. Eddy's own count of the whole thing, written down at the time, was eleven days of waiting.
That is a long time to be parked in a city you had meant to pass through. It was not all dead time. We were rested when we crossed into Nigeria, which mattered more than we knew then.
The last night
Our last evening in Benin we spent at the cafe, which by then we had decided was the best in Cotonou. The pizza and the plate of rice Max would have ordered in any country on earth had been a different night, at a different place, on the evening of the bad appointment. It says something about the eleven days that both meals blur into the same one.
We left for Nigeria early the next morning. The thing we took with us was not really about visas. It was that the person who moved this along for us first was another traveller in the same waiting room having the same bad morning, and that the building we needed was not the one we had been going to.