If you were to send back only one photograph from your trip to Benin, it would
be of Ganvié.  A lacustrian stilt village of fishermen, floating
markets, and long, wooden canoes, Ganvié is in many ways, amazing.
"The Venice of Africa" the pamphlets say, home to 20,000 who make
their living by fishing and trading, and a lively market daily on board the
graceful wooden pirogues that provide transport from the mainland.

But I avoided Ganvié for the first year and a half I lived in Benin, the
way I avoided Borobudur in Indonesia until nearly the end of my stay in
Yogyakarta, and the beaches of Sicily until the end of the year we lived in
Italy.  It seemed there was no reason to go.  Every traveler's report from
Ganvié was negative: a filthy, trash-blown dock and thick swarms of
hawkers, boatmen, and cons vying with each other in an unpleasant sort of
aggression, shallow waterways overrun with tourists in sun hats, and a forced
lunch at your tourguide's cousin's restaurant, for which you pay the "special"
price.  I spent my free time instead at the beach.  But a friend convinced me
to accompany him to Ganvié in the final days of his visit to Benin.  I
acquiesced.  "There's apparently a back way," he explained, and we
set out in the early morning hours to find it.

The morning was heavy and overcast; the harmattan winds hadn't yet turned from
the north but there was rain in the air.  We bargained with a boatman, who led
us in his wooden pirogue through the back canals onto Lac Nokoué and
into the stilt village.  The weather kept the other travelers at bay, or we
were simply early enough to beat the crowds, and Ganvié was for the
moment, involved in ordinary village life.  Young boys and women queued their
pirogues at the communal water tap to fill jugs, then paddled uneasily home,
loaded to the gunwales, lake water lapping at the edge.  A team of uniformed
rowers passed us en route to a dance performance; a woman selling stewed fish
in pepper sauce pulled up alongside one wooden dock to sell.

Venice of course, it was not.  The water was clearly polluted, and we noted a
number of reed shelters perched on stilts over the water that confirmed the
lake doubled as a city sewer, which is to say the Ganviéns live much the
way they did when they first arrived in the 16th century, fleeing the rapacious
Dan-Homey slaver tribe and bondage to Portuguese traders.  Religious beliefs
kept the Dan Homey landside, and the Tofinu people settled into an uneasy
lacustrian existence that continues to the present.  Outside of the village we
passed enormous reed and straw akadja pens pressed into the lake's silty
bottom.  Fish, attracted by the still waters and the shade, accumulate to
breed, producing a sort of small scale fishery.  The whole landscape, bathed in
the harmattan dust, was eerily silent.  Beninese friends commiserated with me
about the lost potential of Ganvié.  "It used to be better; they had
professional boat services, advertising, and more."  "What happened?"  "Nobody
knows."  The paper a week later sported a critical opinion piece about how
Ganvié had gotten decrepit.  How?

But I thought back and realized we'd had a great time.  We avoided the crowds,
the hustlers, and the garbage in general.  And instead we enjoyed a lot of
birdlife on all sides of our pirogue, including this gorgeous Northern Carmine
Bee Eater (Merops nubicus), King fishers, egrets, herons, and more.

Great tourist sites can quickly be ruined by bad management: lack of
investment, lack of control over vendors, pollution, and the overwhelming
influence of travelers themselves.  Sites worth seeing quickly become overrun
with travelers and fall prey to the myriad hawkers and touts, the pollution and
filth, and the annoyances that drive away the same tourists who made the
destination popular in the first place.  Avoiding this trap takes careful
resource management that eludes many poorer countries, diminishing the industry
that could, under other circumstances, provide such benefits.  Appreciating
such places' charm requires traveling on the off hours, or taking the
alternative route.  And of course the issue of sustainability should not be
understated: Ganvié will be around only as long as the fishing and the
waters sustain the village.  When pollution and disease worsen, Ganvié
will be gone.