Hey, what's up, y'all? This is Baudelaire. So I have this personal goal of going to Africa

at least once every year. And late last year, I took a trip to Benin, a country that sits right on

Nigeria's western border, a country with a distinct connection to my parents' birthplace, Haiti.

Benin is the birthplace of Voodoo. It's the home country of one of

Haiti's founding fathers and just seemed like a really dope place to visit. And out of all the

places on my list of things to see, there was one I was really excited about, Gonvier Lake

Village. It's a village of about 30,000 people sitting on top of Benin's largest lake, Lake Noquay.

When I got back from Benin, I talked to Dylan about my trip.

What about Ganvier Lake Village?

Like, when did that come into your awareness?

How did you even know to go looking for it?

So I was looking around the Atlas when I first started on this show, like a couple years ago, and I was like, man, this place in Benin. Because I wanted to do episodes in Benin. I wanted to talk to people from Benin. And this village looked so cool. And I'm like reaching out to a bunch of people. No one's getting back to me. And it's like, you know. That's a tough place to source an interview.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then like also like I speak a little bit of French, but my written French isn't so good. So I'm typing these emails. And I'm like, does this even make sense? Are people, are they just deleting these when they see them? Like I probably reached out to like five people knowing it gets back to me. And so it kind of just like, I kind of just put it like on the back burner, you know?

It's like in the back of my mind, like, okay, one day I'm going to find a source for this episode. Like somebody's going to be able to talk to me about this. So then once the trip to Benin was in motion, I figured, oh, well, I'll have to bring my recorder. The source is you. My name is Baudelaire, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, I talked to Dillon about my trip to Ganvier Lake Village, a place that serves as a testament to our ability to adapt

when our survival depends on.

More after this. One thing that made my trip to Benin easy was my guide Chris Bell.

I first talked to him in early 2023 for a different episode I was reporting.

And Chris Bell told me to hit him up if I ever come to Benin.

...