The abandoned airliner parked on the beach in Cotonou

On our last day in Benin, somewhere along the coast road west of Cotonou, there was an
aeroplane on the beach.

Not a wreck, and not in the sea. A three-engined Lockheed widebody, sitting on the sand
above the tideline, upright and more or less intact, with a boarding staircase pushed up
against the door, the surf a short walk beyond it and palms behind. The airport is on the
other side of the city. There is no runway anywhere near it and no obvious way it could
have arrived under its own power.

You can go up the steps. Inside it is still an aeroplane: rows of blue seats down a long
cabin, overhead lockers, the aisle running away into the dark at the far end. That is the
part that gets you, more than the outside does.

We asked. Nobody we spoke to could give us a version of events they seemed confident
about, and the answers did not agree with one another. The story that came up more than
once was that somebody had bought it, had it hauled to the beach, and intended to open a
restaurant in it, and then either the money or the enthusiasm ran out and it has been
sitting there since. That is the sort of explanation that is either exactly right or the
thing people tell you when the real answer has been forgotten.

What makes it worth stopping for is not the mystery, which is thin, but the picture.
Old airframes are almost always shot in deserts or scrapyards, on concrete, behind
fences. This one is on a tropical beach, with people going past it as though it were a
rock. It has been there long enough to be part of the furniture.

Twenty minutes, on a stretch of road you would be driving anyway. Go and look at it
before the coast road is finished and somebody decides it is untidy.