The Temple of Pythons at Ouidah, where the snakes are loose

Ouidah was not really a plan. We drove out of Lomé in the morning, crossed into Benin,
and stopped because the coast road goes straight past it, which is how most people end
up there.

The Temple of Pythons is a low ochre building on a street corner in the middle of the
town, directly opposite a cathedral. The siting is not an accident and nobody pretends
otherwise. The python is sacred to Dan, one of the Vodun deities, and the temple and
the church have been facing each other across that junction for well over a century.

Inside is a small round courtyard with a curved wall and a painted panel, and the
pythons are simply there. Not behind glass, not in a tank. On the floor, along the base
of the wall, shifting when they feel like shifting.

You are invited to pick one up. It goes around your neck and shoulders, and two things
land at once. The first is the weight, which is far more than it looks, and all of it
moving slowly in several directions. The second is that the animal is completely
uninterested in you. It is not frightened and it is not threatening. It is going
somewhere and you happen to be in the way.

These are royal pythons and they are not venomous. They also are not kept as a display:
by custom they are let out into the town to hunt and make their own way back, and
anyone who finds one at home is expected to return it rather than harm it. The bit where
visitors hold them is bolted onto something that was already going on.

Half an hour, on a road you would be driving anyway. It is the thing people ask me about.