Wrapped up in the real Africa: From voodoo ceremonies to close encounters with pythons - a unique insight into the magical continent

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Scrolling through my photos on the plane home from Africa, it was difficult to believe all that I’d seen over the past two weeks. Was I really that person with the python draped around his neck? 

Had I posed with a band of voodoo musicians in a sacred forest, been driven to the windswept edges of a vast desert, walked through slave dungeons, seen bullocks being shepherded along a beach, and ascended the glorious Table Mountain?

What had appealed to me about the Lands Of Wonder cruise on board Seven Seas Mariner was exactly this sort of variety.

Making new friends: Steve Turner poses with a python in Benin on one of his stops while on a cruise through Africa

One morning I’d look out from my veranda and see dancers wearing colourful tatterdemalion costumes and tottering on stilts, and musicians in kufi caps, and on another there would be men in bush hats and shades standing nonchalantly beside air-conditioned Land Rovers.

At every port of call there were a range of trips offering everything from the scenic and historical to investigations of local markets, food, drink, nature and religion.

I boarded Mariner in Dakar, Senegal, ten days after she left Lisbon. 

My first excursion was to the slave castles of Cape Coast and Elmina in Ghana, from where millions of Africans were sold and shipped across the Atlantic to the Caribbean islands, Brazil and America.

The views from the coach window travelling along the Trans-African Highway from Takoradi reminded me of images from school geography textbooks. 

Sailing the high seas: Steve booked on to the Lands Of Wonder cruise on board Seven Seas Mariner (seen above) - he boarded the boat in Dakar, Senegal, ten days after she left Lisbon

Wild times: The voodoo dancer (pictured) who entertained Steve in Togo struts his stuff

Miles of plantain trees, red oil palms and lush roadside grass were interrupted by small settlements with football pitches, churches, huts, homes with corrugated roofs, chickens, babies and goats. 

Every now and then, tied to a wooden telegraph pole, there would be a large photo of someone recently deceased, over which was inscribed the slogan Called To Glory.

The castles are now a humbling indictment of previous excursions by white Europeans. 

They were castles in the sense that they had been heavily protected and housed local governors, but they were effectively prisons and trading posts for the sale of humans. There were no banqueting halls or crenellated towers.

We looked at white walls stained by Atlantic storms, walked through cramped, unlit holding cells, and gazed at the ‘gates of no return’, from where the ancestors of many African-Americans left their home country for the last time.

Open air: Steve visited the Mount Nelson Hotel (pictured) in Cape Town during his trip

In the next two countries, Togo and Benin, I took tours that introduced me to their different beliefs and rituals. 

In Togo there are more than two million followers of voodoo who believe spirits govern nature and society, and that each tree, river and place has its own spirit. 

Through ceremonies involving music, dance, song and symbolic acts, they try to appease and beseech these spirits.

At Sanguera, a small village at the end of a series of potholed tracks, musicians were gathered in a clearing ready for us. As the music (mostly drums and rattles) started pounding, villagers danced and the business began.

A man wearing a straw skirt spun around like a dervish and occasionally departed to run round the village.

Grim past: Ghana’s Cape Coast castle (above) was a former slave prison. Many Africans were sold from there

A younger, well-muscled man, his skin gleaming with sweat, went into an ecstatic state and slashed wildly at his arms and chest with a knife, but there were no apparent flesh wounds. 

There was much lighting of flames, pouring of libations, wrestling of bodies, and drawing of lines in the dust.

Ouidah in Benin is known as the City of Voodoo and the spiritual capital of the country. 

Here we visited Kpasse Sacred Forest, full of huge concrete statues of deities such as Shango, the god of thunder, and Dan the rainbow serpent.

We sweltered under the fierce midday sun waiting for an audience with the ‘King of Ouidah’. He arrived wearing a black top hat and carrying a sturdy carved stick, three daughters in tow.

The youngsters knelt on the ground, poured liquor into the dust, prayed and tossed pebbles, petitioning the spirits to keep us safe on the rest of our journey.

Cultural insight: Ouidah in Benin (seen above) is known as the City of Voodoo and the spiritual capital of the country

Later at Ouidah we paid a visit to the Temple of the Sacred Pythons, where the snakes are kept and brought out by initiates marked by facial scars to drape around the necks of curious visitors.

In the inner sanctuary, 20 of the snakes were coiled up asleep, unaware of their sanctity or the photo-ops outside. For the privilege of having one draped around my neck, I was obliged to throw a dollar note into the python pit.

In Namibia we enjoyed a four-wheel-drive desert safari, and then it was on to the splendour of Cape Town for the perfect end to the trip.

That evening, after a visit to Table Mountain and the colonial Mount Nelson Hotel, we went to Signal Hill at sunset. 

It’s a ritual that attracts tourists and locals alike as the dramatic mountains behind, city below and ocean beyond change in hue by the minute. 

In the distance I could see the lights of Mariner, my home for just one more night.