As souvenirs, you can take back engravings, batiks, jewellery, traditional masks, wood carvings and religious statues. At Lome, the handicraft village, the Rue Foch and the Rue du Commerce, are the best places to shop for souvenirs. Businesses are open from 8:00 am to 5 :30 pm from Monday to Friday and from 7:30 am to 12:30 am on Saturdays.
Togo offers one of the best cuisines in West Africa. Most of its specialties comprise sauce with rice, corn (in the form of corn meal or steamed pancake) or yam fufu. The sauce is cooked with groundnuts, fish, tomatoes, eggplants or spinach. You can also taste the very popular koliko (fried yam) or, beans or plantain fritters, the abobo (snail kebab), the egbo pinon (smoked goat meat) and the koklo meme (roast chicken with pepper sauce). Gourmet attractions include eating bats in Atakpame. As liqueur, you will find the sodabi (palm wine), the tchoucoutou (very thick millet beer) or the tchakpallo (fermented millet).
Take camera films when travelling and seek permission before taking snapshots of the people. Avoid taking photos of the police or official buildings and similarly do not wander around the presidential palace at Lome. Seek permission from the village chief before visiting a site on their territory. Make sure you see the Chebe dance (on stilts) at Atakpame. On another topic, do go and watch the knife festival at Sokodé (end of August), a Muslim ceremony in which men, who seem to be in a trance, dance while slashing their bodies with swords and knives, and washing their faces with splinters of glass.
It is strongly inadvisable to swim along the coast of Togo due to tidal waves, only a few developed areas offer safe swimming.