Careful, this one is long. If you get tired of reading, I’ve posted pictures; as the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
We had been talking about and looking forward to our trip to Ghana pretty much since we arrived in Burkina last June. And by “we”, I mean our whole training group. With that much hype, you might think that the trip wouldn’t be able to live up to the nirvana it had become in our minds.
You’d be wrong.
Most of us were in Ouaga for a Peace Corps training session the week before the trip and were able to use the time to get visas and arrange transport, which turned out to be surprisingly challenging. After several trips to the bus garage, we finally managed to find someone going to Ghana on Saturday morning. It was kind of sketchy because apparently Saturday is not the normal day to go to Ghana; this guy came up to us in the garage and said he’d take us and that we should show up Saturday morning ready to go. Um, OK? Not knowing what to expect, we foolishly hoped for the best: a private van for the 16 of us. Nope. Four hours after he promised we’d leave, a nearly full bus pulled into the garage. Great. Just the way we wanted to spend the next 16 hours. Sometime around 3:00am the next morning we switched buses in Kumasi and took a nice large van/small bus the rest of the way to Accra. Our entertainment for the trip? Listening to the Ghanaian election officials counting the ballots. Seriously. “One, two, three…four hundred eighty-seven…” This was definitely the first time I had ever heard democracy in action.
Once we made it to Accra, sometime mid-morning on Sunday, we met up with Megan and Andy, our hosts for the first part of the week. The two are studying sea turtles in a small beach town a couple of hours east of Accra, and eleven of us stayed at their house for a few days. What a life! They live in a gorgeous house a couple hundred meters from the beach, and their job is to walk the beach a few nights each week tagging sea turtles who beached to lay their eggs. Megan and Andy took the whole group turtle hunting, and on our second walk we got lucky. We came across a turtle about three feet long who was just finishing laying her eggs. After she had finished and buried the nest, we flipped her over, tagged her, then watched her use the moon’s reflection to guide herself back to the ocean. Absolutely beautiful. And what’s more, Disney and Pixar got it right! Turtles don’t age like other animals and can live well over 100 years!
The village we stayed in is right on the ocean, so its main livelihood is fishing. Each morning before sunrise, the men begin with a line of guys about 100m long on shore holding one end of a gigantic fishing net. A boat pulls the other end of the net over a kilometer into the ocean. About midmorning the boat circles back to the shore, forming a U with the net, and the men begin the laborious task of hauling in the catch. I had watched them fish for several days, and one day I joined in. You hold onto the net and walk backwards up the beach, pulling the net with you. When you get to the end of the beach, you go back to the water and pick up the next segment of net. Let me tell you, that thing is heavy. This is not your ordinary Lake Harriet fishing net. After a couple of hours hauling in the net, the fisherman had their reward: maybe one small fish each.
A few days after Christmas (which we celebrated by feasting at one of the local resorts and watching “It’s A Wonderful Life”), the whole group packed up and headed for Busua, a beach village in the West. We arrived at our guesthouse and were sorely disappointed; they weren’t on the beach, didn’t have running water, and had electricity in only one room. Not exactly what we were hoping for. Luckily we decided to check out our other options and found a great little place right on the beach. Despite its ironic name, The Alaska Inn boasted comfortable cottages, a well-stocked bar, immediate beach access, and a tasty (though painfully slow) restaurant- all for less than $10 per night! We were sold. We spent the next three or four days bumming around the beach and town. Our hotel had boogie boards; the hotel across the street rented kayacks; there was even a surf shop down the beach…and they had BURRITOS! My first burrito since San Francisco. Talk about paradise.
For New Year’s Eve we showered (a notable event for 11 vacationing Peace Corps volunteers), got all dressed up, and had dinner at the REALLY nice resort next door. The food was good, but the atmosphere was a bit snotty; I kid you not they put us in the back corner, out of the main dining area, with no light. The rising tide almost swept away our dinner. Whatever. We ditched the formalities and spent midnight at the Surf Shop, being entertained by Mr. Ghana and Wonder Boy, a street performing duo. Beer and cheesy entertainment is more our style anyways.
A small group of five of us managed to tear ourselves away from the beach to add an educational aspect to the vacation. We started by touring the slave castles in Elmina and Cape Coast. Originally built in the 15th and 17th centuries and used by the Portuguese, Dutch, British and Swedish, both castles have recently been restored by the Ghanaian Historical Society and are completely beautiful. Whitewashed walls. Ancient cannons. Blue skies. Palm trees. Ocean. You could almost forget the heinous acts committed within the walls. Almost. Slaves were taken to the castles from throughout Ghana and West Africa. They were branded and forced to live in dungeons about the size of my living room with hundreds of others. They had little light, food, or water, and disease was rampant. When someone died, they were usually left in the room with everyone else. There were no sewage holes, so the captives lived in lakes 18 inches deep of their own excrement. The “lucky” ones who survived were shackled and brought to boats where they were literally stacked on top of each other like pieces of paper for a couple months’ journey to Europe or the Americas. My mind can’t even fathom the evil that people are capable of inflicting on one another. And this went on for five hundred years.
Leaving the coast, our small group headed up to Kakum National Park. Megan has a friend of a friend living in the village near Kakum’s entrance. We took a cab to the village and asked for directions to his house once we got there. No problem. The first kid we saw jumped into our taxi, on my lap, and took us to the house. I love Africa. We spent the night at “Papa G’s”, and in the morning his son, a Park Ranger, took us into the rainforest. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from our tour guide- he showed up at the house right on time a couple of hours before sunrise decked out in a dark green t-shirt and pants, combat boots…and a semi-automatic rifle. For the lions? Elephants? Angry villagers? My apprehensions were soon abated, and our guide gave us a fantastic personal tour. The park’s signature attraction is a canopy walk- a series of rope bridges connecting six platforms in the trees 30-40 meters above the forest floor. Amazing. Though the only mammalian wildlife we saw were a few monkeys from quite a distance (the elephants generally stay away from parts of the park frequented by tourists), the serenity of the sunrise from above the forest floor made the whole trip worthwhile. It really made me realize what a drastic affect humans can have on wildlife; one road passes through the park, and even at that early hour with little traffic, every car sounded like a freight train disrupting the stillness of the forest morning. No wonder the elephants stay away.
After meeting up with the rest of the group in Busua, we headed up to Kumasi to begin our journey home. And what a journey. Three members of our group ran away from an angry taxi driver…and his 40 friends…threatening police and jail to jump into a moving van as we left Takoradi. In Kumasi, we rolled up to our gorgeous hotel ($10 per person) well after dark. The rooms had air conditioning; the bathrooms had floor mats; and the TV had cable. Royalty. The next morning I went over to the bus station to get tickets for our group of 11; once again we got lucky as there were exactly 11 seats left on the bus that evening.
With the whole day to bum around Kumasi, me and three others decided to visit some museums. Kumasi is the capital of the ancient Ashanti kingdom, and the Ghana has put a lot of time and effort into preserving artifacts and buildings important to their history. We visited the Prempeh II Jubilee Museum; it was disappointingly small (about the size of my Burkinabe house), but had some really interesting artifacts. I also found out that my Ashanti name- based on my birthday- is Kofi…like one of the most famous modern Ashantis, Kofi Anon. The Ashanti Palace was built by the British in 1925 as a “welcome home/we’re sorry” present for Prempeh I, who had previously been kidnapped and forced into slavery. The Palace now houses paintings of Ashanti royalty, their war weaponry, ceremonial relics, and furniture. It was a little like touring the house who had been on vacation for the past 30 years, but cool nonetheless. The highlight of the tour was without question our tour guide’s blatant disrespect for Museum Rule #1: don’t touch anything. He kept rubbing his hands on the paintings, playing with the swords, and swinging around the medals of recognition. At one point a painting resting against a wall actually slid down and crashed to the floor. My art history major friend practically had a heart attack, but the guide barely noticed.
Interesting museum practices aside, I love Ghana. The food is delicious: thick bread, fried rice, “red-red” (spicy beans and rice), fresh fish, and grilled chicken. I could have eaten forever. Almost as importantly, transport in the country is a little slice of Heaven. Through all our trouncing about the country, our total transport wait time was less than 30 minutes. Tro-tros (mini-van taxis) run nonstop on all the major roads, so whenever you want to go anywhere, you just head to a tro-tro stop (or stick out your arm as one passes by) and hop on. The tro-tros and taxis were clean, had most of their parts, and didn’t try to rip us off too badly. Our bus ride home was even air-conditioned.
The trip was an overwhelming success, an outcome I have to admit I was a bit skeptical of in the beginning. Traveling with 11 people made for more than one “hold your breath and hope this works” moment, but everything turned out great. Ghana itself is fantastic. Aside from the obvious (the beach), or maybe because of the obvious (the beach), the country has a lot going for it. Their democratically elected officials are putting money towards education, infrastructure, and historical preservation. Accra smells like the inside of my latrine (environmental standards are lacking), but we had no problems finding our way around or getting things done. Most of the villages we passed through had electricity, and even small things like advertising and village name signs pointed towards progress. The country is one big die hard soccer fan, and appropriately, they are hosting the African Cup of Nations later this month. Most importantly, Ghana seems to be modernizing in a way that is sensitive to its historical background and generally healthy for the population. It may seem surprising to talk about a developing nation in such glowing terms, but Ghana is definitely moving up in the world.
Whew, done. Now get back to work Mimi.
