In my last entry I mentioned an upcoming trip to Ghana, and it was epic. But first a little bit of background information:
Immediately prior to this trip was probably the low point of my entire Peace Corps service. As many of you know, I have been slowly working towards a big (or small, depending on your perspective) project in my village, and we were finally to the point where funding was going to be coming through in about a week. I was really looking forward to having a visible, tangible result from my 2 years in Mali, but as time went on it became clear that I was far more invested in this project than my village. One of the things that I respect most about Peace Corps is its focus on sustainable development, and I no longer felt that completing this project was going to have sustainable results. So, after a few really difficult days of deliberation I made an executive decision to pull the funding. It was one of the hardest, most heart-wrenching things I have ever had to do, and my village was (and still is to a certain extent) very upset with me, but I still feel that I made the right decision.
Needless to say, I was really looking forward to my vacation in Ghana, and it fortunately lived up to my expectations.
The first step of our adventure was to take an overnight bus through Burkina Faso and down into Ghana to the city of Kumasi. There is a PC house there that we were able to spend the night at, bathe, and then continue down further south. After being on a bus for about 30 hours straight it was a welcome relief with the added bonus of getting advice from a current PCV in Ghana (thanks Mikey!).
Our first stop was in Accra, but it was really just a stop-over in a failed attempt to get our Burkina visa extended and save some money, but we had a lovely night at the YWCA and our first Fan Ice - so good. From there we went to the beach at Kokrobite, which was nice, but not enough to get us to stick around for too long, so our next planned stop was in Apam.
Oh Apam. I had gotten this idea in my head that I wanted to stay in an old slave fort. In our guide books it says that this is possible in a couple of different towns along the Ghanaian coast, and Apam seemed like one of the cooler places to do it, so we headed on down. When we arrived it was just gorgeous - I'm talking French Riviera gorgeous. The fort was at the top of the hill overlooking the fishing harbor that was full of big, brightly painted boats, and the aging stone building was just as I had imagined. Creepy history aside it was kind of romantic. The three of us each had our own individual rooms on the top level of the fort with a breezeway in between where we could all hang out together, so we relaxed for a while then went down to check out the town. After getting a little harassed along the harbor (as expected) we headed back up to our refuge on the hill and started settling in for the night. We were having a lovely game of rummy accompanied by a fine box of Don Simon sangria when it became increasingly clear that the 4th room in the fort, the only one not occupied by us, the one right next to my room and opening out into the breezeway where we sat playing cards, was being rented out by the hour. Yup, a couple of times. Awesome. So, okay, we weren't the only ones to find the fort setting a little 'romantic' but we did our best to deal with the situation (I did have to make a *little* fuss), and the next morning we had the fort to ourselves again and all was well and beautiful. But we didn't stay for another night...
Next on the agenda was Cape Coast. A lot of other volunteers had very good things to say about it, and I have to agree. It was a nice town on the beach, we had a nice room at the Red Cross hostel with good access to the rest of the town, there was good seafood overlooking the water, and, perhaps most importantly, it gave Jess an opportunity to flesh out her obsession with the Obamas visiting Ghana. Nothing really remarkable happened while we were there, other than lovely site seeing, and then we went up to Kakum NP to the north.
Kakum was pretty amazing. It's famous for its canopy walk, but we did a little extra and spent the night in the park. Since the park closes at 4pm and you have to be spending the night to stay any longer, we had the whole park to ourselves for more than 12 hours, which was pretty cool. We also realized that we were really good at being cheapskates. Instead of splurging on a lunch in the park (about $4) we walked down the road and spent about 1/5 of that, and because we had thought it would be even more expensive than it was we also brought food with us for dinner. Well done us. The next morning we got up relatively early and took another guided walk through the park and then headed off to the beach again.
This time we went to a highly recommended eco-lodge that's kind of out of the way called the Green Turtle Lodge, and basically fell in love with it. Joelle essentially spent every waking hour in the surf, while Jess and I took some breaks for books, food, and bathing. We met some other travelers and shared stories, walked into the nearby fishing village for lunch every day, and just relaxed for a while. We also made some tentative plans to open our own eco-lodge next door, thus having this be our day to day life.
From the Green Turtle we headed back up to Kumasi, where I got to have a short visit with my old site-mate Brooke, who is living there for a while. We also went to the zoo, where I got spit on by a chimpanzee and actually ran into some of our friends from Mali who were also traveling in Ghana. Kumasi was mostly just a nice place to relax (since our time on the beach had been so stressful), do a little laundry, etc. and then we took a little side trip to a crater lake nearby before continuing on up north.
Our final big stop in Ghana was Mole NP. On the way to and from there we were able to stay at another PC house in the town of Tamale, which was really nice and convenient (thanks again Ghana PCVs for sharing!), but Mole was infinitely better. You always hear about all this great wildlife in Africa, but after a year and a half here I had hardly seen any, so I was skeptical of the claims of all these baboon/monkey/warthog/antelope sitings. They were all true! It was crazy! The warthogs were probably my favorites, running around with their little tails in the air, grunting with several little ones following behind. The baboons were really cool, too, but also a little scary. They weren't afraid of people at all, going so far as to steal the ketchup bottle literally off our table at lunch one day. And then there were the elephants. Our first full day there we saw 2 of them from a distance and it was very cool. Our last night there we had a guide take us out away from the hotel and slept on a platform next to the watering hole. We weren't able to really see anything because it was so dark, but you heard all the jungle-y sounds and then we had to start hiking back out at about 2am to catch the morning bus, along with our armed guard. On the way back in we were almost back to the hotel when our guard signalled us to stop walking and then made us start backing up slowly because there was this massive elephant less than 100m away, staring us down. I was grateful it didn't charge or anything, but that didn't stop my heart from leaping into my throat until we starting walking again. We hadn't gone 50m before we had to stop again. A bunch of antelope were running across the road ahead of us, and as we slowly continued after they had passed we saw another elephant that had come along. It was pretty spectacular.
Afterwards, we headed back to Tamale, got our stuff together, did some last souvenir shopping and then got transport back to Mali. Just in case you thought our adventure was over, though, we got to see yet another elephant up close right after crossing the Burkina border. It was standing in the opposing traffic lane as we rode by in our bus. Crazy!
So, our Ghanaian adventure was over, and it was a great one.
I didn't go straight back to site, because we were having our 'Close of Service Conference' in Bamako right after the trip anyways. Instead a made a quick stop in my friend Gemma's village and then went the rest of the way to Bamako with her. The conference was good, mostly because it was one last chance to see all the other volunteers that I came to Mali with almost 2 years ago. I still can't believe it's been that long already, but time flies when you're sitting in village with no running water!