volta region

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Alright, go back a couple weeks to when sarah and I made a second attempt at getting our packages from the states. We headed to the post office on a week day; there was a lot less traffic so we got there a lot quicker than the week before. When you get a package through the postal service here, you have to open it at the post office in front of a customs officer so they can charge you the appropriate taxes. The amount you end up paying is pretty much at the employee’s discretion so it’s best to be very agreeable with them. I had done this and was about to pay for my package when the customs officer asked me to hand her one of the boxes of granola bars inside my package. She started shaking it, opened the box and proceeded to open one of the bars and start eating it. I was taken back but didn’t really do anything but laugh because I had just given here money and was waiting to get my change, and once she had given it to me I asked her to give the box back to me. She then took one of the bars out and handed it to me, I asked her to give me all of them but all she said was “I like them, so we’ll share,” and that was that. Unbelievable. But there’s a good chance that I’ll be dealing with the same people whenever I’m at the post office so I didn’t want to burn a bridge by making a big deal of it. Still, so ridiculous. Regardless, I was stoked and getting the package made my day. Thanks mom and dad.

That weekend a few of my Ghanaian friends took sarah, malina and I to bojo beach. We went in their cars instead of tro-tros but as with most things here, it took us much longer to get there than we had planned. It cost five cedis to get into bojo but was well worth it. The whole resort is beautiful -the prettiest I’ve seen in Ghana. There’s a water current you have to cross in a canoe to get to the beach which is an open stretch of white sand with a bar, speakers and tables scattered along it. It wasn’t very hot the day we went so most of us didn’t swim but we played soccer and danced instead.

Last thursday my friend Kevin and I left for the volta region for the weekend. We had planned on catching a mini-bus to hohoe from the tema tro-tro station but once we got there, everyone we asked for directions pointed us in different directions. (tro-tro’s are suitable for traveling around town but we had been told to try to find a mini-bus because they’re much more comfortable for longer drives but at this point we couldn’t be too picky -we wanted to be on our way before it started getting dark). There was one guy who said he know where we needed to go and offered to give us a ride for free as he was heading that way already. We got in not really knowing where we were heading, but that’s the case pretty often with going places here. He ended up driving us to the city of tema -about a half hour away while picking up other people on the way. We got there and found the only tro-tro heading to hohoe and waited for it to fill up for awhile before we were on our way. The ride wasn’t very eventful aside from the woman who was sitting between Kevin and I was openly breastfeeding so it made it kind of awkward any time we tried to talk to each other, but she was nice. It was also interesting to see how quickly the scenery changed as we got out of the accra region. Much more tropical looking, much more rural. It had been dark for awhile when we got to hohoe and there wasn’t much to do so we found a hotel and called it a night (Oh, this is also the night we both left our cell phones in a taxi and didn’t realize it until the taxi was long gone).
We left pretty early the next morning for wli falls. You can walk to the bottom of the waterfall in about a half hour. Our guide stopped along the way to climb up a cocoa tree, cut off a plant and show us how you can cut it open and suck on the outside of the cocoa beans. His English wasn’t very good, but he showed us some cool stuff along the way to the falls. We decided to do the hike to the upper falls through the rainforest as well. This was the most intense hike I have ever done. Four hours, almost entirely vertical, very steep and slippery in parts and we did it in the mid-day heat. When we got to the top, our guide cut a path with his machete to the edge of the waterfall so we could stand on the ledge for a bit. it was beautiful but definitely a little scary. We had left our bags at one of the hotels near the bottom so we went to pick them up and the owner let us use their bathroom to shower and change. The border to togo was about a ten minute walk from wli falls so we decided to try to go through, mostly because we need to get our passports stamped soon (our Ghanaian visa’s are supposed to be good for a year but the immigration process is weird -we need to get them stamped every 60 days or pay a monthly fee). We talked to the border police for awhile and explained our situation to them but without a togo visa, they said stamps would look fraudulent. Unsuccessful but was worth a try. We were both pretty spent so wanted to get going pretty quick.

We got to tafi atome pretty late but right when we got off the tro-tro, there was a sign directing us to the monkey sanctuary and a motorcycle taxi waiting. Both of us rode on the back of the motorcycle. it was actually kind of scary because I was on the very back and couldn’t see what was going on as the driver swerved to avoid potholes and bumps in the dirt road. it seemed a lot further than 5km but we made it there okay. We woke up early the next morning to eat before going into the sanctuary. we had breakfast with a peace corps volunteer who lives in the next village and he let us pick his brain for awhile about the work he’s doing in ghana and the peace corps in general. After breakfast one of the guides bought some bananas and we headed into the forest. We had to walk through a swampy part of the forest and jump from rock to rock to avoid the mud but we soon found a group of monkeys. The monkeys are used to people so they didn’t run away, they swung from branches all around us. The guide showed us how to hold bananas so the monkeys would come and peel them and eat them out of our hands. We watched and fed them for ten minutes or so until we ran out of bananas. It was incredible.

we rode on another motorcycle taxi out of tafi atome and waited near the main rode for a tro-tro to achimota and akosombo, two towns bordering lake volta. we were planning on going on a day-long cruise Sunday morning so when we got to achimota we went a couple places to figure out what we needed to do for that. We started looking for a hotel room but found out pretty quick that most of the rooms along the lake had been rented out by a company who had come to do the same cruise the following day. A man helped us find a room in akosombo but it was more than we had planned on paying so we decided to get dinner then go to the bank in achimota to get cash for the hotel and cruise (almost all transactions are done in cash, it’s pretty rare to find a business that accepts cards). We had dinner on a dock over the lake and it started pouring rain while we were eating, it was really cool. also while we were eating, a man in a canoe rowed up to the dock we were on and asked if he could row us around the lake. After negotiating the price we agreed to go out after the rain stopped. it was really pretty and Kevin jumped in for a little before we went back to shore. The canoe man showed us up a path to get to the main road where we started walking to the bank. It was a Saturday evening so we weren’t expecting the bank to be open but we were confused when the atm wouldn’t let either of us get money out. A man there explained that the atm would only service members of the Ghana commercial bank and that the nearest atm or bank was in accra. At this point we had about 15 cedis between us which would barely be enough to get home. The man offered us a ride back into town with him and his wife and some money to get home -we took him up on the ride, not on the money. He was really sweet. After we got back to our hotel we decided that since we hadn’t used to room and we didn’t have money to pay for it, we would just grab our bags and leave (I realize this wasn’t a great idea but it was already getting late and we just wanted to get home). It didn’t end up being nearly that simple. As we were leaving we walked past the hotel manager who started to ask us questions about leaving. We tried to explain the situation to him but he didn’t understand and got really upset. Him and Kevin were yelling at each other outside on the street with a group of about fifteen people around them, all trying to get involved. It was pretty clear that the man was not going to understand what we were saying and we needed to get a tro-tro back to accra so we got in one that had just pulled up. The tro-tro was about to pull away when the hotel manager came up and grabbed kevins bag and kept yelling at him. Now the people in the tro-tro started asking questions and getting involved. A man came up to the tro-tro and told Kevin that he was an immigrations officer and to get off the vehicle (it’s probably important to mention that there’s a huge distinction between how men and women are treated in public situations. All of the planning along the trip was done with Kevin and throughout this argument I wasn’t approached at all. It’s generally assumed that the man is in charge). We got off the tro-tro and explained the situation to the immigrations officer, he checked out kevins passport and after explaining the whole thing to the hotel manager in ghanaian English (something I haven’t quite mastered yet), he let us go. We took a few different tro-tro’s to get back to legon but made it back with a couple cedis to spare. We tried to decide what the lesson of all of that was and the best we could come up with was that for future traveling, take more money than you anticipate you’ll need. It was a really good experience, very different than any I’ve had in accra or at school. At the end of the day, I was just glad to be home to get some sleep.

On Monday a few of us went to kokrobite beach. It was a national holiday, meaning the school and a lot of businesses were closed so the beach was full of people but it was really nice. We all swam and laid out for awhile and talked to a bunch of people on the beach.

I haven’t done a whole lot since then, I’m being treated for malaria. There’s a pretty general rule here that if you have any of the symptoms of malaria or typhoid, you should go get checked out. The downside is that the healthcare system is anything but efficient; my roommate anouk and i spent five hours at the university hospital just to speak to a doctor, get blood work done and get medication. but lots of sleep and bumming around this week and I’m feeling much better today.

i'm going to try to get some pictures from kevin from the trip to put up soon.

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