Last few days in Ghana!

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Wow cant believe its nearly been 6 weeks here already, its gone ridiculously quickly! Our flight to Ethiopia leaves tomorrow morning at about 10am so we are getting a tro tro that leaves Cape coast at 5 in the morning- really hopeing there will be places to eat at the airport! We will be in Ethiopia for one night at the hilton hotel (thanks mum and dad 😊 ) and then friday the 13th we are off from ethiopia to kenya :S !

Weve just had a really busy weekend. On Friday the 6th it was Ghanas 52nd independance day so we took the idea of the holiday and decided to have a well deserved lie in! later found out when we went into town that this meant we had missed all the parades and festivities 😞 which we were all abit gutted about so we went out for lunch instead! The town centre was really busy with loads of people all wearing their best sunday dress. In the afternoon we went to the orphanage and all the kids were really hyped up! We bought them some balloons and used paper adn twigs got them all to make little ghana flags which they all loved 😊 They even got their drums out and started dancing wanted us to join in- before laughing at us when we did. kept saying to us obrunni (white person) cant dance which was very true so gave up with that idea and decided to try to teach them the macarina! When we saw them again on monday theyd been practicing all weekend and performed it perfectly! nice to see im spreading my knowledge well! We took all the kids on a little parade with their flags- its quite hard to control about 12 hyped up kids who just want to run around and hit each other!

Saturday was a very busy day. We went to a place called Hans cottage botel aka the croc place! When we got there we walked up to this mini island bit nearly completely surrounded by water and stood there whilst about 3 big crocs all came out of the water at once- was quite scary! Didnt want to really turn your back on any of them because there just soo quick at creeping up on you so tried to watch all 3 at once whilst trying not to get cornered by them and fall into a lake full of them- was jokes- no health and safety at all! After a couple of minutes built up the courage to go and pat one (called sadam hussein!) , its skin was rock hard had a touch of its feet too which were all scabby and webbed- had a few photos but having the flash on probably wasnt a great idea so the croc started waddling away whilst it was still between my legs ! Lucy cleverly walked infront of it and it managed to go for her ankle and her flip flop went flyin in the air- she survived though so its all fine 😊 . As if that wasnt close enough we then decided to go on a pathetic (and very broken ) pedalo in the croc infeseted lake. The steering on the pedalo was really bad and we decided it was probably best to avoid going near the river banks as thats were they tend to hide and rush out of- this didnt work so well. Saw a couple of eyes poking out the water but we survived!

We then went to Kakum national park which has part of ghanas rainforest in it which was soo good! After a lot of confusion we managed to sort ourselves out a 'tree platform' to camp on in the rainforest for the night. A guide led us up a little trek path and showed us where we were camping- it was like a little wooden shack with no walls just 4 post supporting a tin roof with two (very scabby loooking) mattresses and a mossie net tied to the posts. The mossie net seemed very pointless to us all as it had soo many big holes in it and didnt even manage to cover our mattresses! We managed to get a takeaway dinner from the cafe and then by about 6 we were sitting on our mattreses in the pitch black in the rainforest with a few headtorches to see where we were! Was really quite freaky as soon as it got dark could hear nothing but frogs and crickets, birds etc adn teh odd very weird or loud noise which just managed to freak us all out- especially the growl we heard :S ! We managed to kill a few hours and at about 9 seeing as their really wasnt much else to do tried to go to sleep. It was very crowded with all 4 of us in one! We were all slowly drifting off when we heard footprints/ twigs breaking right outside our tent- apparenlty theres jaguars in the forest :S we were all pretty scraed to say the least! Then realised that Caitlin cleverly had left her dinner (chicken! and rice ) right outside where we were sleeping- we were not impresses so me adn Caitlin took it to the toilet (again a shack with a hole in the ground!) to where there were bins in an attempt to stop tempting the animals near us! It still didnt work very well. Me and Caitlin both decided to use the loo and as we did something big dropped from the tree above right behind us made a weird noise and so we ran back to our shack trousers round our ankles screaming!! not our proudest moment! Again we tried to sleep and were succeeding when Hayley managed to wake us all up by jumping on us because she was scared of the frog that was literally righth outside our tent! Eventually managed to get to sleep - decided to just put my ipod on! Had to be up at half 3 to pack up and be ready for our night hike! Our guide took us on a hike around the rainforest for about an hour in teh pitch black with just our headtorches was quite freaky beacuse you coudl feel loads of little bugs crawling on you but you couldnt see which was probably just as well! Managed to get bitten by some freakishly large ants! and saw a big sandy camoflauged colour tarantuala along the path and some big ugly millepides! We got to the start of the canopy walk at about half5 and waited for it to be abit lighter before we started it! There was just 8 of us at this time and it was just as the sun was rising so there was more chance of seeing more animals 😊 We heard some bush babies in the trees next to us they made the weirdeat noises and we also heard some big rodant type creatures which had freaked us out the night before beacause they sound like people screaming!

The canopy walk was about 40m above the ground and seemed to have little health and saftey as it was a canopy brigde with a wooden plank to walk along(many were loose!) and he main ropes holding it up were attached to the smallest most pathetic tree! Tried to ignore all this and the big foot sized holes in the net which was there to stop you falling! The view was amazing though! Was just massive trees everywhere and the sun began to rise! The rope canopies were seperated by tree platforms and our guide saw some monkeys (which were rare to see apparntly!) soo we all gathered to one side. The tree platform jolted very sharpley. Twice. Scared was a very large understatement!! Apparently according to our guide it sometimes does that if all our weight goes to one side- it sounds very safe Considering we were 40m up with nothing but trees below! We were all in a great rush to get off that pplatform but then stopped halfway on teh canopy bridge and was lucky enough to see a family of Mona monkeys swinging from tree to tree below! They were soo cute there were even some baby ones. There were quite a few of them a we vaguely saw a bigger monkey bnut ouor quide couldnt figure out what it was ! Was such a good experience, got me and Luce really in the mood for safari now! We got back at about 8 in the morning and spent the rest of the day at Anamabo beach which is stunning beach surrounded by plam trees and we stayed there til the sunset 😊

Sunday night was the biggest strom iv ever seen- was really glad it was that night though and not the saturday night when we wouldve been in our shack! It was absolutely chucking it down and all the power went in our house. before long the lighteneing started it was immense! literally lighting up the sky every few seconds. Me and Hayley cleverly went to the balcony to watch and as we were standing there there was a massive clap of thunder that shook the house and we saw about 3 forks of lightening right in front of us hit the ground not fay away and lit up the whole sky! After screaming we decided it was probably best to take refuge inside away from all the power cables ! and so we all stood and waited for the storm to calm, in our room all wearing our rubber soled walking boots with or pjs looking like idiots!

On monday we took the orphans to a local park and played football with them (african style apparently so everybody for themselves!!) They all were ridiculously excited about going to the park even though it was literally round the corner from the orphanage but apparenlty most of them have never seen the sea or beach which is really sad considering its like only a 10 minute car ride away 😞 ! Yesterday was me adn Lucys last day at school which was sad. We spent the majority of the day teaching adn singing them songs and letting them scribble on their chalk boards which always leaves me with a class of 'white looking children' as apose to black ones- Chalk EVERYWHERE! Spent the rest of the afternoon trying to pack (eeek) fit all my stuff in and attempting and failing to flog some clothes for a bit of dosh! Off in a minute back to the orphanage for our last day, going to hopefully get them to make some friendship bracelets! Then off out for dinner and a few drinks tonight and then thats the end of GHANA! Cant believe how quickly it has gone!

Sorry this is a bit of a long one, tried to get completely up to date before we leave for safari tomorrow morning! Il try and keep you guys up to date with how thats going when i can but chances are we wont stumble across internet that often! Hopefully write soon

Alice 😊

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