This was posted from an internet cafe in Accra minutes before driving to the airport. A lot's happened since the last post. It's another long one, so let's get started.
On day seven, Janaya and I made a second hike to the top of Mount Afadjato, Ghana's highest mountain. Ghana is not an especially mountainous country, and the mountain is not quite nine hundred meters tall, rather unremarkable by Vancouver standards. But it was undoubtedly worthwhile, as the climb was not too strenuous (certainly much less so than that to the Wli upper falls) and offered impressive views of the surrounding towns and rain forest. Sadly, my camera hasn't been the same since it got soaked in rain a few weeks ago, and it gave out just as we reached the summit, but I got an eyeful, and that was enough for me. The rest of you will just have to visit for yourselves!
Learning that another trip member was in nearby Ho, we elected not to go on to Accra that night, staying in Hohoe for the evening instead so that we could meet her for another hike the next day. After meeting with Coleen, we a took another cramped, uncomfortable tro from Ho to Accra, and then immediately went on to Cape Coast in a spacious, air-conditioned tro that somehow managed to be less comfortable than the previous one. We were all fighting off sleep by the time the tro made it to Cape Coast at about 10:30 at night. A local who'd gotten off the same tro helped us find a taxi to take us to our hotel, the Oasis Beach Resort. The taxi dropped us at the top of the hotel's drive, and the three of us exhaustedly climbed out, hoping only for an at-least-slightly-bed-like surface upon which to lie.
As we descended the sloping drive, the lilting strains of Afroman's “But Then I Got High” drifted up from the resort to meet us. We passed through the gate into the outdoor lobby and bar and checked in to a nine-cedi-per-night dorm room. It being the beginning of Ghana's rainy season and thus of off-season for tourism, the three of us had the entire dorm room to ourselves, making it an extremely good deal. After depositing our bags, we headed back out to the bar for some slightly-overpriced beers to reward ourselves after the long journey, and took our bottles down three steps to the beach to drink them while enjoying the cool ocean breeze and watching the high, dark waves crash on the shore.
A bit about the resort itself: We had chosen Oasis on the recommendation of the Peace Corps volunteers that we'd met in Hohoe, and I'm glad that we did. The resort, which is run by a pair of German expatriates, consists of an outdoor bar and lobby and a handful of small huts where visitors stay, and is positioned just above a beautiful sandy stretch of atlantic coast. The ocean is just a few steps away from the rooms and the bar, and the sound of waves can always be heard in the background. It's a bit more tourist-y than most of our accomodations have been, but happily still not much so – the strech of beach, for instance, isn't private, and in the early morning we said hello to some local boys who were doing laps on it. If one is going to stay in Cape Coast, one should stay here. Just don't eat at the restaurant. Like most hotel restaurants, it's very overpriced and the food is nothing special. Better meals can be obtained at much lower prices from the roadside food vendors and chop bars (small restaurants) that are never far away from one in a Ghanaian city. Unless one is dead-set on eating Western food, these are always the better option.
The next day, after carving the last three pawns for my chess set in the early morning, we made a series of exursions to explore Cape Coast itself. Cape Coast used to be the nation's capital, and it's easily the most beautiful city I've visited in Ghana. It's positioned right on the coast and exists on very hilly terrain. When viewed from a high vantage point, the city becomes a rolling, swelling wave of tin roofs, a still-life parallel to the rough seas that it overlooks. While a smaller city by Ghanaian standards, it's very dense and bustling, with the buildings along the main roads typically reaching to three or four stories. Modern Ghanaian construction is mingled with eighteenth- and ninteenth-century European archictecture in a hectic but romantic juxtaposition of styles, a legacy of the slave trade upon which the town was originally built. I ranged along main streets and side alleys, up a grassy hill crested with a crenelated castle and down dusty, decimated dirt roads, and stopped frequently to chat with locals who were bemused to find an obruni in their corner of town.
Around mid-afternoon, while checking out the exterior of the infamous Cape Coast slave castle, I was approached by a man on a bicycle. We greeted one another, and I commented that I liked his shirt, which was brightly coloured and patterned in a common Ghanaian motif. He said that he liked mine as well, and offered to trade if I'd give him ten cedi into the deal. Given that mine was a fairly simple white T-shirt that I was wearing inside-out to hide how dirty it was, I bargained him down to seven cedi and figured that was a good deal. Unfortunately, the only bills I had in my wallet at the time were a pair of ten-cedi notes. We took off our shirts and exchanged them, and I gave him one ten-cedi note and asked for change. "I don't have it now! I'll get it later!" he said, and rode off on his bicycle with my shirt and the ten cedis, as a few locals standing nearby had a good laugh. Getting scammed out of the three cedi was a little annoying, but it amounts to about two dollars and so I can't get too upset, and it was still not a bad price for the shirt I got out of it. Henceforth I'll just have to make sure to ask people if they have change first, before handing over money. Besides, now the garnment has a story attached to it, and that's more than worth the extra.
We stayed at Oasis again that night and left Cape Coast the following day, but not before spending a little more time in town. For breakfast we went to one of several vegetarian, Rastafarian chop bars, where we had some very good pancakes. I made friends with the owner Patrick, nicknamed Stone, and he told me about his pancake recipe and his other work as a DJ in Accra as he smoked a rather large joint. Having made this new friend, the three of us went to see Cape Coast Castle. The guided tour was very interesting, moreso than such things usually are to me. There was a stark and unsettling contrast between the cavernous, pitch-dark slave dungeons and the whitewashed majesty of the castle's exterior. Particularly portentious was the Door of No Return, as it was termed by the slaves at the time, through which they were taken from the castle to be loaded onto ships. There was a plaque above the door inside the castle reading "Door of No Return", and on the outside, a second plaque reads "Door of Return", as the door was termed roughly a decade ago by the descendents of slaves who had come to Ghana seeking their roots.
After we were done at the castle, we checked out of the hotel. Coleen and Janaya went ahead to the tro-tro station, planning to reach Princess Town that night, while I decided to hang back and eat a lunch of banku at another Rasta restaurant. At this one, I sat with four or five guys who were having a highly animated conversation when I arrived. I couldn't understand much of it, but I gleaned that the topic was politics as I heard Atta Mills, the president of Ghana, come up a few times. As the food arrived and we all began to eat, the conversation shifted in topic to religion and in language more to english. It was still difficult to decipher much of what was being said, but it was fun to listen and try, and I got to know them all a bit as well.
After lunch I embarked on another series of tro-tro rides, going further west along the coast to Green Turtle Lodge near the village of Akwidaa, to say hello to some other group members that were staying there. After about five hours of riding tros through towns of decreasing urbanity and jumping from vehicle to vehicle at various junctions, I was dropped at a along a stretch of dirt road surrounded by rainforest, where a sign directed me down a sandy side-path to Green Turtle. A short walk later I met Anna, Polly and Ben at the lodge itself. From the lodge, it's possible to hike for two hours to the town of Cape Three Point, where there is a lighthouse in which travellers are normally allowed to stay a night, and then to hike another two hours to Princess Town the next day. This had been my tentative plan, but by the time I arrived the skies were just beginning to darken. I didn't relish the thought of a two-hour hike with all my bags down a remote, unlit road at night, especially when held against a night on the beach with friends and drinks, so I decided to stay the night at Green Turtle and make the whole hike the next day.
Green Turtle Lodge was much like Oasis in its structure and layout, but somehow seemed much more touristy and less authentically Ghanaian. I suppose this was due to the higher population of visitors, most of whom were western, and moreso to the fact that the lodge is a ten-minute walk from the nearest village, meaning that the only encounters that one is likely to have with Ghanaians are with the staff. This is very unlike Oasis, which is right in the middle of a city. At any rate, I wasn't looking too forward to an evening of touristy beach bumming, but it was nice to catch up with my friends about what they'd been doing during ITT, and to get to know the other North-Westerners. I talked at length about UBC with a German girl who was hoping to study there for a year on exchange, and an Edmontonian taught me to play Owari, an African board game. The food was even more expensive than that at Oasis (ten cedi for a meal?!) but unlike that at Oasis was good enough to be worth the price, at least for Western-style food.
And that was the final day of ITT. The next day we were all to come together in Princess Town for Disorientation. The other OG members at Green Turtle were going to take a tro-tro to Princess Town, so after eating breakfast I said goodbye to friends new and old, shouldered my two backpacks, and set out on the hike at about 10:00. Walking first litte ways down the beach, I passed through the tiny fishing town of Akwidaa, which consists of two clusters of buildings on either side of a small inlet, connected by a wooden footbridge. There I bought some bread and pineapple for lunch, and also witnessed a little boy happily dragging a dead puppy around on a string.
Shortly after passing through the village, I reached the main road which would take me to Cape Three Point. This was the same red dirt road I had been dropped off on at Green Turtle, and being hemmed in closely by rainforest it didn't make for a terribly scenic walk. But occasionally it crested a hill and offered a short view of the sea and the point on which the lighthouse stood, and as I went I met a number of people walking the other way with goods balanced on their heads, or just sitting by the roadside.
After about two hours I reached Cape Three Point, and found it to be a town much like Akwidaa and just as small. I passed quickly through to the short road leading to the lighthouse at the end of the point. The point on which the lighthouse sits is the very southernmost tip of Ghana, and it's been made into a bit of a tourist attraction; in the clearing around the lighthouse, there is a pole with signposts pointing in the directions of cities around the world, a stone block painted with a map of Africa, and a few other simple but neat bits of brick-a-brack. After looking at these, I paid one cedi to the groundskeeper to let me in to the lighthouse itself. It's just four stories tall and very narrow inside, but it's really cool, and the view from the top is fantastic. There's a little cupboard full of Coke cans on the second story, and they can be had for two cedi, a lot for soda in Ghana but not much at home. I bought one for the novelty of it and went back down.
I found a palm tree in a spot just near the rocky cliff where the point meets the sea, and sat down under it to eat my lunch and take in the sights and sounds of the Atlantic. As I sat, three cats, followed by countless goats, gradually drifted in and surrounded me, staring intently. This seemed pretty wierd until I realized they were interested in my bread. I fed them a few pieces, but they didn't leave until I had finished eating it started up to leave. After lunch, I climbed down the rocks close to the ocean to feel the spray on my face, then climbed back up, and poked around the remains of the older ninteenth-century lighthouse before taking up my bags once again for the second half of the trip down to Princess Town. This walk was much more scenic than the one from Green Turtle. It started by running along the beach, and then climbed onto a high ridge and became very narrow, passing through close-grown rainforest dotted with small farms for some distance before coming back down on the other side. Then it passed along a very long sandbar that separates the ocean from a lagoon. Along this stretch it went through two tiny fishing villages, one the size of Akwidaa and one about half that size, where the buildings were made not from the usual mud with tin roofs, but from wooden sticks and palm leaves. After the second village, the path became sandy and wound through a stand of coconut palms on the sandbar. The walk was full of beautiful views and strange and amazing things to see, not least the villages themselves, and the whole day was I think the most fun one I'd had in the country.
At last the path entered the outskirts of Princess Town, and on the directions of the locals I turned left and followed it up a hill through the rainforest, past the fenced-off enclosure of a cell phone antenna, and into the courtyard of Fort Groot Fredericksberg, the former German slave castle where we'd be spending our disorientation. Walking in at 4:30, I was the last group member to arrive, and I found my friends all sitting on the western rampart of the castle, eating crackers and pineapple jam.
The castle, which has been renovated into a hotel, was a spectacular place to spend the next few days. It's much smaller than the one in Cape Coast - the eleven of us took up the entire place - but it's marvelously atmospheric and surrounded by gorgeous views. Its position on the ridge gives it a spectacular view out over Princess Town just below it, where the sun can be seen setting over the ocean in the evenings. Joseph, the proprietor, is a chef by training and he prepared excellent meals for us, which we ate at a table on the ramparts overlooking the town. We were happy to overlook the lack of electricity and running water during our stay, but even those with a greater attachment to western conveniences would be making a mistake to avoid the place. Everything else about it makes it more than worth the sacrifice.
Disorientation was very relaxing; we spent much of the time talking about what we did on ITT. We also did a short canoe tour of the mangrove forests behind the town, and all hiked together to the lighthouse and back. It was fun to do this again with everyone, instead of alone, and on the way back I helped the villagers in the smallest village haul their titanic net back in from sea with the day's catch.
But after three very short days, we had to return to Accra, taking a tro-tro all the way from Princess Town in a single day. Now we're here, back in the Salvation Army guest house, and preparing to leave for the airport, which we'll do in just half an hour. There are a few posts yet to come, and time now is short, so I'll leave the trip overview until later. I'm excited to see my family and friends at home again, but at the same time it's strange to think of going home after seven weeks, and of not being with the OG group anymore.
As always, thanks for reading. Cheers!
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