ITT: Part 1

Hey everyone! I'm writing this at an internet cafe, so I'll try to keep it brief.

It's only the sixth day of ITT and we've already managed to cross the entire country in both directions, and have a couple of adventures. We left Sandema on Tuesday morning, eight of us aboard a tro-tro (a private transit vehicle slightly bigger than a van) to Bolga. After grabbing lunch there, Janaya, Sarah and I left the rest of the group and got a second tro south to Tamale. Arriving in the evening, we returned to King's Guest House, where we'd stayed four weeks earlier on our journey northward to Sandema. Arriving at the guest house just seconds ahead of a torrential downpour, we were greeted again by its affable owner and manager, Kofi, who remembered us and gave us a discount on our rooms, and then rode his motorbike through the rain to pick up food for us! While we waited, I sat in the front-door-less lobby, enjoying the cool breezes and the sounds of rain from the storm just outside, a welcome relief after the three hours we'd just spent in a hot, cramped tro.

After eating a dinner, we retired to our rooms. King's requires that men and women room separately, which made things more expensive but had the advantage that I got a room to myself for the night. And what a room - it had clean tile floors on which I could comfortably walk barefoot, and the AC had been left on for a while, so when I entered the room it was actually cold. This was the first time I'd been cold since arriving in Ghana. By western standards, the room would probably seem low-quality, as it was rather small and the bathroom lacked a sink. But after five weeks in the country, I'd grown entirely accustomed to sweltering heat, malfunctioning machinery, and general dustiness. With those forming my new benchmark, I felt that I'd landed in the lap of luxury, and I was suddenly conscious of how much my standards of comfort had adjusted!

The next day, we had originally planned to get an early start, as our guidebook suggested buying tickets for the 1:30 bus to Mole as early as 7:30 in the morning. But Kofi said that, it being off-season for tourism, we'd easily get tickets as late as 11 AM. As he was a local with much experience with tourism in the area, we assumed he was correct. We took the time to get breakfast and shower before heading to the bus station around ten, where we found that the tickets had already been sold out.

"Oh."

But all was not lost: the ticket seller said there was a private tro that made the same journey that day, and gave us the number of Zanab, the driver. We called her, and she instructed us to meet her at the tro-tro station, which was a short walk away. After meeting her, she led us through the station and what seemed like half-way across the city to where her vehicle was parked. It was only then that we were told that, as we were the only passengers, the ride would cost us fifty cedi per person! That's about thirty-three dollars each, and a lot more than the bus, which would be about 2.50 cedi. We told her that unfortunately, at that price it was impossible. But again, all was not lost; Zanab herself made a call to someone back at the bus station, who said they could get us reserved staff tickets on the bus that we'd originally planned to catch. This cost just six cedi each, more expensive than the normal tickets but a lot less than Zanab's tro. She was also kind enough to give us a free ride back to the bus station in her air-conditioned tro, rather than having us make the long walk back!

We returned to the bus station at about 11:30, got our tickets, and sat down to wait. We ended up waiting for a lot longer than two hours, since the bus didn't I bought some oranges from a roadside vendor and carved a few pawns for the first hour or two. The bus didn't arrive until a good seven hours later, despite being scheduled to leave at 1:30, but it wasn't the longest we'd waited for a bus here, and we had time to chat with a few other westerners who were also waiting at the station - an American with the Peace Corps, a German tourist also headed to Mole, and two Norwegian volunteers who had just arrived in the country. We were starting to get a bit worried by the time the bus actually came, so it was quite a relief to see it pull up. We climbed aboard for a five-hour ride that was by far the bumpiest I've ever been on. As we traversed a long, narrow strip of mud pits which some had puzzlingly referred to as a road, Sarah said that she felt like a popcorn kernel, which is about as eloquent a description of the experience as is possible.

Night fell soon after we left, and as luck would have it, a partial lunar eclipse was occurring that night! We stopped once in a small village while it was still going on, and everyone climbed out of the bus for bathroom breaks and to buy provisions at the innumerable business shacks. The children were all running about banging tin cans with sticks and chanting. One of the locals taking the same bus explained to us that this was a sort of ritual related to the eclipse. According to the folklore of the area, lunar eclipses were believed to be due to the sun trying to capture the moon, and the children's noise-making was an appeal to the sun for the moon's release. I made a brief effort to explain the real cause to a few of the kids, but the language barrier here proved insurmountable, so I gave up and simply watched as the black disk of our shadow slid languidly across the moon's bright surface.

We finally arrived in Mole at about 11:30 PM and got our room at the park's only hotel. Travelling as a group of three has been a good arrangement, as most places thus far have had family rooms that for three people work out to the same price or less as staying in dorms. We'd been informed that one's chances of seeing lots of animals were best on the early morning walking safari at 7:30 AM, so we set our alarms for 6:30 and fell right into our beds to get what sleep we could. Rising early, we headed out and met the rest of those going on the morning safari. Unsurprisingly, all of them were other tourists; the German woman from the previous day, some other Germans and Americans, and a group of some twenty or thirty young Chinese people. We wound up in a smaller group of about six with the Germans, and followed a camp ranger with a large rifle off into the bush.

For the next hour and a half, we wandered through the park, seeing baboons, gazelle, and various other large mammals at a distance and through the trees and underbrush. These being largely prey animals, they tended to see us before we saw them, and would run off after a few seconds; the views we got weren't bad, but taking good pictures was nearly impossible. We also saw the signs of the presence of elephants: knocked-down trees with the leaves or bark eaten, and the occasional massive footprint or pile of droppings.

I was starting to wonder if we'd actually see one of the creatures themselves when the ranger got a call on his cell phone, and told us that some elephants had been sighted. After a little more walking we encountered the other safari groups, and finally we came upon a herd of about three or four elephants. At first we only saw them through the trees, but after a few minutes they moved towards us in a procession, crossing the screen of vegetation and continuing to a mudhole in the middle of a large clearing. Another few came up behind us as this happened and we had to move quickly to get out of their way as they went to join the others. We stood about thirty meters from them as they covered themselves in mud, which the ranger said they did to protect themselves from flies. After a while, we followed them as they moved directly to a small lake where they immersed themselves and washed the mud right off again; here we got as close as perhaps fifteen meters or less. I took lots of pictures and video, but it can't compare with actually being in the presence of these huge, majestic animals, with nothing but air between you and them.

After an hour of watching the elephants, we returned to the top of the bluff on which the hotel was situated. It was only about 10:30, so we had a large brunch at the staff canteen and spent the rest of the day relaxing in the room and around the grounds. Apart from the elephants, all of our most memorable encounters with animals came during the rest of the day. During brunch a monkey mother and child and a number of warthogs walked almost right up to our table looking for scraps. We saw bushbucks walking right past our room a bit later.

Best of all were the baboons. Our room had a back porch with a spectacular view over the reserve, and we saw many baboons moving quite close throughout the day, near where the forest began just a few meters away. Then, in the afternoon, Janaya was standing on our room's back porch with an orange she had just peeled, when one of the baboons rushed at her and grabbed for the orange! Terrified, she dropped the fruit, and the ape took it and then climbed right onto the roof to eat it. We'd heard the baboons here had a propensity to steal things from the guests, but it was pretty cool to experience it first-hand, and we were glad that it didn't take something more difficult to replace.

And that was Mole. The next two days were given over largely to travel. We rose at 3:30 AM the next day to catch the only bus back to Tamale, which left at 4:00, and tried to sleep as best we could Arriving in Tamale, we immediately boarded a tightly-packed but mildly air-conditioned tro-tro for the subsequent seven-hour tro ride to Kumasi. We spent the night in the Guestline Lodge where we'd resided a month ago during orientation, and that evening and the following morning, we spent a bit of time enjoying the nearby familiar parts of the city, making use of the unusually expensive and well-apportioned internet cafe and buying some food for the subsequent bus and tro rides. We also discovered a fantastic egg-and-bread vendor that we'd missed the first time, and met a family of Torontonians who were visiting relatives in the country.

At about noon on the eighteenth, we took another five-hour tro-tro back to Accra, where we left Sarah with a friend of her family, with whom she was staying for the rest of ITT. Then it was off across the city on foot and by taxi to another tro-tro station, where we found transport to Ho, our first stop in the mountainous Volta region. Arriving late in the evening, we found that the cheapest guest house in our guidebook was full, and the next-cheapest was no longer in operation according to everyone we spoke to. Finally someone directed us to Lord's Hotel and Restaurant, and we got a taxi there. At thirty-five cedi a night it was much more expensive than we'd been planning, but we were so exhausted from day's to-ing and tro-ing that we decided to stay.

The next morning we rose at about 8:00 and wandered around the city in search of the Ho Museum, getting totally lost, and finally being shown the way by a helpful local. The museum was interesting, consisting of displays on Ghanaian traditional culture and modern history, but was very small and took about half an hour to see in its entirety. We walked back to our hotel, looking for a stall to buy breakfast from on the way, but we learned the hard way that the vast majority of shops in Ghana are closed on Sundays, and we eventually resorted to eating breakfast in the hotel's restaurant, which like the hotel itself was not bad but rather over-priced.

We checked out before noon and found another tro to take us to our final destination in the Volta region, the town of Hohoe. This was a relatively short ride, taking only about two hours, and while it rained for part of that time, it wasn't long enough for the leakiness of the vehicle's roof to become a serious problem, and there were plenty of gorgeous views of the mountains and jungles to enjoy on the way. We got to the Grand Hotel in the early afternoon. It was supposedly the cheapest in town, but we found upon our arrival that the cheapest rooms had been taken just minutes before by a few Peace Corps volunteers, so we had to settle for a twenty-eight cedi room that was much smaller and poorer than our room at Lord's. Next time, we'll call ahead.

Despite having snagged the cheap rooms, the American volunteers weren't total bastards. They invited us to lunch and drinks, and Janaya decided to stay back at the room while I went with them. They told me that they had almost finished their two years (!) in the country, and regaled me with stories of their drunken exploits the previous night. Later we sat in the Grand's outdoor courtyard and I told them about some recent news from the West, including about Watson's Jeopardy victory and the sport-related rioting in Vancouver. One of them disappeared for about half an hour and returned with his hair shaved into a Mohawk. Finally they went to meet some other Peace Corps friends of theirs, and I went out into the night to find some street food for dinner and to absorb some of Hohoe's night atmosphere.

The next day - that is, today - Janaya and I went to hike to the Wli falls, which reputedly form the tallest waterfall in West Africa. Rising early once again, after a breakfast of Nescafe, rice, and hard-boiled egg, we took a group taxi to the tourist information center near the base of the falls, where we met our tourguide. He led us along a wide, level path towards the lower falls for about half an hour, and then handed us walking sticks from a big pile of them and turned off this path onto the narrow, rocky, and extremely steep path leading to the upper falls.

What followed was probably the most arduous hike I've ever been on. It lasted about an hour and a half each way and had an average incline of about forty-five degrees, coming closer to sixty in a few places. Within about ten minutes I was sweating more than I was aware I could. We wound our way back and forth up the face of a steep cliff, keeping a good enough pace to pass a trio of Dutch girls that had left well before us, and taking only a few breaks to catch our breath and take pictures of the stunning surrounds. At last we arrived at the pool at the upper falls, where the cool breeze and faint spray quickly refreshed us. After enjoying the sights for a while and having a small snack of fruit which we'd bought in town - and chatting with the Dutch girls when they arrived later - we started back down. This was less physically exhausting but a good deal more nerve-wracking, but fortunately we both made it to the bottom again without breaking any bones. Then we walked two more minutes over level ground to the larger pool at the lower falls. Here there were hundreds of bats roosting on the underside of the cliffs next to the massive waterfall. Leaving my things on a bench by the water, I waded in to the icy water and stood under the falls, the stinging spray driving all the sweat off of me. I normally don't like swimming or getting wet, but after the previous three hours this felt fantastically refreshing.

So much for keeping it brief. My time at the cafe here is just about up, so I've got to go. I'll post again soon. Tomorrow we climb the country's highest mountain, and then it's back to Accra to explore the city properly. Thanks for reading!