Whatchu Ghana Do?

Whew. We are departing from Ghana after a five-day excursion further north on the African coast. South Africa was beautiful and had weather in the 70s, but we crossed the equator (more on that later) and docked our first day in Takoradi where temps hit around the high 90s. Sort of like summer in Virginia with heat and humidity, but factor in the direct equatorial sunshine, and it was hot.

Takoradi is an industrial port, so nothing fancy there, but a duty-free shop with no frills stood literally about 50 feet from the off-ramp of the ship. We missed out getting some South African wines in Cape Town, so we scored some here. I've been to a few places in my travels that had decent wine: Oregon, a smidge of varietals in Germany, and quite affordable liters of wine in Greece–even the pine-tinged Retsina grew on me. South African wines are really accessible, so I'm glad to have gotten a few bottles for the next few weeks. Oh, on the way from South Africa shortly before landing in Ghana, we crossed 0' 0' 0' 0' at the intersection of the equator and prime meridian; this made the crew excited, the scientists among us stoked, and all of us Shellbacks who crossed the equator shortly before Mauritius are now Emerald Shellbacks.

Aft of the MV Explorer. Oddly, I haven't gotten to see much of the backside.

Here's another Explorer that was docked directly behind the MV Explorer. Nice ship with about 125 passengers. I had a talk with a British lady who was aboard and knew the Kimballs on our ship.

Lots of mini buses travel around picking up passengers and dropping them off anywhere. These are called tro-tros and are usually packed full. Religious faith shows up everywhere in the names of stores and mottos on cars, taxis, and tro-tros.

We (i.e., Ellen, our master planner) weren't really sure of all the logistical planning for independent travel in Ghana, so we took a number of Semester At Sea trips. First day was a visit to slave dungeons near Cape Coast. Sounds ominous, so I'm in. There were small underground rooms below marketplace courtyards; each of the rooms held up to 200 potential slaves awaiting travel to countries where slavery was practiced, including the US, Spain, Portugal, and other European destinations. I'm still struck after the visit that about 3 of 10 of slaves died in the extremely cramped, hot, unventilated conditions, and another 3 or 4 would die on horrendous conditions aboard the ships, so only about 30% of slaves would make it to the new world alive. Perhaps it was a weeding out of the weak process, but the harsh reality is that livestock were treated far better than slaves in the African slave trade.

Slave dungeon. This room held the prisoners who were executed for attempting to escape. Some didn't even make it out of the holding room alive because of the cramped, unventilated conditions.

Here's the ocean outside of the slave dungeons. Ghana had lots of coastlines.

The second day was a trip to a water village. Our plans were to travel on a bus through rubber tree plantations to Nzulezu, do a short hike, travel by dugout canoe to the village, and then return. Bus trip, check: the 2-hour-long ride described on the brochures was really more like 3 hours, and the journey through the rubber tree plantations was really a dusty road adjacent to a couple farms with rubber trees. Short hike, check: about two miles through the savanna fields to the river, in the noon sun, with a mix of students and older life-long learners, and we weren't smart enough to bring water. Whatevs. We all made it across the field to the dugout canoes, each of which held about 4 riders and a paddler. The canoes also leaked, so we got to bail as we traveled across the river to the water village. It was interesting in that the small village was so inaccessible yet was home to about 400 people living on stilt houses and bamboo walkways. 

Water village self portrait.

 

Jasper and Keani walk through the door at the water village school. The sign on the door says Reading 

builds

intelige

nce.

We were a bit fried from the heat and long hiking–not to mention dehydrated–upon return to the MV Explorer. There were some positives to the water village trip. We all made it back, we had a tasty lunch (even though it was 3pm before we made it back), and there was a beautiful beach where we at. So, we had run over schedule, which isn't unusual for African time, and we eventually made it back to the ship before departing that evening for our next Ghanian port of Tema.

On day three we landed in Tema after sailing overnight. Tema is about 20 kilometers from the capital city of Accra, so it was a bigger metropolis but the port was again an industrial port. Quite a contrast to modern new ports focused on tourism like we saw in Yokohama, but I like watching the container ships loading and unloading and all the bustle and stockpiled goods. SAS offers city tours as a general intro to each new city, and this is the first one that the Ramsey-Catz extended family signed up to do. Basically it's what you would think a city tour is: riding around in a bus, visiting a few sights, eating at a local restaurant, and heading back in the evening. Yep, that's what we did. We also visited the W.E.B. DuBois memorial and then later the Kwame Nhkume memorial. You get to see a lot of the city on these tours, and we saw industrial areas, residential neighborhoods, colleges, billboards everywhere, and lots of small shops with names proudly bearing the heavily Christian faith on the signs out front for places such as God is Great Hair Salon and Infant Baby Jesus Tyre Vulcanizing Stop.

Casket shop as photographed outside the bus as we drove around on the Accra city tour. We really wanted to stop and see the caskets up close. Not sure if I'd want to be buried in a cell phone, frog, or even a beer bottle...

 

Statue of President Kwame Nkhume at the memorial park we visited. It was vandalized in a coup a few years after his death in 1972, with the head returned to the state in 2009.

Here was a peacock outside of the Nkhume memorial. He squawked, so I investigated where the sound was coming from when another person wondered what the heck the noise was. I knew it was a peacock because some farmers keep them around since they squawk when foxes or other predators come around.

Day four, and we set out for a trip to a game preserve followed by a visit to the Akosombo Dam. Not the most logical pairing, but it worked well since both were close together on the ride two hours away. The game preserve had a few animals including baboons and ostriches in fenced areas. Good thing the ostriches were penned because they were aggressive and tried to nip each of us through the chainlink fence. Jasper and the Harden boys saw a tiny little scorpion, so after that we all watched carefully where we stepped. We saw a few antelope, too; nothing as exciting as our South African safari, but still pretty cool for a short little stop at the preserve. The dam visit followed lunch at a nice riverside resort where there were lizards everywhere, and Jasper and the other boys ran around trying to catch them. Our guide Steven told them that he caught them when he was a little boy, but he didn't tell them what he told us: the captive lizards were flung with catapults, which sounds funnier and funnier the more I think about it.

I call this shot the baboon Rodin. He looked deep in thought, and it was spooky to see him scratch himself, oddly human-like. How do I know it's a he? Well, I had to position the camera to get a decent angle to hide his, um, manhood.

Extreme closeup of an ostrich on the game preserve. I was hoping he wouldn't pluck my camera from my hands.

Today is our last day in Ghana, and we did a partial day program to a drumming workshop. Fatigue from travel and the heat seemed to affect everyone in our small group, so we were stoked to hop aboard a smaller bus with really strong A/C and cloth seats that weren't covered in plastic like some old great-aunt's living room furniture. Even more surprising, the ride to the workshop was a short 15-minute drive a few miles from port by the oceanside. We got lots of drumming instruction, no actual hands-on drumming ourselves, but lots of detail on how the drums are made, how they sound best when paired or partnered with other drums, and traditional types of music. We also got to dance and sing a traditional Gha song. I had a hell of a lot more fun than I expected.

Dancer at the drumming workshop.

Jasper and I dance with tassels. We were amazed we got Jman out on the dance floor.

We wound down the drumming excursion at about 1400 (2pm) and got back to the ship about 4 hours before onship time. Normally I'd have taken advantage of the extra time to spend the last of my local currency, but in this case I hung onto my Ghana Cedi rather than spend it at the vendors set up outside the dock. I had a few difficult experiences with bargaining and negotiating on this trip: day one I found out that some entrepreneurs will ask your name and then make bracelets, painted shells, and other nicknacks and then guilt you into buying them. On the Accra city tour we stopped at a market and I had some hawkers steer me to their drum store; no biggie since I wasn't in the market for a drum but asked to look at shirts. I liked a few t-shirts and traditional kinte-cloth formal shirts, but the bargaining was fast and furious and I ducked out when I felt cornered. No real threat, but I don't deal too well with lots of commotion and fast-paced back-and-forth bargaining. So, since we were back at the ship after a good day with positive fun experiences of the drumming seminar, I figured I'd keep the image of Ghana on a positive note by not dickering over touristy trinkets that I really don't need anyway.

The country is beautiful with sea, small rolling mountain ranges, tropical vegetation, and flatlands. The people are friendly but I think it would take me a few weeks to get a feel for negotiating for most commercial items, and some rules are a bit confusing such as don't take pictures of government buildings (understood) but you can take pictures of tourist towns with a camera fee that covers buildings but not people unless they're children. There are incredible mineral riches including manganese and gold but there's drastic disparity between the poor and affluent. Simple corrugated homes and buildings reminded me of Burmese or Vietnamese homes or even the South African homes minus the barbed wire–very basic living conditions but a general lack of stress that was initially hard to pin down but eventually helped ease the tension of immersion into a new country.

So this is Africa...

Next stop is Morocco. Should be quite an experience in the marketplaces there. Looking forward to it and writing about my adventures. Thanks for reading.