For those who are wondering, yes, I did celebrate my birthday Ghanaian style and it was all good fun. It began with some delicious hummus indulgence and ended with a peanut butter fight, with lots of festivity and cheer squeezed in between, so I was quite satisfied.
Friday five of us ventured to the Volta Region, where we planned to visit some monkeys, splash in some waterfalls, and climb a mountain or two. All great activities, if you ask me.
We got a tro-tro from Accra, rode in good cheer with a bunch of Ghanaian women, including Gladys, who invited us to her home approximately every five minutes, and were having all sorts of fun when one of our fellow passengers tells us we’ve gone too far. Oops. That was madness. We’re all coming up with all kinds of solutions, one of which is to yell “Can we get off?!” Mind you, we have no clue where we are nor where we can get to the nearest station, nor will any passing tro-tros have room for five girls and luggage. Hm.
We get the whole tro-tro involved and it turns out this guy was wrong to begin with, that the monkeys were actually up ahead, and we had caused all this commotion for no reason. Well, that seems to be a trend. Oh well.
A little bit later, it starts drizzling just a wee bit. Never a good sign, but for all we knew, we had hours to go. Nope. As we’re stepping off, the skies open and it starts pouring. Lovely. Luckily, out of nowhere, a hand reaches out of a shed and pulls one of us in, so one by one we all file in to this carpentry shed thanks to a lovely Ghanaian man and take cover until it [kind of] stops raining. About 15 minutes later, Elena peeks out the window to watch the rain, and out of nowhere, we hear a beep, and there’s a taxi waiting for us. We ask how he knew we were in there, and he tells us he saw us get out of the tro-tro in the rain, but thought it’d be funny to have us wait a little. Anyway, he knew where we were going without even asking (what Ghanaians are actually going to pay to go see these monkeys that live naturally in their backyards? And what else are a bunch of oboruni girls going to be doing in this random town besides paying to see these very monkeys? It adds up quite nicely). So we piled in and he drove us through the storm along a rough road through huuuuge leaves and grasses and all-around lushness while playing cool African music. Fun!
We got to the monkey sanctuary and had some lovely storytelling, drumming and dancing for the evening. The skit included an elephant represented by a pink flip-flop. Gotta love the improv.
In the morning we went to see the monkeys and they came swinging on down, eager to munch on the bananas we so cleverly brought/our guide intentionally gave us. They were mona monkeys and they were wonderfully social and adorable.
Then we headed to Wli Falls, the highest waterfall in West Africa and the most magnificent body of water ever. We showed up in Hohoe, the junction town to get to Wli, and essentially hijacked a tro-tro to take us to the base. (Okay, actually we chartered it, but it sounds a lot cooler if we hijacked it.) We got there, paid to enter the park, found a room, etc.
After we were settled, it was off to the falls. We decided to do the Upper Falls, which are harder, because we’re super hardcore and adventurous, of course. The guidebook claims it is “more difficult to reach,” but that didn’t sound so menacing, and, plus, nothing stops us.
Maybe we should have reconsidered. Probably every third step, no exaggeration, was an incline that required a knee to chin step. It was beautiful, but my goodness it was hard. Also, the thing about Ghanaian tour guides, I’ve noticed, is that they don’t quite consider the fact that maybe we don’t climb mountains for a living. For a people that walks so damn slowly, you’d think they might take their time ascending a mountain. Nope. It felt like we were sprinting up a vertical rock face.
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but not too much.
Anyway, we made it to the top in record time—we decided there’s no conceivable way any group ever did it faster than us—and it was the most beautiful water ever. The fish in me could not contain excitement, and all of the work was rewarded.
Running down the mountain was just as fast. We timed it via camera stamp times and covered the two-hour trail in less than one hour. Matias (our guide) was done with us, ready to take his afternoon off, but only after he demanded we pay him what we had already paid at the office, in addition to his 67 percent tip. That was fun.
That night, some woman prepared us dinner, which was wonderful, though it arrived an hour late (shocking) and was spicy to the point that my sinuses started running (also shocking), but I suppose that’s pretty much what we should have expected, even though she asked what we wanted and we said rice with a non-spicy sauce. Oh well! Much more preferable to the ginger snap dinner that was our alternative option.
In the interim, while waiting for our food, the entire village shut down, it got dark, everyone disappeared, and rain clouds formed. Great. That’s when we made our friends for the evening, when we hired a schoolboy to go buy us pineapple. Where he went to fetch it, I have no idea, but he emerged from the darkness 10 minutes later with the most delicious pineapple I’ve ever tasted. (Sidenote: I realize I’m making a lot of “the best I ever had, the hardest I’ve ever done,” claims, but they’re all true!)
The problem, which led to the title of this post, was that we had no knife, nor pineapple-cutting expertise. Our solution was to ask a 50+ year-old Ghanaian woman if she knew how to cut a pineapple. It’s a staple of the country, but she probably wouldn’t know how to do it. That’s logical.
They helped us out, then the boys sat and waited for our food with us and tried to teach us Ghanaian card games by dealing out the deck and saying “now play!” without any other instruction. We tried to interpret the game as Uno, but that was a helpless attempt at forging understanding. We were clueless, and that whole cultural-bridging thing never fell quite into place.
The next morning, we woke up to find our driver (who knew we had one?) sitting on our ledge at 6:45 AM, asking if we were going to have him take us to the mountain. He was going for the convenience factor, I guess, but the stalker factor sort of hurt his chances and we let him go on to the next group.
Eventually we got to Mt. Afadjato, the highest mountain in Ghana, found our guide, and requested we go up slowly, then explained our experience the day before. “Yes, yes, yes, we’ll go slowly,” he assured us. Nope. We booked it up once again, but this time it was only an hour’s hike condensed into 40 minutes, so it was slightly less rigorous.
We got to the top and looked all around, excited we had climbed the tallest mountain in the country (ignore the fact that Ghana is not a particularly mountainous area…), and asked if we could see Togo. Nope. It was hiding behind the mountain next to us. The conversation went something like this:
Us: Is this the tallest mountain in Ghana?
Guide: Yes.
Us: Isn’t that one taller?
Guide: Yes
Us, thinking it must be Togo, since we’re at the highest point in Ghana: Can we see Togo?
Guide: No. It’s behind those mountains.
Right.
So that was a lost cause. I guess the explanation is there’s another peak below this taller mountain, so it’s not technically one mountain, and thus not the highest one, though for all intents and purposes, it totally is.
We ventured back to Accra, pretty smooth-sailing, with the minor exception of some security issues crossing between Eastern and Volta regions. For whatever reason, our tro-tro had to stop and we had to walk over the border ourselves, then it picked us up 20 feet down the road, but only after the security guard stopped me and only me, asking what I was doing in the country and demanding my passport. Stop the white girl: straight out of Arizona, I’m tellin’ ya. Luckily I waved my U of Ghana ID at him and he let me along, but it was momentarily pretty nerve-wracking.
Unfortunately my camera card reader is being stubborn, so I can’t show much evidence of these adventures, but I know you can all use your imaginations to picture these falls and mountains and pineapples and all the rest. I promise they’re wonderful!
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