Beach paradise and the jungle

I apologize that it has taken this long to update. As I suspected, we had no internet on the beach, and the keyboard of the computer where we were in Cape Coast was so jammed that writing a blog post would not have been good for my blood pressure. But here we are in the Ashanti city of Kumasi in Ghana. Let me recap our past week for you. But before I do that, let me say that Kevin and I are both in good health—thanks for all of your concern.

The last installment indicated we were going to a beach town called Busua, and go we did. After trying to reach a couple of resorts on Dixcove to no avail (either the number doesn’t work, is constantly busy, isn’t right… a common occurrence), we settled on a place called the African Rainbow Resort in Busua. We nearly got left behind by the bus in Cape Coast at one of its rest stops, but we ran and jumped on in the nick of time.

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at our resort. It was lovely. The room was open and airy, no AC, but naturally ventilated and cooled by the ocean breeze from the balcony. We went down to the beach after settling in and waded in the water. It would be hard to find a more ideal beach. There was no steep drop-off into the water, but rather the warm waves rolled up high onto the flat beach, resulting in a wide wade-able stretch. That day, we had our first run-in with Frank, the juice man, aggressively peddling his juice. More about him later.

The next day, we hit the beach in the late morning and rented body boards from the Black Star Surf Shop. Neither Kevin nor I had ever been body boarding, but it was delightful. The water was warm and the waves weren’t too big, but they were still powerful enough to give you quite a ride. After an hour of that, we were again approached by Frank the Juice Guy, brother of Dan the Pancake Man, and we agreed to go give it a try, since the guidebook had mentioned good things about the pancakes.

He led us back away from the beach to a run-down little house with a couple plastic tables. The steps to getting our pancakes were baffling. We told him what we wanted (“American pancakes with banana and chocolate”), then he told someone else, who came later and asked us too, then some people got in a car, and some guy came back with a plastic bag of bananas… it was as though they had to scour the town for ingredients. But in the end, we each had in front of us a fresh pancake with sliced banana and a bar of melted chocolate (to be spread ourselves), as well as a liter and a half of fresh chunky mango-orange juice. Our walk back to the resort was accompanied by an afternoon rain shower, which turned into a hefty thunderstorm overnight. We spent the rest of the day playing Scrabble and pool and getting eaten by mosquitoes.

Saturday, we got more adventurous with our water sports, and went sea kayaking. The scariest part was getting out of the surf. A young man who worked for the hotel waded out as deep as he could go once I was seated on the kayak to hold me steady and help push me out, but the rather large waves crashing onto me head on capsized me once and pushed me back to shore. The second try, though, after a little bit of screaming and a lot of paddling, I burst through the last wave and found myself on the calm sea behind the surf. Kevin joined me and we paddled serenely out towards the little coastal island.

It was about twenty minutes of paddling when we arrived at the island, steering our red plastic kayaks around a small isthmus of rocks marking out a protected cove to land in. The island was basically a big pile of rocks with a couple of coconut palms and a lot of tide pools. Dozens of crabs would scuttle out of our way as we explored, checking out the black spiny sea urchins in the pools and the cowry shells peppering the sand. After a little while, we took to the sea again, bobbing along the undulating water until the waves pushed us back to land.

We went to the neighboring resort for dinner that night, where they were having a barbecue night, complete with a traditional drum and dance group. I wanted to try their ostrich sausage, but they were out of it, so I had a big plate of corned beef and egg stew with yams, a Ghanaian dish, which was delicious. I even tried Kevin’s grilled lobster and enjoyed it.

Our last full day in Busua, we walked down a muddy jungle bush path to get to the neighboring fishing town of Dixcove. It was much more bustling than Busua, with dozens of wooden fishing boats moored on the rocky shore and a heavy smell of fish and sewage in the air. Sunday was Ghana’s presidential election, and there were a couple of polling stations set up, including one on Fort Metal Cross, Dixcove’s old British slave fort. We took a quick tour of the fort and got the sobering account of how the slaves were kept in a room for three months before being shipped out; if the toilet filled up, they would have to sit with the sewage, if someone died, they would stay in there until the three months were up, and the food was thrown down through a hole in the ceiling. It was chilling.

Kevin and I both had huge burritos and beer at the surf shop for lunch, then went body boarding again. This time, the waves were bigger and our technique was better, and all in all, we were probably in the water for two hours or more.

I was depressed to be leaving the beach the next day. The whole experience was wonderful. I already described the beach, but the hotel itself had a nice atmosphere, with tons of yellow birds weaving grass nests in its gardens. The one thing detracting from the stay was the baffling lack of pina coladas. No where made them, despite the fact that the area is bursting with coconut trees and fresh pineapples, and the hotel bar had rum and a blender. Who knows, but there’s one for the suggestion box.

Monday, we took the advice of the Canadian co-owner of our resort and checked into the Hotel Hacienda outside of Cape Coast. The room was arguably pretty nice, but the feeling of the hotel was dreary and it was far from everything. We went into town for a late lunch then toured their slave fort, Cape Coast Castle, a much bigger one than at Dixcove, with a nicely laid out museum in it. The fort had changed hands many times, originally set up by the Portuguese, then taken over by a progression of the Dutch, Danish, Swedish (who knew?), and finally ending up in the hands of the British. At night, we walked to the local minimart and got snacks which we ate while catching up on our Top 40 hits on a British music channel coming through on their satellite TV.

We decided to change hotels and try out the Hans Cottage Botel, on the road to Kakum National Park. What exactly made it a botel rather than a hotel is unclear. Maybe it was the thatched restaurant on stilts over the crocodile pond, but I don’t know. In any case, it was quite a unique place to stay, with delicious fresh passion fruit juice. In the late afternoon, we took a taxi up to the national park, where we took the walk across the “canopy walkway”, a series of seven rope bridges 40 meters above the forest floor. The bridges swing disturbingly when stepped on, and I had some horror visions of the bridges snapping off their anchor trees, but it was a great way to see the forest. Unfortunately, we didn’t see much in the way of wildlife, though I think I saw an elephant on the way from the taxi.

And to stay true to my roots, I must say that I was in pangolin country, but unfortunately, the critters are nocturnal and I saw none.

We are now in Kumasi, as I said, trying to get back to Mali, but it’s harder than it should be. We asked at the Cape Coast STC bus station when there were buses going from Kumasi to Ouagadougou, but the woman told us we would have to ask in Kumasi. So today we pulled in around 5:30 PM and found out that a bus left at 4:00 and the next won’t be until Saturday. Unless we find another transport company that isn’t suicide to take, we’ll have to hole up here for three nights and hope we get pretty quick transport out of Ouagadougou to Mali.

I will end with a few observations about Ghana in general. First of all, it is incredibly lush. The roads are lined with tons of fruit trees: bananas, oranges, passion fruit vines, papayas, coconuts, plus pineapple groves. Second, Ghana has so many more cars than motorcycles as compared with Mali and Burkina Faso. Finally, just a current events fact, Ghana will be having a run-off election between Nana Akufo-Addo and J. E. Atta-Mills on the 28th of this month, and then we will know who the new president is. Elections for everyone!