My Last Post From Ghana

Hi! Sorry I haven't been posting in a while. I have been doing a lot and I've been so busy that I didn't have the time! On the 16th we went to an adinkra village. The word adinkra means goodbye. People used to only wear it at funerals. Each stamp has a different meaning. We got to stamp some cloth and saw how the ink is made. The ink is made of bark that you pound with a large stick. After it is pounded you add water and boil it. The stamps are made out of carved gourds. Both my mom and I used red strips of cloth. I used three different stamps in the very simple design. Then we went to our hotel and swam. On the 17th we traveled to a town called Nkoranza. We traveled by tro-tro, a large van-like vehicle. We stayed at a community called Operation Hand in Hand. Operation Hand in Hand is a home for mentally disabled children. It also has guest-houses. We stayed one night. The next morning we took a mule ride and a tour around the grounds. Then we took a taxi up to a monkey sanctuary. We went to the village with a guide and got bananas for the monkeys. It was one of my highlights of this whole trip. The monkeys ate out of your hand and they lived in the wild! They were SOOOO CUTE! Sadly, we ran out of bananas so we had to leave. The next morning we went again into the woods, this time carrying all of our luggage over the roots and ditches. Yes, we were going to see the monkeys again, but we had to catch a tro-tro in town, too. Also, the fetish priest had invited us to his house the night before. So we dragged our luggage to his house and we talked for awhile, about everything from his job to maple syrup. We saw the monkey shrine. I expected it to be in the woods somewhere, but instead it was in his house. The room smelled like eggs and had an altar and lots of religious objects. After that we went to see the monkeys one last time. Then we caught a bumpy, overcrowded tro to Nkoranza. There were 15 people in it with a lot of bags and luggage while it normally fits 12 people with no bags comfortably! I had to sit on my moms lap with our backpack on my lap while someone was sitting on either side of us and another person was sitting, facing me. Then we got to the tro station and took a more comfortable van. Unfortunately it was going to Kumasi, land of the traffic jams where we would take an STC bus to Accra. The ride was fine until we entered Kumasi, where we sat for about 15 minutes. We got to the STC station and, miraculously, were just in time for an STC bus. You have no idea how lucky this was. If we were even 10 minutes later we could have been waiting the whole night! It took something like 5 or 6 hours to get to Accra. When we got to Accra we discovered that the hotel we wanted to stay in was booked to the brim, full of Danish history teachers. We asked the receptionist where we could stay that had a pool and he said Novotel. As it turns out, Novotel is a fancy, expensive place that you can find literally everywhere. My mom and I just needed to have a short break from Ghana. We had dinner and went to bed. The next morning we woke up and had a really good breakfast. Then I swam in the pool and we went on the Internet for a tiny bit. We swam again in the afternoon. The next day we went to the Volta Region and also saw a bead factory called Cedi Beads. This is not your polluting, huge machine run factory but a small, pleasant workplace where you can see how the beads are made and buy some of the beads themselves. My favorites were made out of recycled chips of broken glass that were different colors. We then went to a hotel called Aylos Bay and stayed there the rest of the night. Yesterday we went, hoping to see how the Volta Dam works, only to find out that weekdays are working days. We got a taxi to bring us to the dam to see it from a distance in the front and back. We took a lot of pictures, but that was it for the day, other than swimming at the hotel next-door. After we swam we just went back to Aylos Bay and played Boggle. Today we came to Accra. We traveled by tro-tro. 10 minutes into the ride, our tro broke. We had to wait for an additional 10 minutes for a different tro to come to bring us to Accra again. It was a smooth ride until the tro-tro crashed! Yep, I know. Luckily, neither I nor my mom or even anyone else of the 3 cars is sitting in the hospital, though. The worst injury of our car was a bruised knee, and everyone else is fine but the cars. We were pretty shocked! Thankfully, a Dutch guy who was on the same tro-tro as us shared a taxi with us so that we could get to our hotel. Sadly, we leave Ghana tomorrow night. Boo-hoo!