Life here in Accra has been becoming more and more routine the longer I am here, but this weekend I traveled out of Accra and had an amazing adventure. One thing that was so great about it was that I was invited by Tania Thursday night, the night before we left, and so what seemed liked another weekend of being blazing Accra turned into a weekend of being blazing hot in another part of Ghana. Oh, but it was so much fun!
Tania and Rachel left for Mountain Paradise Lodge around 1 in the afternoon. I would've left with them, but Jackie was also going and she had class until 4:30. So I did the usual... walked around, sang, got sweaty, ate, showered until Jackie arrived home from class, ready to go. So we took off around 4:45 and got to Tema Station at 5:15 to catch the tro-tro to Hohoe, the Volta Region. I've been wanting to go to the Volta Region ever since I heard there were mountains there. Flatness becomes so old after a while, and the mountains are cooler too. So we asked some people at the station where to go to get a tro-tro. A man told us we need to go down the street to the Novotel, and there we can get a tro-tro. We were a bit confused because the driver told us that we just needed to wait by the road where he dropped of us. So we walked down the street and we don't see the Novotel. So we asked an old man by the side of the road where we should go to get a tro-tro to Hohoe. "Oh, Hohoe! Just go over there, to Tema Station." The man had told us to go back to where we came from. So then we asked some more people on the other side of the street, and they also told us to go back to Tema Station. We gave them our thanks and headed back to Tema Station. So we asked another guy where to go to get a tro-tro to Hohoe. "Oh, you need to go over to the Novotel." It was some sort of sick joke. The joke didn't last long, though, because a nice guy named Samuel (I think) walked us over to the right place, which was in view of the Novotel.
So we walked into this tro-tro station/market, which means a large area of dirt where people try to give rides and sell stuff. We bought our tickets to Hohoe for 36,000 cedis and went to sit at the back of a tro-tro. By now, I've ridden a tro-tro maybe 7 or 8 times. I will tell in all honesty that there is no such thing as a comfortable tro-tro, but this one was probably the most uncomfortable one there is. Sitting down normally, my knees were jabbing into the back of the seat in front of me and I had absolutely no circulation in my butt for that whole ride. I would've just turned and sort of sat on my side, but by the time we got going there was Jackie on the left of me and a woman and her child on the right of me, whilst I have my backpack in my lap. (It reminded me a lot of a certain family trip to New York City in 1994...).
Anyway, we get on this tro-tro and it's about half-full. The two of us just sat and waited, chatting away, having an ok time. The whole while market people kept coming up to the windows and trying to sell us things: food, soap, flashlights, chewing gum, random things. Jackie and I bought some FanIce (so good!), two meat pies, Mentos, and a VitaMilk. I was already equipped with apples and cookies, while Jackie had brought along with her trail mix from Trader Joes (I love Jackie so much, almost as much as trail mix... just kidding). Over the course of the next 45 minutes we waited for the tro-tro to fill up or the driver to come. They tied a bunch of stuff to the back of it, so the back door wasn't shut the whole time. A woman in front of me decided to buy an gargantuan bowl from a vendor. ("Oh, I better get this large bowl before I get back to Hohoe. I've been needing one of them," she thought).
A little after 6, the driver got in the tro-tro, cranked it up, and took off for Hohoe. Of course, the first hour of the journey was spent in congested traffic trying to get out of Accra. Convenient how it got dark the second we started to pick up the pace a little bit. The ride at first was just unpleasant because I couldn't feel my butt and I couldn't fall asleep (for lack of a comfortable position). Then I started to get a little frightened because I decided to look out the front windshield and I couldn't see anything. If the driver had his headlights on, they weren't doing much for him. It really baffled me that he could see where he was going. We passed through several towns on our journey. The tro-tro pulled over in one of them for some reason and we were attacked by a mob of people trying to sell us stuff, mostly loaves of bread and water (the stuff, not the people). After a few minutes, another tro-tro pulled up in front of us and instantly a new mob of 20 or so people rushed to the tro-tro, desperate to make a sale. They were amused by the fact that there were obrunis riding the tro-tro to Hohoe at 8:30 in the evening.
Another time we stopped mysteriously in the middle of nowhere. Everyone started chattering away in local languages that I could not understand. It seems ridiculous, but from the tones of their voices and the pace of their speech it sounded like they were saying, "Oh, he's got a gun and they're going to shoot us all!" or "They are going to make us all get out here and give them our wallets and clothes!" Jackie said, "Excuse me... Excuse me..." No one pays her any attention. "Mepowcho." (Excuse me in Twi). Then they turned around. "What's going on?" Jackie asked. "Tire," a woman replied. "Ooooh, tire," we both sigh with relief. So everyone gets out of the tro-tro, although they shut the door before Jackie and I could get out, and then a few guys lift up the tro-tro to replace the tire. After about 15 minutes, the tire is fixed, everyone gets back on, and then off we go again.
It was getting late and Jackie and I hadn't been able to get a hold of Rachel or Tania since 7:00 when they called and told us that they got off in a town called Fume and we're at the time walking 4km uphill to the Mountain Paradise Lodge. we realized we hadn't asked the tro-tro driver to let us off in Fume, so we asked the ladies in front of us if we had passed Fume. "Oh, Fume," one said and pointed straight ahead. "So we haven't passed it yet?" we asked. "No," she said. Strangely, this tro-tro full of 16 people that hadn't said a word the whole time other than when we stopped for the tire started talking to one another after we mentioned Fume. (It's always interesting to know people are talking about you but not be able to understand them).
At about 10:30, the tro-tro stopped and a few people in front of us beckoned us to go. "Is this Fume?" we asked. "Yes, Fume." So we got out in Fume, a little bitty town on the way to Hohoe (a bigger town, I suppose). There were a few people outside, and this one man came up to his and said, "Hello, how are you? Do you need a place to stay?" We explained to him that we needed to get a taxi to Mountain Paradise Lodge, and he told us that taxis wouldn't run that late, that we would have to stay in Fume. Then we asked, "Well, can we walk?" "Walk? Oh, no. It's too far and too dark. You can stay here." He pointed to a place called Adzokor Hotel and then went inside to fetch the receptionist. We wanted to call Tania and Rachel to find out what had happened to them and to let them know where we were, but neither of our cell phones were getting reception. The helpful man and the receptionist came out of the hotel, and they insisted that we stay there. We told them, "Well, we don't mind staying here, but we need to call our friends before we make any decisions." They didn't seem to understand what we were saying, because they just kept saying that it was too late to go to Mountain Paradise Lodge, too dark, too far, no taxi would take us, but finally they understood and so a few more people came around and we tried to use their phones. It seemed hopeless. No one had any reception. After standing around, not sure of what to do, afraid of going to bed without contacting Rachel and Tania (I didn't want them to worry), we finally got through to the lodge and talked to Tania.
"Hey, Drew. Go to this place called 'The Hot Spot' and wait there under the big tree and Tony is going to come get you," Tania said. So I asked the men around us if they knew where The Hot Spot was. They didn't, so I told Tania, "They don't know where it is." "It's under the big tree," Tania said to me in a way that suggested, "Duh, Drew, the big tree, come on, that'll clear everything up." So I asked about the big tree and the men didn't know what I was talking about. So we told Tania that we were going to stay in Fume for the night and come up to the lodge early in the morning, to which she said, "Oh, ok, do that."
So we checked into our double-bed room at the Adzokor for 80,000 cedis and made our way down the hall to our room. This was probably the weirdest hotel room I have ever seen. The bed was in the very center of the room, and there was about 2 feet between the bed and the wall all the way around. A little couch sat in the corner. It was a yellow and brown-cushioned couch, the kind you would expect to find in someone's grandma's house. Jackie was so fascinated by it that she kept drawing it on and off for a few hours. We played cards, took pictures, were silly, and then around midnight decided to go to bed. We went down the hall to the bathroom, brushed our teeth, came back to the room, and got ready for bed. I flipped off the light and then... it was ridiculously bright. There was a window and two large ventilation holes in the wall against the hallway, and the hallway was really well lit. So I stuffed the couch cushions in the window (sorry, Grandma) and a science book and my shoes into the vent holes. That was a little better.
Jackie and I talked for a little while (we were both in a strange state because of our journey), laughed a bit, and then began to drift off into sleep. Then all of a sudden, Jackie started to scratch herself. A few minutes later, I noticed that I too was a bit itchy. I first I didn't think much of it, but after a while, the itching just started getting worse and in more different places. Jackie and I recognized the pain we were each in and concluded that there must have been bedbugs in the bed. I spray myself down with deet, scratch myself some more, and then fall asleep in possibly the strangest hotel room I'll ever be in.
To be continued...
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