Weekend trip

On a more boring day I will tell you about:
- Religion and how big it is in Ghana
- Girls' hair - it's all a fake
- Football and Black Stars
- Ants and other nice creatures we live with

If you want to hear about something - please comment and you can read about it in the next edition:)

So, the weekend trip. The trainees here led by Saulius (our very own Lithuanian trainee in Ghana:)) have came up with the plan to work all week and do something cool during the weekend. This weekend five of us set out to Boti Falls to see two water falls, umbrella rock and three trunk palm tree.

Traveling in Ghana is the fun part - you can get these small micro busses - called Tro-Tro - to go to almost anywhere in the country. The bad thing about them is that they don't have a schedule and leave only when they get full, so most of the time you have to wait for some time, sometimes more than an hour (happened twice on this trip:)

July 1st Ghana is celebrating Republic Day and every year there is a big celebration near the Boti Falls where tons of people come. It was really lot's of fun to be the only obrunies (that's the white man in Twi) in this huge crowd of obibinies (that's dark skinned people in Twi - local language). People don't get to see white people so often here so most of the time they look at you and call 'obruni, obruni'. I don't mind when the kids do that - they often look very excited to see a white person:) But I don't understand the grown ups...

The walk to the umbrella rock was not the easiest one - an hour one way going through 'forest', down a rocky path and then climbing up a rocky hill. I was half dead when we got there, but as always - the scenary pays off all the efforts:) they charge you 2000 cedis to climb up the umbrella rock:) it's gorgeous when you go up there... but comming down is not a fun part, especially for someone like me who's kinda scared of hights... but I made it safe to the ground:)

Me and Misha (my roomate) up on the umbrella rock

Luckily three trunk Palm tree wasn't that far:) Here again they wanted to charge us 5000 cedis for taking pictures, but we didn't pay for that - instead we asked them to give us some palm wine. Pure alcohol if you ask me, but more experienced drinkers were very satisfied with it, so objectively it's probably good:)
For Eric's (the guy on the right) sake I have to tell you - the first of July is CANADA day - so Happy Canada day everybody;)

We spent a night at Eric's friends place in Tafo village and in the morning set out to see the oldest cocoa plantation in Ghana. It was planted in 1879 and by 1911 Ghana has become the second biggest exporter of cocoa in the world and stays to this day. Well the plantation was nothing really special, but the guy told us how they gather the fruits and we tasted some cocoa beans, which taste like dark chocholate without sugar.

Yet the fun part was to come - this cocoa plantation is in a small small town and to go from there to Accra was not an easy task:) we spent like an hour waiting for a right Tro-tro, but all of them were full, so then we decided to walk a bit and wait a bit and walk a bit again... Finally we took a taxi to a bigger town near by and there after skipping three Tro-tros (as we were by the end of the que) we finally made it!

Waiting and waiting and waiting...

All in all it has been a great weekend - looking forward to more of these;)