Ghana February 06-09

Some Ghana history:  Ghana, formerly known as the Gold Coast was colonized by the British around the same time the rest of the continent was being taken over, however, not only was Ghana the first country to gain independence, but also managed to do so without any violence in 1957.  Called the Gold Coast due to that and many other of its natural resources, Ghana still faces issues involving slavery, child labor, and many other issues relating to poverty.  These problems are being addressed, but it is a work in progress, taking action can be done from America, and it is worth mentioning to make an effort to spend a little more in purchasing Fair Trade products.  Though the system is not perfect, they do have a way to track most of the producers and suppliers and have proven to break business deals with any companies involved with things such as child labor or conflict-involved resources.  Another fun fact, Ghana’s oil reserves are growing and many companies are already beginning to strike oil, SO, if any of you like to play the stocks, companies with oil drills in Ghana are about to do very well, I may or may not have some insider info to back that up.  Ghana’s official language is English, however there are quite a few tribes which populate the country and have their own languages.  In Takoradi, many people spoke Twi (pronounce chwee), I managed to learn a few words, but not much.  The names for every tribe are based on the day of the week that you are born, the names for the days are different in every tribe but that is a universal characteristic of naming throughout the country.  I, for instance, was born on a Sunday, and the name for Sunday-born in Ashanti, I can’t remember, but in Twi (maybe a different language) is Ese (pronounced like essay), which is what my African name would be.  NOW for the fun stuff:

Day 1: We arrived at the port at Takoradi with some time to kill before I had to meet back for my overnight trip.  I had thought ahead this time and attempted to look into some sites in a guidebook, however, most of them didn’t bode well, saying things mainly summing up to “there’s not much to do here.”  Apparently, everyone else on SAS knew this ahead of time, because many people had plans to go to a BEAUTIFUL beach outside of Takoradi and/or go to Accra, the capital of Ghana.  I somehow found myself with trips every single day, and was unfortunately not able to head to Accra, or the Cape Coast slave castles which would’ve been difficult, but important to see.  Killing time around the ship, I ran into my friend Adam, who convinced me to walk around outside and check out the town a little bit because we had so much time.  I agreed and we left with nothing but our IDs to get back on the ship with.  Turns out, Takoradi is mainly a business port, and it’s about a mile walk simply to get out of the port.  Once out we were BOMBARDED with people trying to sell us stuff, we met a crazy guy who’s name was Franklin, but wanted us to call him Kelly Wonder, who turned out to be a gymnast and did some back flips for us right in the street.  No one believed that we had no money on us of course, and one guy managed to get a huge necklace on me which he refused to take back.  I eventually tricked him into it by conceding to write my name on a piece of paper but insisting that he hold the necklace for me while I do so.   I also got a few funny business cards from the “artists/businessmen” who had come to sell us stuff outside of the port.  There were a bunch of taxis lined up, but we decided to walk into town with a group of people.  The humidity eventually got to us, and about a mile into the walk, we decided we should turn around and go back to the ship.  All and all, didn’t get much done, but was now prepared for the long, dirty trek into the town area and also the horrible smell of raw cocoa beans which overwhelmed about 10 minutes of the walk.

After we got back, I left for my overnight visit to Winneba.  This was a Field Practicum for my Ethnography class and was rather looking forward to it; based on the description, it was a small fishing village on the coast, where we would eat dinner, have a welcome ceremony with drums and dance, check out the shopping and beach areas, look around the university the next day and then head back.  Almost none of this actually happened, but it still turned out to be a great time.  The bus ride was 3 hours long, most of which I spent sleeping, but with some great views of villages, market places, and scenery.  Once we arrived, we had a little welcoming ceremony with the chief of Winneba and other dignitaries involving pouring hard liquor on the ground and summoning the gods in Twi.  We then got our hotel assignments, which were apparently split up between three hotels in the area, and headed out to check in and get dinner.  The dinner was amazing, and I felt bad because there was so much leftover food that I wished I could’ve saved for later dinners on the trip, but I was so full.  They played some music, and wanted us to dance, and a few of us did to be polite, but it’s hard to get a bunch of young people to dance in broad daylight in a non-bar situation.  Afterward, we headed over to one of the campuses at the University of Winneba in which there was about an hour of formal introductions of all of the dignitaries there as well as a long, LONG, description of how Winneba and Charlottesville are sister cities.  The sister city lecture and attempts to explain what semester at sea is were to become a big theme throughout the visit, heard at least 20 times and discussed for about an hour each every time.  They had a TON of performances which were all great, and in many of them we got out of our seats to go join them in dancing and singing.  Afterward, we were supposed to get on the bus but managed to socialize with a lot of the students before leaving.

This also happened to be on Super Bowl Sunday, and a few of the guys on our trip managed to get some of the University students to pick us up at the hotel in their school bus and take us to a bar where they could stream in the Super Bowl.  It was pretty mind blowing to be watching the Super Bowl outside on a huge screen in Ghana, but still a really fun experience, and I got to know a lot of people on the trip that I hadn’t known going in, not to mention it was a pretty good game by the second quarter onward.

Day 2: The next day, we went to a different campus of the same University, more toward the center of town which was more of a music school in focus.  They had some pretty cool performances, the students invited a partner each up to dance with them (I got chosen!) and after their performances, some of the professors and students more involved in music and performance got up and showed different cultural performances that were foreign to the Ghanaians.  We had some time to walk around after that and the girl who invited me to dance wanted to take me around town; I brought 2 girls from my trip with me, and we went into a hostel, which is like the kind of dorms that Ghanaian students stay in, and met a friend of hers who studies French Horn (she was a vocal major).  He was super funny and since we didn’t have much time they took us to a bar nearby where we danced to “high life,” which is the popular kind of music in Ghana.  We kept dancing in the streets on the way back to the bus, and people outside were laughing and cheering us on because I’m sure we looked ridiculous.  After that, we went back to the hotel for lunch, and ended up in a final super long lecture with a guy from parliament, but it was interesting and we were all exhausted by the time we got back to the bus for the drive back.

Day 3: Exhausted from my trip and my escapades the night before, I didn’t make it up in time to go on  my planed Semester at Sea-sponsored trip.  I was super upset at first, thought the ship was completely lost and frustrated and then I happened upon some people I hadn’t met yet who were figuring out what they wanted to do.  I hopped in their group and we explored the market areas as well as going to lunch at a place called Captain Hook’s with delicious food.  Ghanaian food is some of the best I’ve had, but it’s very spicy.  I like that, because I love spicy food but even the rice is spicy which is served with spicey chicken haha.  Anyway, the market was overwhelming and didn’t really sell the touristy stuff we were looking for so we headed back, but it was still a really cool experience, and I found an ATM which took master card which was good to know.

Once we got back by the ship, there were people outside with more touristy items for us and I went in with a plan.  I chose one stand (they all pretty much had the same stuff), and decided to buy all the stuff I knew I wanted from there so that I could bargain even lower.  I got some pretty good prices, and even when they refused to go down more on some of the prices, I would barter by asking them to throw in a few free post cards.  It worked out pretty well, and some of you have some pretty exciting souvenirs!

Day 4: I had to wake up pretty early for a hike in Ankasa National Park, which is rare, untouched rainforest.  It has a lot of plants and wild life which literally only exist in this national park.  Ankasa means to keep quiet, and the park gained that name through a traditional story.  There was a rickety bridge over a river which serves as the kind of boundary for the rainforest area.  Apparently people would often fall into the river, and a legend formed around it involving a dwarf that lived under the bridge.  This dwarf apparently does not like to be disturbed, and if you were to make any noise while crossing the bridge, it was said that you would be swept in the river, so people would always say “Ankasa!” and that eventually became it’s name.  The hike was nice, despite the palpable humidity and plethora of bug bites on my calves that I’d somehow managed to acquire the night before.  There were a lot of semi-bridges which were just basically logs placed across the water like in the Hakuna Matata scene in The Lion King.  Ashley, Rachel and I were all on the hike together, so it was a pretty good time and we were pretty much clowning around the entire hike.  On the way back, we stopped by Axim beach for lunch.  This is the beach where many people from SAS chose to stay for a few days, and it’s literally the most beautiful, clean, sunny, pleasant beach I’d ever seen in my life.  We were considering staying there and not going back on the bus, but none of us had money or swim suits.  I would actually consider going back to Ghana solely to return to that beach resort; it was gorgeous.

Day 5: I originally didn’t have anything scheduled for this day, BUT Rachel and Ashley both had tickets for Nzulezo, a water village, which I had missed a few days before.  I figured why not, and rushingly handed them my group B ticket on the group C trip, and no one said anything, and a ton of people didn’t even show up, so it worked out perfectly, and I managed to get to go on the trip I missed!  It was actually pretty cool, although I wish I’d known more about it before hand, because the village was a bit in need and I had pencils, stickers etc. that I could’ve brought for the children, but didn’t bring anything with me but my ticket and my ID.  We got to the main area, and got into groups to go in canoes with a guide in each one.  We would take turns helping to paddle and sailed down the river to a village literally on stilts over the water.  Their streets were wooden platforms and all of the houses were grouped together on this open lake.  The children were adorable and friendly; the adults were a bit more stand-offish, but apparently they appreciate the tours because they’ve helped to fund their school buildings and teachers.  They told us the legend of how they got to the lake and decided to live there, and how no one feels threatened, because if anyone has a treacherous thought in those waters, legend says that the treacherous person will die, and the innocent will always live.  Each member of each family has a canoe, and they are mostly made up of fishermen.  It was raining that day, and we didn’t get to stay in the village as long as the other groups did, but it was still amazing to see and a great experience.  We had a delicious lunch when we got back and had some time to walk along the beach and into the next town where we met our bus.  After that we got back and had to get straight on the ship…Kind of interfered with a few last minute souvenirs I wanted to get, but  still a great day overall and I can not wait for South Africa.

Brazil: Jan 23-27

(Apologies for lateness) In my usual style, some brief history/context about Manaus. (Pronounced MAN-ow-s)

It is a port city located about 2-days-sailing into the Amazon River.  The Amazon is the largest river in the world, and a relatively new river which is continuing to expand.  It is the capital of the state of Amazonas, and a popular eco-tourism destination, which as a now-seasoned traveler of the city, I understand to mean code for there’s-not-much-to-do-other-than-exploring-the-river-and-jungle-areas.  That being said, I had an AMAZING time and upon returning to the ship, I was quite worried that no other countries would be able to rival the time I had in Brazil.  In addressing the famously mixed population of Brazil, rather than a lot of various races, though there was diversity, traces of indigenous people was the most common race being the strongest survivors of the slavery period due to their familiarity and ability to survive in the Amazon jungle.  Economically, Brazil is facing an issue with an increasingly large gap between rich and poor with a remarkably small amount fitting in middle class.  There are rough areas called favelas where people literally live and shacks and get by any way they can with problems of violence and drug/alcohol abuse.  The main areas with favelas are in Rio de Jenaro and Sao Paulo and I read a book for class which was a published diary of a woman who lived there in the ‘50s called Child of the Dark.  Didn’t really interact with that aspect on my trip, but a very big issue in Brazil.  My last fun fact to share is that Manaus also happens to be the birthplace of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts.

      Day 1: I had no planned trips and due to the growing increase of school work which had begun as classes got rolling on the ship, did not get a chance to check out a guide book from the library.  The policy here, as I learned that day – is that guides can be checked out for the span of 2 hours, and you must read them in the library and cannot take them to your room.   Anywho, that didn’t happen, and the campus store was selling guide books for a whopping $25, so no guidebook preparation was done, expecting a city with more tourist attractions and things to do.  In addition, only the night before at our pre-port briefing did we discover that almost no one spoke English, and would only understand a LITTLE Spanish if attempting to communicate that way.  So:

     Rachel, my roommate and I step out of the boat and look out at Manaus excitedly freaking out and saying “WE’RE IN BRAZIL…THIS IS CRAZY” etc., we stop by the tourist center which conveniently has an ATM and the tourist guide speaks English and gives us a fun map to use.  We then step out into the city and are overwhelmed with little stalls completely lining the street on each side for what seems like an eternity selling everything from food to toys to fresh fruit and everything in between.  After managing to communicate enough to purchase some grapes the noon-time sun gets to us and we can’t handle the humidity and walking down all of these stands. We decide to take a taxi somewhere and with our map IN PORTUGUESE with some drawings on it, pick one that looks nice to point at for a cab driver.  In response, they point at a DIFFERENT drawing far away from the one we pointed at and insist "SHOPPING MALL, SHOPPING MALL," after a while of back and forth with the occasional response of "OPERA HOUSE?!" we say "ok, shopping mall," and get in the cab.  On our way, the cab driver takes initiative to go to the one tourist spot in Manaus and let us take pictures outside while the meter is running.  So we got some pictures outside of an historic opera house and continued on our way to a mall….on a Sunday…..in a religious Catholic country.  That means: no stores were open.

      So, abandoning any plans of buying cute Brazilian bikinis we happened upon the one area of the mall that was open – the food court, which, conveniently has a bar that serves alcohol at 12:30 p.m.  From the month I spent living in Spain, I learned some valuable words in Spanish, some of which are the same in Portuguese – in this instance, “cerveja” really came in handy, and Rachel and I proceed to get our buzz on while laughing and giving in to the fact that we don’t speak either Portuguese or Spanish, and have no idea where we are, what to do, how we’ll get a cab back to the ship, and what to do with the rest of our day(s) to samba music playing in the background while sitting next to a man whom we eventually decide is a drug dealer after many minutes of observation watching him accept phone calls publicly with one phone, privately with the other, and occasionally leaving for a few minutes only to come back and keep drinking.  We eventually find that we’re actually enjoying ourselves despite all this, and the ludicrousness of the situation only makes us enjoy it more and laugh about how nice it would be if a super-sexy Brazilian man approached us who spoke English and took us out to see Manaus, which is more what we thought our day would be like…basically a Mary-Kate and Ashley movie circa late ‘90s/early 2000s.  After much discussion and preparation, we manage to order what seems to us as a very Brazilian dish – it consisted of chips (French fries), rice, steak, salad and steak with a fried egg on top, and was called “Carne du Sol,” which I suppose means something involving beef and sun?  It was pretty good.  Then our luck changed:

    As we tried and failed to explain that we wanted to split the bill between our 2 credit cards, a woman nearby who spoke English came to our rescue!  Being the first person who spoke English we’d interacted with we jumped on making friends with her.  We were basically like, we’re in Manaus, it’s a Sunday, we don’t know what to do blah blah blah.  She explained to us that she was an accountant from Sao Paulo and also a tourist of Manaus but had a cab driver assigned to her for her trip, so together they took us to this Brazilian version of a country club which was apparently what everyone in Manaus does on Sunday.  There was a pool where a lot of kids were playing and an outdoor area with tables and music where they served drinks, food, and there was dancing.  We sat down and had a few drink and, despite being the only non-Brazilians there, eventually got up the courage to dance.  Old drunk guys taught us how to samba, which I eventually became pretty good at the humor of everyone watching, I’m sure, while I didn’t know what to do, and we spent the rest of the afternoon talking, relaxing, and dancing.  It was great!

     That evening, after getting a ride back to the port with our new friend, Thiaga, I decided to join a lot of other Semester at Sea kids in going to a rehearsal for Manaus’ performance done on Carnival.  Professors, Lifelong learners, and students all seemed to be there and after a pretty cool performance of drumming and dancing, we all joined it.   It was super humid and everyone was covered in sweat from dancing so hard, but it was CRAZY and they ended the night with a few ‘70s classics, and then we headed back as a group to the port.

     Day 2:  Didn’t do much in town, but had lunch on the ship with a few friends, and headed off for a jungle overnight excursion to learn survival techniques and hike.   We took a boat from the port where our ship was for about an hour to a beach with the jungle looming mysteriously behind it.  To get off, we had to walk in the Amazon River marshy-area  to the beach which was GROSS, plus the guides got me nice and psyched-out because I was wearing shorts and they made me wear Rachel’s funny looking knee socks with my otherwise athletic wear, there are pictures, it’s absurd.  But anyway, they talked me into it with the threat of snake bites, which I was NOT ready to deal with by catching the snake to know what type of poison it had injected me with…so point blank: think hiking shoes and argyle knee socks…classy.  First things I noticed after reaching the beach area were a) snake holes/animal burrows, b) GIANT dragon flies who did not seem threatened by the 98% deet formula I was armed with, and c) that it was BOILING HOT with the kind of humidity that causes a strange mixture of air moisture and sweat to literally just SIT on your skin with no evaporation.  Very Apocalypse Now.

                Once we got started it turned out to not be that bad at all other then being a big sweaty mess.  We learned some survival stuff like how to climb trees to get the fruit at the top, what fruit is safe to eat (anything monkeys can eat, we can eat), how to set traps, various types of shelters, and start fires w/o matches or lighters because they seemed to think that we’d be more likely to have materials handy such as AA batteries, steel wool or gunpowder, which I’m not so sure would apply to me when going to the jungle.  We were led by a guy in the Army Amazona with a HUGE machete and a guide who would translate what he said.  We came back to our camping area and picked out hammocks for the night with no more shelter than a mosquito net, but luckily it didn’t rain that night.  When we went back to the area where the army guys were staying to get some more chicken for a late night snack, they went shirtless, shoeless and without mosquito nets!  It looked pretty badass, but I have no idea how they didn’t get completely bitten up.  There were huge spiders everywhere that kind of freaked me out, but I put a TON of deet all over my hammock which I like to think worked and that I didn’t eat a spider in my sleep.  They brought out some really good chicken for dinner which I suspect they caught with some of the traps and prepared with their many machetes.  During dinner and afterward, I became engaged in a conversation with a guide who spoke very good English as well as one of the Army guys who didn’t speak great English but managed, and proceeded to have the most interesting conversation of my life!  All of the Semester at Sea kids were just talking to each other, but I didn’t care because it left the guide and Amazon guy open to completely tell me everything from Army man’s year spent living with an Amazonian indigenous tribe called the Yanomami (I had actually seen a documentary on them last semester in an Anthro class) with a few other soldiers from the military, what the experience was like for him, what their customs are, their relationship with other tribes, the Brazilian government, childbirth practices and everything in between.  He told us about his personal history, his life and how he ended up founding the jungle overnight program which we were actually on.  The guide had a little bit of a different history being mixed race between being descended from an African slave who was as recent as his great grandmother who was brought from Africa, and somewhere along the way was mixed with indigenous people of the jungle as well.  He grew up in communities who are not indigenous and don’t live lives as traditional as many of the tribes, but still live in the jungle rather than society as we would think about it.  For instance, they have houses in the jungle rather than living in hammocks hung with no other shelter but a roof to protect from rain.  He did however tell us about how he’s had all kind of wild jungle animals as pets such as tapir, monkey, deer and many others.  How he hunts in the jungle at night and they both told us different jungle legends and stories many of which are known in the tribes as well as in the city.  One of them, a story about a floating fire ball which is seen around the jungle, the Army guy claimed to have seen himself.  After a while we were about to go on a late night hike with a few people, but then someone went to go get bug spray, and next thing I know everyone wants to go so we had to get all of the Army guides to come with us and it was a whole debacle BUT we hiked back out to the beach, looked at the stars and went swimming in the brown dirty-looking and disconcertingly warm waters of the Amazon River.  I got a foot infection in a bug bite on my foot which flared up a few days later and caused me to be quarantined to my room for a few days, which I suspect that may have been the cause, but I guess I’ll never know.  At around 4 am, someone’s hammock broke which was pretty hilarious but other than that, we got up at 5 am, walked back to the boat and sailed back to port as the sun rose.

                There was a bit of an event getting back though, because at one point, I got stuck in a branch or something, and when I got myself free, everyone in front of me was out of sight.  It was dark, the trail was hard to see, and there were a bunch of people behind me who also had no idea where to go.  I started to walk where I THOUGHT the trail was supposed to be, and we would shout to the people in front of us to wait and they wouldn’t answer (later we found out they couldn’t even hear us), but somehow my guesswork actually got us out of the jungle.  Why everyone trusted and followed me the entire way like I knew what I was doing, I have no idea, but it was pretty scary up until we reached the beach.

Day 3: Mostly got spent at the mall again, luckily a different mall then before, but with no guide book or way to get in touch with our Brazilian friend before, Rach and I were pretty lost and had to just submit to the cab drivers’ insistances to go shopping.  Relatively uneventful, but I did get a cute overpriced jacket.

Day 4: Got to walk around and explore the city a little bit more this day.  I went on an incredible service visit to a nonprofit orphanage for special needs kids who have all been abandoned and we took them to the zoo.  It was amazing because none of them had ever even been to a zoo and despite the language barrier, we could still have fun with them and tell that they were having a great time interacting and looking at the animals.  One girl named Juju kind of adopted me.  She was very bossy and funny; she took my camera and took pictures of everyone together, the animals, as well as insisted that a few other people and I all link arms with her as we walked around and had us jump into peoples pictures.  She had a little crush on one guy on the visit which was soooo adorable because she didn’t let go of his hand the entire time.  The kids were all sorts of ages, and even though many of them were shy I got to spend a little time with a lot of them, just smiling, high fiving, making funny faces, and laughing was enough.  I brought some plastic medals that say #1 on one side and “winner” on the other.  I think they’ll like them, but they had a really nice system where they collected all of the little gifts that people brought in one big pile to redistribute among all of the kids, including the ones who were not healthy enough to go on the trip.  We also had a tour of the facility which I was extremely impressed with.  All of the living spaces were very nice and pleasant, the children seemed very well cared for, and everything was really bright and hopeful about it.

                I got back at noon, and met up with Rachel to get lunch and hit the town.  We met this girl who came with us named Jamie who I still hang out with on the reg now.  We walked around the market area which was pretty interesting.  They sell all sorts of things in markets – not so much touristy stuff, and at first I was worried I wouldn’t really find any good souvenirs, but everything from hardware to hammocks to clothes and school supplies.  When we got to the food area, they had all the usual stuff; fruits, veggies, candies/snacks all looked awesome, but when we got to the meat and fish area it was an FDA agent’s nightmare!  The seafood and meat literally just sits out in the hot air, tons of flies and bugs, AND they had a huge wheelbarrow in the middle of the aisle to walk in full of the scraps and bones which were covered in all sorts of who-knows-what…I had to hold my breath.  I suppose there had to have been hundreds of years where meat and fish just sat out in the market, but it was probably the biggest culture shock other than the language barrier through the whole trip.  We eventually found the tourist-directed market, and I bought some cool stuff but it was also fun to just look around; most of the coolest stuff wouldn’t have really travelled well, but they had some amazing woven baskets and wooden masks.  I wish I had taken more pictures of that.  When we stopped to get some drinks, these super cute little kids who were walking around the market started coming up to us and hung out with us for a while.  Despite the language barrier, we managed to communicate pretty well.  They were super adorable, and don’t worry, I got pictures!  On the way back, this police man stopped us and gave us his business card….he moonlights as a male stripper!  That was the last day, so we were just like “thanks!” and skidaddled on to the boat to head to Ghana, but definitely a humorous way to end the trip.