The past two weeks have been adventure-packed and overall pretty amazing! I apologize for not writing after my Kumasi trip. It was a good weekend, but there really wasn't a lot to tell. We went to a traditional Asante home and celebrated Ghana's Independence Day at a place called "The Sweet Pub" which was pretty amusing. A lot of the girls ran into some trouble with drunken African men. My one friend's face got licked, another's crotch got grabbed, several were pushed, and I was punched in the arm by a large drunken African woman. Overall we were happy to leave the pub and go back to an Obruni filled hotel. We also went to a market which is said to be the largest open air market in West Africa. I got a pair of "Aldo" sandals, which as I'm sure you can guess are fake, but nonetheless cute.
The week after Kumasi was spent mostly in preparation for my trip to Mole National Park. In order to get to Mole you need to buy tickets no more than 24 hours in advance for Tamale, which is the nearest town resembling civilization. Tamale is about three to five hours from Mole. Our group of eight woke at the early hour of 4am to buy bus tickets on Wednesday. Our firs adventure to the STC bus station was a success! We arrived back on campus at 6am and I proceeded to sleep until noon! Thursday we left for Mole at about 6:15. Rush hour in Accra beings around 6am so we knew we needed to leave time before our 8am bus. We were worried about missing it as we arrived at 7:45 in the bus station, but little did we know that a whole day of waiting for this mythical bus was ahead of us. We waited from 7:45 am until about 6pm until the bus FINALLY came. We were informed that during this time it was being repaired, reassuring I know. During the ten hours that we spent waiting at the bus station, we were surprisingly content. Around 4:30 we decided it was time to have a drink because at that point we didn't even know if we were going to get on a bus that day. Six of us finished a fifth of 8pm whiskey in about 45 minutes then decided to buy a second mini bottle to treat our kind waitress. At this point we were all feeling a whole lot better about just having spent a full day waiting for a bus that may never come. It is safe to say that our mantra for the trip was TIA, "This is Africa." You waited for a bus for ten hours? Well, TIA. When the bus came you had to wait 45 minutes for a police escort? TIA. If you don't have a police escort you will almost surely be robbed at gunpoint. TIA.
After we boarded the bus and all of the women suddenly got off, we knew something was up. People were shouting in Twi so a few group members went to investigate. Some of the women told horror stories of what happened to people traveling to Tamale by night without an escort. Because we were supposed to be traveling by day they hadn't booked one for us, so it took a little while to find a policeman willing to ride a bus over night for 12 hours to get a bunch of people to Tamale safely. Fortunately we were able to find one and our journey continued!
We arrived in Tamale at 6am on Friday. We had been planning to arrive at 8 or 9pm on Thursday, but at least we saved money by not having to get hotel rooms! It was a rough night on the bus to say the least. I could go on a rant about Ghanaian movies, but I will spare you. The short version is that they are loud, there is a lot of screaming and yelling, they are very dramatic, and the acting is TERRIBLE. Terrible as in I've seen eighth grade homemade movies that have better acting and overall production. Anyway, the movies played the whole way to Tamale, so my ipod was at max volume. When we got in to Tamale (by the way it is not pronounced like the Mexican food) we were lucky enough to be able to hire an un-air conditioned van to Mole. The trip took about three hours and was one of the most hilarious and ridiculous rides in a vehicle I have ever experienced. Because it was un-air conditioned the windows were open the whole time. As we got closer to Mole, the roads got worse and worse therefore more dusty. By the end of the journey our whole group was brown. Those wearing white shirts will definitely have to retire them after this trip. Luckily I had brown pants on. My friend's eyelashes had dust in them and were brown. The shutter on my camera wasn't closing as well because it had dust in it. Everything was covered. It was the dirtiest I have been in my entire life. In addition to the dirt from the roads not being paved, the bumps were almost unbearable. I never get carsick and there were several times both on the way to Tamale and on the way to Mole that I thought I was going to be sick. Somehow all of us made it,with only one person getting sick out of all eight people.
When we finally got to Mole after over 24 hours of bus station waiting and traveling, our rooms weren't even ready. The icing on the cake! We immediately set our stuff down changed in the bathroom into our bathing suits and jumped into the pool. It was the most refreshing swim I've ever taken. Finally after our rooms were ready and we finally ate some food we went on our first safari! Four people rode in the jeep and four rode on top then we switched half way. It was so incredible. You had to hold on tight and it was definitely an adrenaline rush at some points. We managed to see two elephants, tons of bushbok and other deer-like animals, warthogs (which also roam around the hotel like dogs), baboons, and green monkeys. I was about 50 yards away from an elephant at one point!It was definitely my favorite of all the safaris.
The next morning we woke up for a 7am hiking safari to the watering hole that the hotel overlooked. It took around 3 hours and while we didn't see any elephants, we did see more bushbok and green monkeys. The scenery was beautiful and there were a lot of interesting plants as well. At one point we stopped at a pool of water that our guide told us we could drink from. We did and no one got sick, although I was extremely hesitant at first. The water even tasted good! When we got back to the hotel we had breakfast, which was amusing. As we were eating my friend got up to ask for something and a baboon hopped onto her seat beside me out of no where and stole the toast from her plate! I let out a little scream along with almost everyone else at the table, then we burst into laughter. My friend Brianna and I ran after the baboon to take pictures. It was so cute, and had a baby hanging onto its belly! At one point it even looked like it was posing for us! After the baboon breakfast we rested up for our afternoon canoe safari. We were driven to a village which I believe was still technically inside the park, but I'm not too sure. Some of the men from the village were our guides. We got into the little canoe boats and were paddled for an hour down a little river, which was more like a creek because it isn't the rainy season. We saw a few exotic birds, but no other animals. It was still really cool to be on the water, and was probably my second favorite safari. That night we ate traditional Ghanaian food as a warthog watched us enviously. The next morning we woke again at 4am to catch the bus from Mole to Tamale.
This time, the bus took about six hours because it was bigger and couldn't go as fast over all the bumps and rocks. Also it stopped at a bunch of villages along the way. I did sleep for a few hours on this bus which was lucky because the rest of the journey back to Accra was too bumpy for me to sleep at all. when we arrived in Tamale around 10am we were extremely fortunate to catch a bus within 30 minutes. We weren't even at a bus station we just found a bus to take us, which is really rare. We waited for it to fill up and then we were off to Accra. This bus ride was about ten hours, but I was able to get a lot of reading done despite the terrible Ghanaian movies once again. The bus rides were quite interesting and I basically had to forget the concept of personal space for about 16 hours. My first seat partner was a little to anxious to look out the window, which I was sitting by. I probably just should have given up the window seat because for the first hour of the ride he was leaning across my body basically pushing me into the wall beside the window in order to look out of it. My next bus partner from Tamale to Accra was a mother, who so modestly nursed her son for the better part of the ride. I guess that she just needed something to keep him from crying, because the kid was fed hourly, but not once did he cry during the whole 10 hours. Ghanaian babies are amazing. There was another little baby girl on the bus and the only noise she made were squeals of happiness when the obrunis looked at her and made faces. She was so cute! The babies were on either side of me but it turned out to be more entertaining than anything else. My third bus partner after the woman switched seats when some became open, was a larger man who kept falling asleep an almost leaning on me but jolting awake at the last second before he actually put his head on my shoulder. He kept me on my toes for sure. I was happy though to not have had to push him awkwardly off of me during his peaceful slumber. I don't even know how it was humanly possible to fall asleep on that bus in the first place!
We finally arrived on campus around 8:30-9:00pm exhausted, yet happy to have survived the adventure of a lifetime.
I promise to post pictures as soon as I can. Sorry for all of the spelling and grammatical errors this post probably contains, as I am too tired to go back and correct them before I pass out. I think it will take me a few days to recover from this trip! Until next time, TIA.
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