Adventures in the Volta Region

This was another incredible weekend, made so fantastic by the unexpected adventures that occurred every step of the way!

Thursday night, we went with our Ikando Volunteer group to dinner in Osu and then Bywells, a "club" in Osu that has a live, local band on Thursday nights. We met some of our Ghanaian friends there too, and had a really great time dancing and listening to the music. We piled in a cab to get home, and once again, had to face the police check with more than 4 passengers in the cab. One of the Ghanaian guys got out of the car before the police check, walked ahead as our cab went through the checkpoint, and then got back in the taxi ahead of the police checkpoint and we carried on our way with an over-full taxi, haha!

On Friday, we left for the bust station straight from the Autism Center. We took an STC (coach) bus from Macola Market to Hohoe. The bus was not air-conditioned, but had a nice breeze. The whole way it stopped for mobs of people selling bread and other products to our bus, and was a very cultural and scenic experience. Our group started as 9 people: 3 Americans, 2 Swedish, 2 French, one British, and one Taiwanese. Later that night, we picked up a Canadian who joined our group for the next day.

We stayed at "The Grand Hotel" in Hohoe. There was nothing grand about it, but we had dinner there and slept, and left the next morning to go to the Wli falls! These are the tallest falls in West Africa, and really were magnificent. We had to take a guide to get to the first falls, and then the "upper falls" are "at-your-own-risk" during the rainy season. We decided to make the climb, after a good while of hiking and bathing in the first falls. The hike was a very steep incline, and was really a challenging trek! We were so wet, from deet, humidity, and sweat, and seeing the top of the falls was an exhilarating experience.

That night, we slept near the Wli falls at another "hotel." The next morning, we took a walk to the Togo border, a very unexciting 2-foot-tall wall, and then took a tro-tro an hour and a half to the Tafi Atome, the village that has the monkey sanctuary. The rest of the group was going to stay there overnight, but Diane and I decided to travel back Sunday evening so that we could get back to the Autism Center on Monday morning.

We saw some monkeys, and decided to go for a walk. Caroline, from France, and I started walking one way out of the village the opposite direction of the main road, thinking that the rest of the group was walking behind us. After a while, we realized they were not behind us, and with no cell phone reception, we turned around and walked back toward the village. After not finding them there, we figured they must have continued up the road toward the main road, so we contined our walk. Granted, it was really sunny, and very hot and humid in this rainforest area. Still a lovely walk together. We got pretty tired and hot after a while, and saw a motorbike coming behind us going in our direction. I flagged it down, and we jumped on! We rode on it, past our friends. When I tried to tell the motorbike to stop and let us off, he didn't understand. After a while, he said, "I do not understand English, I speak French!" HAHA! After all that time of enduring a language barrier, the French girl and him spoke, and we got off and started to walk BACK so we could catch up with our group. Then, a large trailer truck came by. We jumped on the back of that, and then jumped off again when we found the group on the road! Since Diane and I would have to come back to the main road later to catch a Tro Tro to go back to Accra, we decided that we would jump on the next motorbike we saw to go back to the monkey sanctuary to get our backpacks, then come back to the main road to find the group. We went back, and the monkey sanctuary didnt' have the key to where our things were. We had to go BACK to the boys and THEN back again to the monkey sanctuary, then hitched ANOTHER ride back! Basically, we spent the whole day on a motorbike, but it was really so much fun. We took a tro-tro back, the two of us, to Accra, and were safe and sound :) Goodnight!