The Volta Region small-small

Sunday morning.

A few hung over geeks got up too early. Heavy eye-lids characterized tired faces.

Trip nr. 3 was about to begin.

Private tro-tro comes in half an hour late. Nothing unusual. Harrowed geeks get into too small tro-tro. There are more of us this time. I was brazen enough to invite my girlfriend Signe and my friend Jens (Val Kilmer) the giant Dane. Tim's wife Claudia adds to the equation. We are practically piled into that tro-tro.

Akosombo, luckily, is only about an hour and a half away. And the roads are good. Excellent. Unusual for Ghana.

The day trip in itself consists mostly of geeks sleeping at the table on a cruise ship on the Volta Lake. It is the "Princess Dodi" sailing out of Akosombo. Destination, Dodi Island and back.

It is hot. Unbelievably hot. There is a band on board. Merry dancing. And a pool for the children. The Grilled Tilapia and Fried Rice feed our sunday hunger.

Dodi Island is just that. An island. Nothing special. Plenty of children want to be your friend. Hold your hand. Show you around. But there is no around. Just a sun-scorched path over the top of the island. The coast on the far side seems identical to the one we docked at. 30 minutes later the ships horn invades our hang-overs. We are sailing again. Back to Akosombo and the over-filled tro-tro.

The trip is uneventful. A glance across the tables inhabited by the geeks shows a group of hot, tired geeks. Almost everyone sleeps. The party from the night before is showing.

It is a relaxing trip. Nothing special. Hardly memorable. But relaxing.

Back in the over-filled tro-tro we drive to the junction. Where the Accra - Ho road, meets the road to Akosombo. I get out with Jens and Signe. We want to explore the Volta Region.

A few tro-tro's pass. None have room for 3 oversized Danes. A taxi-driver offers us a ride. We negotiate. We agree on a price, and he takes us to Ho. He almost finds it without asking.

At the tro-tro stand in Ho, we quickly find a tro-tro for the short ride to Ho-Hoe. It's dark. We don't know the road. After 3 and a half hours we finally get there. It should have taken 2 hours. The tro-tro must have been all over the Volta Region. Why would we expect anything else?

A group of kids lead us through the dark streets of Ho-Hoe. They take us to an entirely different hotel than the one we ask for. It's expensive by Ho-Hoe standards. After the heat of the boat and the dreariness of the tro-tro we go for the comfort of a night with a/c and running water.

We sleep in. Relax. Have a nice breakfast in the hotel diner.

We want to go to Liate Wote. Multiple sources have told us that there is only one scheduled lorry a day. In the afternoon. We look for another taxi to charter. Again the ride takes longer than expected. Finally our driver signals arrival. We are a little put off by the signs announcing this to be the village Bgledi or Gbledi. We thought we were going to Liate Wote. He says we are there. He takes us to the office were numerous young men insist that this is the only place to climb the mountain. We want Liate Wote, we reply. But this is the only place to climb the mountain. And they will kindly take us before we go to our destination. I tell them I am visiting a friend. I will come back tomorrow, but now I must see my friend. I am referring to Leslie the Peace corps volunteer at Liate Wote. I have never met her, but it earns me an understanding nod and directions to the next village. The taxi driver takes us there. We pay him, and ask around. Leslie is travelling in Ho-Hoe, she will arrive later. "Is there somewhere we can stay the night?". They show us a room, and a laminated piece of paper describing the hikes, the food and the costs of staying the night. A few cold sodas later. A large bottle of water. One more to replaced the liquid lost to sweat in this hot, humid village. Our guide takes us on the afternoon hike. We go to the local waterfalls. Not the biggest or tallest we have ever seen. But at the end of a 45 minute hike through the jungle, the idyllic and inviting pool at the bottom of this beautiful 15 meter waterfall is incredible. We swim for a while. Enjoy the freshness of the water plunging in from the other side of the Togolese border. Laugh. Smile. Live.

We walk back. Dinner is rice and stew. With a few pieces of fish that taste ominously similar to chicken. We think about the X-files for a minute. Then we dig in again. It tastes good, albeit a little hot on the tongue.

We spend the evening chatting with Leslie about large and small matters. About George W. and the environment. About Georgia University. Where both Leslie and Signe spent years of their lives. About the Danish taxes and not having a drivers licence. About living in a remote Ghanaian village for 2 years, and about the difficulty of going back to a stressed and hurried western life. We covered a lot of ground before heading of to bed early. There's nothing much to do in a village in the Volta region after dark.

We sleep in bursts. The constant attempts at escaping from my own sweat, in the humid heat of the night, wake me up again and again. We get up before 6. We want to hike to the top of Mt. Afadjato. The tallest mountain in Ghana. The guide says it is only feasible before the sun gets to hot. He is right. Yet this is the same mountain that our friends in Bgledi wanted us to hike at noon. In retrospect that would have been a very bad idea.

Instead we head out at around 6:20 a.m. No breakfast. The hike is long, steep and hot, irrespective of the time of day. Mt. Afadjato is almost 900 metres high. The path leads almost straight up the side of the mountain. By the time we get to the top, about an hour after leaving the village, we are exhausted. My T-shirt, as usual, is completely soaked. Jens is in dire need of a blood-sugar raise. And even Signe is feeling the heat and the tired thighs. But the view is breathtaking. It would be even nicer on a clear day. But through the cloud cover we can see the waterfall we swam in. The hilly western side of Togo. The villages below us, and the dusty road from nowhere to nowhere.

We are back in the village before nine. We have breakfast of rice and beans. It feels like it should be lunch. We have been up and about for hours already. We sit around alternately reading a little and complaining about the heat. I teach one of the locals his first lesson on Leslies laptop. How to use the touchpad. How to use the start menu. How to open and close Word. Very Basic. I shower. I siesta. I complain about the heat. I sweat like a madman.

We decide to leave the village. Try our luck elsewhere. We pack. We join some locals in the shade of a tree by the road. We wait for a ride.

We have waited maybe 15 minutes when a car passes by. It has room. It is, without a doubt, the most wrecked vehicle we have ever seen on the road. It actually drives. It is an unidentifiable stationcar. Retrofitted with a second row of back seats. The front doors close with a iron bracket that is placed through the open window to hold the frame of the door to the frame of the car. The rear door has a hatch. The interior consists of the metal frame and the seats. No lining. At one point during the drive there are 11 grown people in the car, and one on the roof. Bundles of yams, pineapple and other produce share the roof and trunk with our backpacks. It is surreal. Twice the driver adds cooling liquid. Once he gets out, grabs a wrench and seems to be tightening the nuts on one rear wheel. Jens has his entire upper body stuck out the rear window for most of the ride. When it starts to rain the driver reaches out the front window to wipe off the completely shattered windsshield. My head is bent forward at a precarious angle. The air we breathe is saturated with gasoline from an apparently leaky gas-tank. But the ride is fast and the driver knows the roads. We survive. Miraculously?

Sitting in the restaurant of the Grand Hotel in Ho-Hoe we debate our next move. Should we head back to Accra a day early?
We meet Jeremy, an Australian living in Montreal and travelling through West Africa. I have met him before in Accra. We exchange experiences.

We decide to try our luck with the monkey sanctuary at Tafi Atome. We charter another Taxi. Because it is slowly moving towards sunset and we don't feel like an hours walk through the dark unknown road between Logba and Tafi Atome. The well-off have certain priviliges.

Tafi Atome is a traditional village which houses a large population of apparently sacred Mona monkeys. You can see the monkeys. The traditional village life. Drumming and dancing. And stay overnight in a small chalet. We have a cold beer. Dinner of rice and stew. A bucket shower. The village is nice. But it seems a little bit staged. As if it had been changed substantially to play to the expectations of tourists. After the remote, uninterested reality of Liate Wote, it comes as a small dissappointment to me.

The next morning we are again up at 6. We step just outside our chalet. The monkeys are everywhere in the surrounding trees. They are quite small. Amusing and playful to watch. We go for a walk through the forest. The guide explains. The forest is off limits to everyone but the guides and the tourists, and the village fetish priest. Oh, and the villagers who pluck the fruit and take it to market. But they must never be seen or they will be taken to the village chief. The forest is off limits. After breakfast we inquire about the drumming and dancing. Conveniently it turns out that those experiences are only available when there are 6 or more visitors. And there are only 5 at the moment. This was nowhere in the material they showed us when we arrived. Not even in small-small print. Again I am dissappointed. We decide to leave. We pay too much for the beers we had, and set out to walk to the junction. It is a 5 km walk. Luckily it is still early. We sweat. We wave and say good morning to the locals we pass. In a village on the way there is a large party with loud music and merry dancing at 10 a.m. on a wednesday morning.

As we reach the junction we debate on the pros and cons of having a cold soda in Logba Alekpeti. Our reverie is interrupted by a passing tro-tro. He will take us as far as Kpewe. We have no idea where that is. It seems to be the right direction. We get in. Find a way to bend our legs in two places instead of one. At Kpewe there is a man yelling Accra, Accra, Accra. We follow him to his tro-tro. It is completely full. Ther are at least 12 people in there. We are all three over 190 cm's. But he is already storing our packs in the back.

Our concern disappears as he says a few words to the existing passengers and 4 of them decide to get off and make way for the rich white tourists. It is the first tro-tro I have been in that doesn't fill entirely en route. The 3 of us have a single bench to ourselves for the entire ride. What luxury. We are back at Sankara Overpass around 2 p.m. The entire trip, including an hours walk has taken just 4 hours. Impossible. A great little adventure into the Volta Region has ended by a great little tro-tro sprint to the comforts of Accra. The running water, the fans, the pizza and ice cream. I would do it again any day. Liate Wote is highly recommended.