Nigeria Part 1

Jonny and I are in Nigeria now. We flew from Accra (Ghana) into Lagos (southern Nigeria) on wednesday and then onward to Jos on Thursday. We had a bit of trouble picking up our tickets on wednesday morning, they simply wanted more money and made us sit there until about 20 minutes before our plane was due to leave. Then they suddenly popped up from behind the desk, offered us bananas and plane tickets and we were on our way. The flight over was uneventful, but the airport in Lagos was a zoo! People everywhere and its a lot scarier than other airports. Thankfully we had someone to meet us and they got us and our luggage safely out of there. We had missed our connecting flight and had to spend the day at a guest house in Lagos. We got on a flight early thursday morning and sat on the tarmac for a while until they had sold every seat on the flight. Apparently it is normal for people to show up outside the plane with a wad of cash and simply buy a ticket out on the runway. The pilots here have a very different way of flying, so we were excited when we landed safe and sound at the Jos airport.

We're staying with friends (Mark and Joc) here at their house in the missionary compound. Its like a little cottage, quite comfortable and has a beautiful garden. We spent the weekend at a game park about 4 hours out of Jos (Yankari National Park) with a group of students from the high school here. The main draw at the park is the warm springs which flow into a river just below the camp and where you can swim. Its warm (31 degrees, or 88 F) and a beautiful blue color. There are sandstone cliffs at the head of the spring and you can watch baboons playing in the trees there. The baboons are everywhere in the park, they get into the cabins, climb on the cars and make a mess of everything. They are quite fun to watch, and as long as you are male, they stay far enough away. The aren't afraid of me so I always went around with Jonny!

We went safari-ing on saturday at the park. Our early morning safari was a failure, we didn't see much except a few monkeys and birds. But, we tried again in the afternoon and saw hundreds of elephants! It was absolutly amazing to watch them, a herd of about 100 crossed right in front of the truck and stood around, eating trees and scooping dust up on their backs. We must have taken 60 pictures of them, from babies right on up to the big bulls. Definatly the highlight of the weekend. We also saw some waterbucks (like a big elk), bushbucks (like deer) and a dead croc.

The drivers in Nigeria are unbelievable. They have NO road rules other than you mostly drive on the right hand side, but its not uncommon to see people on the other side. There are hundreds of motor bikes on the roads and they just drive where ever. We are always amused by people passing us on both sides at the same time!

This part of Africa is quite different than what we saw in Ghana. Its not humid and almost cool at sometimes. There are amazing rock formations, so if anyone knows how they got there, they can let us know! We're up on a plateau and there are actually "mountains" around us. There are also lots of nomadic cow herders and those traditional looking villages near by.

Not much else to report. We're both healthy and eating well. We plan to stay in Nigeria for another couple of weeks and do some touring around here with Mark and Joc. Hope everyone is well. Until next time!

Ghana Part 2!

Sorry if this ends up being a super long e-mail. We've had trouble getting hotmail to work anywhere but Accra, so we haven't sent anything since we were last in the big city.

Our first stop (since we last wrote) was Kokrobite, a small town just west of Accra famed for its beaches and relaxed tourist feel. We stayed at a very enjoyable backpacker lodge called Big Milly's where we were able to eat, drink and relax. We had a nice small room in a pretty garden and were able to meet lots of travellers. The beach is clean and very safe for swimming so we spent several hours each day body surfing in the waves and working on our tans. There are lots of fisherman out along the shores and we enjoyed watching them bringing in their nets and boats at the end of the day. The friday night that we were there, the resort hosted an excellent drumming and dancing group. Probably the highlight of our stay there was the great pizza joint next door that offered an absolutly fantastic cheese and garlic pizza for about $3. Mmmmm....

After spending a week hiding out from the dirt and grime we decided it was time to see some sights and set off inland for Kumasi. Kumasi is the second largest city in Ghana (just under 1 million people) and is easily reached by bus from Accra. However, it seems that the government is repairing all the roads in this part of the country, so our bus ride took closer to 8 instead of the expected 4. Kumasi is an excellent city, much more relaxed than Accra and less crowded and dirty. They host the largest outdoor market in Africa, over 10 000 people selling pretty much everything. The very narrow streets have stalls selling everything from dried lizzards and pig feet to fresh vegetables to used oil drums. There seems to be a huge market in west africa for shoes, shoe venders outnumber anyother seller around here. We were too intimidated by the yelling, bell ringing and constant obruni (white man) calls to actually purchase anything but we plan to return before we leave and try again. We also tried visiting the cultural center in Kumasi but were disapointed by the run down atmosphere and lack of cultural activities going on. However, the center is in a fairly nice garder with beautiful palm trees, so the walk wasn't all in vain.

We then travelled by train from Kumasi to the coastal city of Takoradi. We purchased our first class sleeper tickets for the overnight train (at a huge cost of $3.50 each) and boarded the train expecting to arrive in Takoradi bright and early the next morning. However, as is to be expected, the train was delayed a whopping 10 hours and it took us all of the next day to arrive. It turns out the engine had overheated and the conductor was forced to wait at every small station for about an hour until it cooled down. This gave the local venders plenty of time to sell water, fruit, and what ever else they could to people through the train windows. It got quite annoying since the small children would gather around our window and stare at the obrunies hopeing that we were going to buy the yams or smoked fish that they were carrying. Its hard to have a staring contest with a 6 year old who has live snails on top of their head.

Takoradi was uneventful, we'd planned to travel around but were both sick for the 2 days that we were there. The big adventure was walking to the bank to exchange cash. We did enjoy a nice dinner at a chinese restaurante on our last night there. We again plan to return later and continue west to see the sea turtles along the coast there.

From Takoradi we took a minibus (the only trip that actually arrived on time) to Cape Coast. The main attraction here is the large Cape Coast Castle which was used during the slave trade. Touring the castle was an eye opener. Its a beautiful white building right beside the ocean, but when you go underground into the slave dungeons its easy to see why it was a terrible place for so many. They have a very good museum there, but not much else in the way of signs or information around the castle. Since transportation doesn't leave Cape Coast on sundays, we spent the next day there just walking around the small market (again, one zillion shoe venders) and enjoying a few drinks by the ocean.

We again tried travel by the government STC buses to Accra on monday and again were late (more roads under construction). It seems like it takes at least a day to travel anywhere, even if that anywhere is only 150km away! Today was a pretty busy day since we are traveling on to Nigeria tomorrow and had to go out to the airport and confirm our tickets. Our guide book told us that we should be able to catch a shared taxi or tro-tro to the aiport from a gas station very near our hotel. However, upon walking there we found that no one had any idea what we were talking about! We would ask on tro-tro driver and he would send us accross the road to one part of the station, we'd ask there and they'd send us back to where we'd started. Finally, we had a breakthrough and were actually able to find what we'd been looking for! We were both quite relieved since neither of us had wanted to pay the $6 fare to the airport. Shared taxis are much quicker and cost about 20 cents each way. After returning from the airport we headed back down to the large market here in Accra to buy some new clothing and see what was going on. I managed to purchase a very nice sun dress for about $3 but we were unsuccessful in our hunt for shirts for Jonny. There was an overwhelming amount of luggage for sale at the market today, had we needed suitcases we would have been in luck. Its incredibly hot here today, as it is everyday and we are sweaty dirty travellers in need of a shower!

Anyhow, thats probably enough boring details for now. We are having an excellent time, especially now that we've found several food items that we enjoy eating. The best is probably the Fanmilk products they sell here: frozen yogurt, chocolate milk or vanilla icecream in packages that can be bought from a vender for about 20 cents. Mmmm, they are so good and cold! They also sell something very similar to Sunny-Delight in bags here too, also very good. We have discovered that every town along the coast has at least one restaurante selling decent chinese food so we're happy that we don't have to eat any more fufu.

Off to Nigeria for a while, we are going to a game park this weekend which should be very exciting.

Ghana Part 1!

Here we are in hot sunny west Africa. The flight over here was excellent, except that it took over 24 hours. The food was good, and the flight into Accra was interesting to say the least. Our first exposure to the African way of things: a man was being deported from Holland and was on our plane with several officials. He began shouting and before long half the plane was in a heated argument with each other (in African) over what was going on. They carried this argument on for nearly the whole 6 hour plane ride. Definatly never happened on any of my flights to Thunder Bay.

We had trouble the first night here, finding a hotel that was with in our budget was a bit of a hassel and we eventually settled for a Ghanian upperclass hotel that simply meant they had air conditioning. We moved on Sunday out into James town (just out side of Accra) which was quite a shock. It is a shanty town with people living in things that we would never dream of. Our hotel out there was a room with an english woman and her ghanian husband plus several hanger ons and her children. It was cheap and a nice place to get away from the hussel of Accra. Yesterday we ventured back into Accra and visited Markol Market, which is absolutly HUGE. You can buy anything you need and many things you don't. We also visted the bank and mastered the art of using the Ghanian telephone system.

We've spent lots of time just staring at things such as the HUGE goat market on the way into Accra and the things that people do. The small children, and many of the adults, wave everytime they see us and often yell "white man" when we pass by. They serve water in plastic bags here, you just bite the corner off and suck the water out of the bag. Then, if you are Ghanian, you just throw it on the ground, or in the ocean or th gutter. We always carry our bags to a garbage can, can't quite get into the spirit of littering. There is so much garbage here that they probably don't need us to. The beach is covered in it, and pigs, chickens and even the dogs root around in it for their meals.

The fishing boats are really quite interesting, they are nothing more than large canoes yet they go out everyday regardless of the huge waves and everyone seems to make it home alright.

We're in the process of making our way to Kokrobite (another beach town) today. The main mode of transportation is Tro-tros, which are just like reaqlly big vans of various levels of safety that run between every imaginable spot. We have yet to master the Ghanian money system, but I think the first part of our tro-tro trip cost us 5 cents US. We still have to catch another on for the rest of the trip, but it is still fairly inexpensive.

We haven't been eating too much, its SO hot and we havn't really found any Ghanian food that we enjoy. The fresh fruit is good, but our last attempt at eating traditional ghanian food was a disaster. It was fishy (VERY fishy) and because there was a bit of a wind blowing it had quite a bit of sand it in. They served us palm wine with it, which tasted slightly like I would imagine cleaning fluid mixed with lemon juice to taste... Mmmm... But the pinapple and coconut we ate yesterday were good, so we just have to keep trying. The hotel where we are headed apparently serves Italian food, so we might try that, simply to eat a real meal. We are drinking lots (especially all the new flavors of pop) and staying healthy.

Anyhow, we should probably go back out into the heat and figure out which one of the hundred vans parked out front is headed where we want to go. We'll try and write again soon, its hard to find things here because nothing is that clearly marked, you just have to poke around until you find what you need. Until next time!