We the North

The next trip, and probably the most adventure packed trip out of the three, was to Mole National Park in the northern part of Ghana. I was a little skeptical about going on this trip because I didn't want to miss class, but since school hadn't technically started yet, I went anyway. I figured it would be the last time I would get a good amount of time to travel around instead of going out on weekends. And despite the entire trip being completely impromptu, it was definitely worth going.

Mole Park is Ghana's biggest wildlife refuge which is famous for its abundance of wildlife, especially elephants and monkeys. I was looking forward to seeing an actual, wild elephant the most. It was supposed to be a sizable group that would go, but it got trimmed down to four of us (myself included) because none of us really knew what we were doing. Plans weren't definite, information on how to get to the park was scarce, and we were essentially going to wing the entire trip and hope for the best. The original plan was to take an 8AM bus for Tamale, the main city in the north, and then take another bus to Larabanga, a city about 5km away from Mole, where we could take a cab to the Mole Motel, spend a few hours in the park, and then take the 16 hour bus ride back to Accra. Long story short, none of that happened.
It started by waking up at 4:20AM on a Monday, dragging myself out of bed and stumbling over to the bathroom where I brushed my teeth and freshened up to go meet with one of the people who was coming from Volta. From there, we would all walk together to ISH to meet up with the last person and walk to the edge of campus to get a taxi to the bus station. It was nice walking through campus when the sky was still dark and the lack of streetlights because it was the coolest part of the day before the sun would rise up and starting roasting everything. We found a cab who charged us 40 cedis for the fare and I don't know why we didn't bargain with him because that was a total ripoff; it should have been around 20-25. Maybe we were all too tired still and wanted to just go leave but it's something that still puzzles me.
By the time we got to the bus station, the sun had come out from its slumber and the city became alive with vendors selling vegetables and the incessant honking of cars trying to get by the pedestrians. The bus we had planned to take was going to leave at 8AM for Tamale, the main city in the north, but we couldn't get tickets because the bus was full and we had to had come a day in advance. So we went to another bus station close-by but we ran into the same problem there. Then we went to another bus station across the street and they didn't even have buses that went to Tamale. The people there told us of another bus station that might have what we're looking for, so we went there and the first thing we saw was a sign that said "Tamale bus departure times: 8AM and 3PM." We were ecstatic and there wasn't any crowd at the station either.
We approached the ticket counter and the guy told us there was no 8AM bus. Despite having a big sign that says 8AM bus, it's apparently not in service anymore or something. The only other option was the 3PM bus which had seats, but we would be stuck in central Accra for 8 hours waiting to leave. After talking it over and not wanting to give up so easily, we bought the tickets for the 3PM bus. We would've seemed like total failures had we gone back to campus and I'm glad that "never give up" attitude spread among all of us when I personally was a little doubtful of going anymore.
So now that we had 8 hours to spend, we got a cab to Osu, which is basically a total foreigner hotspot because a lot of foreigners live there and its a very rich district of Accra, filled with nightclubs and fancy restaurants. We went to one restaurant which was surprisingly open so early and had some coffee and water while enjoying the news that was playing on the TV. Then we walked around Osu to various shops trying to kill time while finding a cheap place to grab lunch. We ended up eating some waakye (beans and rice) from a street vendor, and that dish would soon become the theme of our trip. Eventually time passed by, we went back to the bus station, got our seats, and soon left for Tamale.
Inside the bus was pretty nice: spacious and cool with big windows. I was fortunate enough to have my own seat since the seating was a 2-1 arrangement. All I did on the bus was eat, sleep and listen to music, trying to make the 12-14 hour ride a breeze. It got pretty hard to do so at night because all ride long, these mini-movies kept playing on the TV until maybe an hour before our ride was over. So in essence, I only got one good hour of peaceful sleep. Thankfully the road to Tamale was pretty nice and smooth, so it could have been a lot worse. I didn't really pay attention to the shows but apparently they were pretty funny in a weird way. The one that really cracked me up was this show called "Baby Police," which was about this little boy becoming a policeman and taking money from people who would pass this toll booth. It's funny because any of those people who passed the booth could have easily pushed the kid to the ground but oh well. Seriously, go YouTube it or something, its ridiculous.
I think we got to Tamale around 4AM and we took a cab to the other bus station which would take us from Tamale to Larabanga. We had 2 hours to kill at that station and we played cards and watched an Insanity workout that was playing on the TV's there. We soon got on the bus and spent another 3 hours on it, getting off at Larabanga. As soon as we got off, we were swarmed by the locals, all of them telling us they could take us to Mole. We had a choice of taking a taxi or this wagon kind of thing where we sat in the back in the open air and of course we decided to go with the wagon. After nearly 20 hours of traveling on buses, we were still able to enter the park in style.

In the park, we first spent some time freshening up and changing and relaxing, letting the fact that we had made it sink in. Then we went with some other foreigners who were staying at the motel on a 3 hour safari tour, where we sat on top of a jeep with the guide while the driver took us through the park in search of animals. Within the first hour, we saw a lone elephant just chilling next to a river, some kobs, exotic birds, warthogs and some antelope looking things. The next 2 hours were pretty uneventful but the drive was nice, driving through a flat, green land. I think I got a few tsetse fly bites because there are tsetse flies in the park and their bite was painful and left a tiny red dot of blood, but here I am a few weeks later alive and well with no sleeping sickness. We came back to the motel and saw a congress of baboons walking around, not knowing that they were being photographed a lot.
We got lunch (waakye again) and spent the next few hours enjoying the view and playing cards. The tour guide invited us for dinner where he made some tuo zillet (kind of like fufu) and three different soups: groundnut, baobab and okra, which were all very spicy. Now that we had eaten and darkness had come on, we had nothing to do but to wait until about 5AM to get back on the bus to Tamale. We didn't want to spend extra money on a room since we weren't even here for that long and thought we could get away with it by sleeping at the restaurant. One person had an idea that we could go sleep on the bus that was parked outside the motel, and some guy (don't know if he was the driver or what) let us in. But one of the workers saw us, told their supervisor, and she made us get off the bus and get a room. There wasn't anything wrong we were doing, we were simply sleeping on a parked bus. There was nothing to steal and we didn't have the keys to run off with the bus, so I think she just wanted to make money off of us. We ended up conforming after arguing a little bit and realizing there was no point. We were angry, but we needed sleep as well so we were happy that we had actual beds to sleep on now.

It got a little bit worse with that supervisor once we woke up. Apparently the alarm we had set never went off and we had to scramble to make it to the bus in time. While quickly grabbing everything, I noticed the receipt we had of our room on the table and I thought that maybe I should bring it just in case, but I thought, "What's the worst that could happen," and left. Well, that supervisor was demanding that we presented the receipt as proof that we paid for the bus and room and I said that I had left it back in the room. She was threatening to make us get off at the park entrance and we were all trying to reason with her, telling her the receipt would still be on the table back in the room. She lessened up and let us go on but she was a complete jerk, yelling at us early in the morning for not having a piece of paper she gave us the night before. I was more angry at myself for not bringing that stupid thing but I realized that in all other instances, that receipt wouldn't have been necessary anymore.
So we took the bus back to Tamale and on the way I got splattered by some water that was leaking into the bus because it was raining outside. Free shower I guess. Anyway, we got to Tamale in the morning and faced the same problem we had in Accra: no bus leaving early to our destination. We ended up buying tickets for a 4PM bus to Accra and had 7 hours to kill in Tamale. We essentially did the same thing as in Osu, walking around and exploring what Tamale had to offer. It's such a chill city with a lot of motorcycle riders and barely any cars. It's relatively quiet compared to the hustle and bustle of central Accra and the people there didn't try to rip us off or take advantage of us. Traveling in a small group or even by yourself is the best.
Time passed by and we got back on the bus to head off for Accra. The ride was more or less the same, TV shows at full volume even when everyone was trying to sleep and a comfortable bus overall. Again, all I did was eat and sleep because that's all I could do. Somehow, we made it back in 11 hours even though the driver kept stopping at random places for no reason. It was funny, the other passengers noticed and began threatening to throw the driver off the bus. But we made it back to Accra, took a cab to campus, and came back to our dorms exactly 72 hours after we left campus.

As you can see, I barely spent any time talking about actually being in Mole because we spent more time on buses than we did in Mole. But it's okay because it was all definitely worth it, seeing that wild elephant, eating some delicious waakye, and being with some amazing company. Seeing how long buses take to travel really makes it hard to plan a trip to the north because you need more than a weekend to really experience everything up there; you probably need a full week. And the best part was I didn't suffer from missing classes. The negative, however, was that I didn't have time to recuperate from the long trip because after taking a 5 hour nap and waking up at 10AM, I would have to leave 2 hours later to go on another bus ride (supposedly 3 hours long, ended up taking 5) to Cape Coast for the Cape Coast Festival.

The Best Way to Shower

So I'm no longer going to do the whole day by day entry kind of thing because it's too much and my days after those first two weeks were uneventful. From now on, I'm basically just going to post entries whenever I feel like that entry would be significant and interesting to you all. After those two weeks, orientation was pretty much over and we were free to do whatever we wanted. And in the span of three weeks, I took three separate yet crazy trips around Ghana: Wli Falls, Mole National Park, and Cape Coast. This first post will be about the falls.

The Wli waterfalls are supposedly the highest waterfalls in Ghana and West Africa. It consists of a lower fall which is only a 40 minute hike to get to, and an upper fall, which is another two hour hike. However from the upper falls, you can get a good view of Lake Volta and Togo since its right next to the border. Anyway, it started with waking up at 5AM to get ready to leave campus by 6AM, only to end up leaving two hours later. Nothing is ever going to be "on time" here in Ghana. But we departed for the 4 hour drive which was pretty nice at first. It was cloudy and cool and the road was surrounded by greenery all over. But then the road got super bumpy and our bus slowed down to a crawl because the driver kept trying to avoid all of the potholes. To give you some sort of idea of how bumpy it was, imagine being on a road that's speed bump after speed bump after speed bump. Basically the road is an endless road of speed bumps with no flat surface. That's literally how we were for the majority of the ride, just jumping up and down in our seats.
We got there after a while (and constant stops from the driver to ask for directions) and getting off the bus woke a lot of us up. At the tour guide station, they said that if we wanted to bring in a camera they would charge us 5 cedis but I didn't want to pay so I decided to use my phone camera. Of course, I didn't stick with that either and snuck in my camera without paying the fine. I stayed towards the back of the group where the guide wouldn't see me with the camera but I don't think he really cared if I had brought it in secretly or not. Either way, I got away with it and saved about $1!
The hike wasn't tedious at all in that there weren't any inclines or declines. When we got to the falls, it was a sight to see: in front of us was the splash pool that looked calm but towering it was the waterfall, cascading down with a thunderous splash. Surrounding the fall were a bunch of slippery looking rocks covered with moss. It reminded me a lot of the waterfall I had hiked to in Costa Rica because it was the exact same setting, walking through a rainforest to see a pool of cool, clear water surrounding by green rocks. The only difference was that it didn't rain like mad while hiking back and the mud on the path didn't go up to my knees. Higher up, I could see a bunch of little brown and white dots on the cliffs, which were apparently bats that were sleeping since it was daytime.I must have been standing there admiring the falls for a while because I felt a sharp sting on my foot and I look down and see a few fat ants crawling up my leg and biting me some more. I had been standing in the middle of an ant train all this time. I was able to brush most of them off but I really had to put in a lot of effort to pull the fattest (they seriously were fat) ant away from my skin and when I did, I saw a tiny dot of blood coming out from my leg. At that point, I quickly took off my shirt, removed the things from my pockets and hopped in the water, hoping the water would ease the stings.
The water sure did help because it was pretty cold at first, but the further I waded out, the better it got. For the next hour or so, we would all be splashing around in the splash pool like children, jumping on each others shoulders and getting each other wet, laughing and screaming at the same time. The pool wasn't deep either, it went up to my chest at the most. Because of that, we were able to swim over to right underneath the falls and it was intense. It genuinely hurt a little bit when the water came splashing down and there was so much water coming down and the noise was so loud that you couldn't see or hear a thing. I was relying exclusively on touch to guide me around the area. Honestly, its hard to describe exactly what it was like standing right there because so much was going on. Half the time I just stood there tying to keep my eyes open for more than two seconds and trying to catch what the people right next to me were saying. I was able to go all the way back to where the rock wall was, and it offered some respite since the water didn't fall in that area as much, but I still couldn't see or hear any better. After a while, it became too much for me and I waded back out to the calmer portions of the pool. When you float on your back and look up, it's like seeing a river of water falling out from the sky; it was really cool. Thankfully my roommate had a waterproof camera he used to take a ton of photos so they'll come up on Facebook soon.
Once the novelty of the falls had worn off, we got out and that's when the sun came out and started heating everything up. Because the sunlight had poured out onto us, the bats above us started going crazy and kept flying and screeching around the cliffs, but they didn't swoop down to our level. I dried off and put on my clothes, careful to avoid the fat ant trails and we walked back to the bus, all feeling exhausted but in a good way. The ride back was more or less the same, only we nearly hit a lamb or sheep or something and everyone freaked out. But like when we hit that empty taxi, I calmly adjusted my earphones and increased the volume on my iPhone because I just did not care. It's one sheep, its okay. Also, the driver decided to take some random detour because there was some traffic up ahead and because it was nighttime, it looked like we were driving through space because we couldn't see a thing from the windows. We were surrounded completely by darkness with only the headlights guiding us. The road on this detour was so much worse as well, kind of like sitting in a violently vibrating chair in a way, and it became so narrow that some of the branches and bushes began scraping the windows, so it gave that part of the ride an eerie feel. We didn't pass any other cars on this route either and some of us began to question what the driver was doing, but after a while we got back on the main road in front of the traffic jam, so I guess the driver knew what he was doing for once, without asking for directions.
We got back to the city late, around 10ish, and we stopped at a complex to get some dinner to go. The restaurant I went to apparently ran out of everything on the menu, and they stuff they did have left had meat in it, so I was forced to get french fries for dinner. I was too exhausted to really care though and I ate a few more snacks in my room before falling into a deep sleep. But all in all, it was one of my best days here in Ghana so far, and it was definitely one of the best showers I've ever had: showering under a waterfall.