Ghana - The Last Week - part 1

Again, I have to start my blog with an apology and another promise that I will keep it up. I just don't know where the time goes. It's about time that I finish off telling you about my experience in Ghana. It's been a year since I have been back from this experience. Raising Hope Foundation went out again this year and I have seen that work on the orphanage is going well and with a bit more money it will be finished and ready to become a home for many children.

I don't know why it's taken me so long to finish these blogs as I love writing them. Mostly what I have written up here before I wrote in a book but now I'm just going on memory but It's like I'm actually there on the red soil again as I write it.


GHANA - The Last Week - What I can remember.

Sunday: Day 18.

This is the day that I call the losing two pairs of shorts day. We woke up quite early, as the sun light hit our faces, looking up and seeing palm trees. I forgot to mention that although most of the boys stayed in the tent Glenn and Sean had a romantic raised bed with just a mosquito net hovering above it. Do I sound a little bitter? Maybe because this was the first time me and Glenn had not shared a bed in Ghana. We had built up quite the bromance so far and then he went and jumped in bed with another man...hussy. I wasn't really bitter but it was funny to play up to it and besides I had Joe now and he was much better at drinking beer than Glenn and would never have left me at the hands of Adolph.

That morning, we all went for a swim in the ocean before breakfast. It was absolutely beautiful, it really was. I didn't have any swim shorts so used normal shorts and left them on a bench to dry afterwards (Big mistake) as after breakfast they had been taken! And I went Liam Neeson to get those shorts back...Maybe I didn't they were only from primark, not worth killing over.

We got in taxi's and headed over to Fort Elmina. For those of you who don't know, Fort Elmina was a slave fort where African's would be held for months before they would pass through the 'Door of no return" and then on to the slave ships. We heard some disturbing stories about how they were shackled down in the boats on top of each other. Not given food or water. How people thought back then that they could trade other people and make money was disgusting and it makes you angry just being there and hearing the stories.

Elmina is now a large fishing town. Where handmade boats fill the shoreline and coast. For quite a small town I noticed that it had one of the largest amount of amateur football teams. Within seconds of arriving there, a swarm of representatives from these teams, approached us holding forms for donation. They all needed money to buy football kits. But if you sponsor them, they will kindly put your name on a shell that they found, with a felt tip pen. Isn't that nice of them. Good try boys.

In the evening we went to the bar in the hostel to grab some dinner and have a few drinks. Just before that I decided to lunge on a rock, ripping a massive hole in the crotch of my shorts! I still wore them out. RIP checkered shorts.

Big Kwame by this point had developed an addiction to the spicy sausages that were sold there and I rarely saw him without one on a stick, no matter what time of day. He will have to go to rehab any day now.

Joe and I, went to explore the beach with a couple of beers. At the end of the beach was Cape Coast Castle another slave fort. At the base of its walls were giant rocks,  The waves crashing against them and sometimes spraying over them. We climbed up them and could touch the base of the walls of the castle as we tried not to get soaked by the waves. In the introduction to the Bob Marley documentary you can see the waves crashing against these rocks.

Monday - Day 19

We walked to Cape Coast and looked around that slave fort. Again was a horrible place when you imagined who was standing in the rooms and cells many years ago.

Today we were leaving cape coast and moving inland into the forest for a change of scenery. I went with Helen and Kwame to visit Kwame's art lecturer from university. I can't remember his name but he lived in a massive house, his walls covered in art and sculptures that he had done. He asked us if we wanted a drink and all he seemed to have wine and it was a ceremonial wine that came in a huge bottle, so we cracked that open. He had exhibitions all over the world  and he told us that when he went to college Robert Mugabe was his Geography teacher - he had a bit of a change of career in the end didn't he?

While waiting for the taxi's we chilled on the beach with all our bags. Another representative from a local football team was looking for money for a...new football kit. Our usual trio of taxi drivers came to get us. They'd been taking us around for a few days now. One of the cars always had blaring music as this guy had a sound system, so I was so happy to be able to ride in that one this time. And it was as fun as it looked from the other boring taxi's as we sung to I love my life.

We got to the botel in the early evening. It was in the middle of the rain forest with a swimming pool and crocodiles (not in the swimming pool but in the lake next to it.)  There was a restaurant that was and it was like it was on a floating pontoon in the middle of the lake.

I will finish off part 2 of the last week in a couple of days.