Kakum National Park from Canopy Walk
Since we spent time in the Greater Accra Region at the beginning and at the end of the trip, I'll complete my notes on Accra in a later post.
CENTRAL REGIONCape Coast
The first photo above was taken from the bus between Accra and Cape Coast. (Excuse the quality of some photos...much of our time was spent in either buses or taxis, so you may see evidence of that.) These rooftops of Cape Coast give you a pretty good idea of what the housing in a smaller city looks like. Many of the houses are stucco or (what we called in AZ and NM) adobe...blocks fashioned from the soil, mixed with straw and then set to dry in the sun. The roofs are almost exclusively tin. The second photo is of Cape Coast Castle. The structure was originally built in 1653, but it is most infamous for being one of the largest processing centers for slave export in Ghana. The tour through the castle was well done. Unfortunately in a case like this, it shows very clearly humanity at its lowest and most shameful. For instance, our small tour group of about a dozen people was led into a dungeon where the men were held in chains and shackles after they were literally captured in nets and dragged from their homes and families. This room held up to 100 men at a time. It was approx. 150-200 sq. feet, dark and airless save a narrow rectangular window carved through the stone wall about 20 feet above the floor. There was another "watch" window on the castle side of the room that remained barred and shuttered closed except when food and water were thrown down to keep the men alive. The floor itself was uneven and had shallow-to-deep channels carved in it to carry out the human excrement, vomit, and blood when one group of men was led away and another group was brought in. The healthy men were led away through a long, narrow passageway to a room with a huge wooden set of double doors. These doors were known as The Gate of No Return...they led to the small boats in the treacherous waters below, which were then paddled out to deliver the enslaved men (still in chains and shackles) to the slave ships. The women's dungeons were very similar, with the addition of a trough dug through the center of the room. This is where women were required to stay, sitting, straddling the trough throughout their menses. According to the guide at the Cape Coast Castle, there were an estimated 10 million men, women and children taken from Africa for the purpose of being sold as slaves. Approximately 750,000 to 1 million of that number were processed through ports along The Gold Coast as Ghana was known until 100 years ago.
A Land of Bilk and MoneySince Cape Coast and the neighboring fishing village of Elmina are one of Ghana's main tourist attractions, the villages (especially around the castles) are teeming with young men trying to sell some little trinkets or scam unwitting tourists into giving money for soccer uniforms. Although being from New York, I knew full well that there were no soccer uniforms, I did give a young man 10 cedis (approx. $8) and my email address which he asked for so he could "keep me informed on the progress of his education." I was interested in seeing exactly what this would bring (trying not to be jaded), and of course it brought an immediate email from my "African son" to his "American mom" asking for money. Needless to say, that email address has been blocked! Although some of the boys were selling woven bracelets, others ran the following scam. They would introduce themselves to you, welcome you to Ghana, ask your name, how long you're staying, etc. By the end of your time in the castle or the restaurant, they would have painted on a seashell something like, "To my American friend Mary from your friend Frederick in Cape Coast, Ghana." Then play the sympathy card about having made it especially for you. By this time my patience had run out, though, and after I convinced the boy I wasn't going to buy his shell, we actually had a nice 10-minute chat. At the end of the day, however, I was really fed up and disappointed in people in general.
For the sake of all the rest of the lovely people in Cape Coast, I'll end on a positive note. The photo immediately below shows only a very small sampling of some of the most beautiful dresses I've ever seen. The women of both Accra and Cape Coast are always immaculately and tastefully dressed. The men, too, are almost always in slacks and a nice shirt. We didn't see jeans at all until we went further away from the cities, and even then you can bet that we were the most casually dressed of all those around us.
Kakum National Forest and The Canopy Walk
From Cape Coast, we started the day early by meeting our personal taxi driver in front of the Mighty Victory Hotel. He had driven us to the hotel the night before and Shayla, Laurie's daughter, negotiated a fare for him to drive us to the Kakum National Forest at 7am, wait for us there, and drive us back to Cape Coast when we were finished with the canopy walk. The fare was about $12 "and a dash" for the 25-mile round trip and the 3-hour wait. The "dash," a little something extra, Shayla negotiated to be snacks for the trip. He ended up with my NutriSystem peanut butter bar (hopefully not tainted with salmonella), some snacks from Laurie's stash, and a Coke before and after our canopy walk.
The Kakum National Forest is one of the few remaining tracts of virgin rainforest in Western Africa. The canopy walk, after climbing the mountain that leads to it, consisted of about 5 rope-and-plank walkways. The walkways were about 30 yards each, and were joined together by platforms built in the trees. The platforms offered unfettered views of mile upon mile of such a variety of trees that it was unimaginable, some reaching over 200 feet into the air. A few of the species include ebony, cocoa, pineapple, mango, shea nut, mahogany, baobab, and acacia. And a small public service announcement: tropical rainforests cover only 7% of the earth's surface, but harbor 50% of its flora and fauna species. I still can't find the name of the amazing trees that dot the landscape, towering above everything else. They remind me of the story my dad told me about the American Chestnut, which had already died out before his lifetime, but whose trunks and bare branches remained in the Maryland landscape as beacons and landmarks.
