As If Murphy’s Law Needed Proving…Our Weekend trip to Mole

This past weekend was our much anticipated trip to Mole National Park, the largest wildlife reserve in the country and the home to hippos, elephants, baboons…basically if it’s in Lion King it’s in Mole. We were going to break the journey into two days of traveling on the way there, stopping in Kumasi to shop and spend the night. On the second day of traveling we were going to stop at Kintampo Falls, a swimmable waterfall North of Kumasi. We would arrive at the park on Saturday night and spend Sunday on safari and visiting a nearby mosque. On Monday we would make the entire journey back to campus.

Everything was going fine until we stopped for lunch at Linda Dora, a restaurant near Kofiridua where we stopped before when we went to Kumasi. The restaurant is incredibly poorly run, extremely slow, and the food really isn’t that good. The first orders came out after around half an hour, but the last took around 2 ½. After such a delay we just went straight to the hotel once we got to Kumasi. The hotel was sweet—It was called Treasureland which is sort of a cheesy name but it did kind of feel like some sort of secret cool place that you had to explore to find all of its secrets. They had these stairs down to the lower level that were like the stairs in Oh the Places You’ll Go. The floor opened right into the staircase. Most importantly, the hotel had a pool, and unhygienic as it probably was, a lot of us went swimming in it and played games we hadn’t played since we were kids at camp. We took our dinner conversations to the bar, talking and telling stories until the 7am departure time seemed too imminent to continue.

Saturday was the most catastrophic day of the whole trip. We left almost on time and had driven three hours or so when we pulled over to the side of the road in a small town. Vivienne, our guide for the trip, got our attention in the typical Ghanaian way, “Ago,” she said. “Ame” we responded. She told us the bus was broken and a new one would come within the hour. Deciding to use the time to stretch our legs and explore the town, a few of us began walking down the main road. Because life in rural Ghana occurs primarily outside, it can feel a bit intrusive to wander around, even when you stay on the main street. Especially because it is quite obvious that you don’t live there and don’t really have a reason to be walking. But we walked the main drag anyway, and after some time a group of older women sitting in the shade beckoned us over: Bra, bra, they said, or, come, come. We went over and started practicing our Twi with them. Every little thing we said was met with clapping and laughter, and every confused face we made received howls and a more deliberate pronunciation. It was really fun to practice our Twi with them because we wouldn’t have been able to communicate otherwise. In rural areas, 12-15 year old boys are the best English speakers. School is in English, and so they’ve been going long enough to really have a grasp of it, and boys are more likely to go to school than girls, especially so the more rural and northern you go. There aren’t a lot of opportunities for the educated boys after they finish school so a lot of them leave for bigger cities…leaving adolescent boys to answer questions in English.

Hanging out in the village lost its charm after an hour or so, but we were there for another two. Not wanting to relinquish the commission for the trip, the bus driver had refused to tell the driver of the working bus where we were and worked on repairing the broken bus instead. It really took three hours, I’m not exaggerating. It might have even been three and a half. We finally got back on the road and made it to the water fall, Kintampo Falls, after an hour or two. Vivienne told us she was going to pick up our dinner and to be ready in half an hour. The falls was really accessible. It was visible in three stages. The first two were small, but still cool. Especially the first stage because the water disappeared for like 25 feet before you could see it again. The third stage was the biggest. It was pretty spectacular, and definitely distinct from the other two waterfalls I’ve seen here. But the best part was that we were allowed to go swimming in it! I walked towards the waterfall, and climbed up, underneath, and through it until I was sitting behind it. Definitely an amazing way to see a waterfall. While I just sat and watched the water and everything else through the sheet of falling water, several people climbed behind and slid down, enough for me to realize that they’d done it on purpose and didn’t just fall. So I tried to pick a starting point that would send me down a relatively smooth path, but…it didn’t really work. It was totally bumpy, but really fun. I went down one or two more times, each time being equal parts painful and fun. One time I knocked three people over by accident. Oops. I ended up with a big old bruise on my rear end that is slowly getting lighter and smaller a week later.

Even though we had definitely spent more than half an hour at the falls, Vivienne and the bus were nowhere to be found. We waited for half an hour, maybe an hour, until the bus showed up…but without Vivienne! The driver told us that we were switching buses and Vivienne was coming soon with the food and the new bus. We all tried to organize our belongings and get into dry clothes. About twenty minutes later, two beat up looking vans pull up. They’re our new “bus.” All thirty of us pile into these vans and eat our dinner out of our lap. We drive and drive and drive, then turn onto a dirt road and drive some more. The windows are open and the wind in our face is a great change from the stuffy under-airconditioned bus, but soon we begin to realize that dust is also getting blown into our face. We can’t really tell how dirty we’re getting since it’s dark outside, but I could feel the dust coating my contact lenses and my hair.

Arriving to the gates of the park was amazing! Some of us clapped and cheered but some people were too tired and grumpy from our long day. When we all sat down in the light for dinner, I was the laughing stock of the whole group because somehow I had managed to get the dirtiest. I was just covered in the orangish brown dust. I washed my hands for dinner and the water swirling down the drain was brown. This experience was repeated later in the shower, where it took twenty minutes of lathering, scrubbing, and rinsing for the water going down the drain to become clear. A herd of deer (or something) was visible from our doorway, just sitting in the dark.

We rose early for a guided walk through the park. There were warthogs at the front door (like Pumba) and monkeys that looked like old men We all told ourselves we were just going to see what we would see…but we all wanted to see elephants. We split up into groups of eight or so for the two hour walking safari. The guide led us down an asphalt road just long enough for me to start to believe that we would really be on a paved road the whole time. He abruptly turned into the brush, onto a path that was only recognizable as a path once you were following someone on it. We all walked in silence so as not to disturb the animals. The terrain was a somewhat hilly savannah grassland that had some trees, but not really forest cover. The guide told us the scientific name for it, but I don’t really remember it. We saw kobs, a really big relative of the antelope, more monkeys and some baboons.

The guide led us past the staff quarters to the place where they burn all the trash produced at the park. The monkeys and baboons were picking through the smoldering trash piles for edibles, but I wasn’t convinced that they weren’t just eating smoked trash. It was kind of cool to see that baboons (olive baboons) up close and poking at the fires in such a human-like manner, but mostly it was sad. Sad because it was yet another reminder of how waste is taken care of here in Ghana. Most trash is burned, even the plastic bags that everything comes in, emitting a terrible and most likely toxic odor. It was also sad because it reminded me of the impact that modern human life has on wildlife. Even where humans and animals coexist relatively well we still change them. It’s great that Ghana has a national park to protect the native species, but here are these baboons inhaling all our toxic gases.

The best part of the trash pile part of the walk was seeing the mommy baboons with their babies. The newest babies, up to about three weeks old, would cling to the underside of the mom’s belly. Once they got older they graduated to sitting on her back. We watched one mom interact with her baby for a long time. I won’t tell you about it because I have it on video that I’ll try and post later.

We walked down a steep hill to a watering hole. I was totally convinced it was going to be like the watering hole in The Lion King but I was pretty disappointed. Some people in our group saw a crocodile but I missed it. I found a cool feather though. Then we climbed up the hill and the hike was over. No elephants.

We ate breakfast, went for a quick swim in the pool, and then piled back into our rusty dusty vans to go to the village of Larabanga to see the mosque there. The big deal with the mosque is that it’s made of mud and clay and the locals say that it’s around 600 years old. I don’t really think anyone has any real basis for that estimate, but it’s an interesting site nonetheless. The kids all try to befriend us and then ask for money…awkward. But our local guide told us to donate to this community education project instead, so we felt less guilty saying no to the kids. Down the road a bit from the mosque was “The Mystic Rock.” There’s some long story about how people a long time ago were making a road and moved this huge rock, but when they came back the next day it had moved back…I didn’t really catch the story, I think I had been walking too slow or something. Anyway, he encouraged us to lay our hands on it and pray for whatever our hearts wanted…a husband, a baby….peace. This was really the order of his prayer suggestions. It was kind of hard not to laugh at the people praying on this rock because you could tell they were really trying to pray but that they were completely miserable because the rock had been baking in the sun all day. I don’t know. Maybe if I had heard the whole story I would have been more impressed by the rock.

Then we went swimming again before the optional afternoon guided walk. Most people went to have one more chance at seeing an elephant. Our guide knew what we wanted to see and hurried us through the shoulder high grasses to find us some elephants. Long story short…no elephants. I felt like I sprinted for two hours because I had to run to catch up whenever I stopped to take pictures…which was often because, I mean, if I’m not going to see any elephants, I better at least have some cool pictures, right?

I showered and headed to dinner to find that some girls in our group had made the head cook angry and they were no longer serving anything besides chicken, fish, fries, and rice. Apparently they had ordered salad for dinner and it was brought to them without dressing. When they asked about dressing the waitress told her it was finished (they had run out). They decided they didn’t want salads without dressing and asked to have something else instead. And so the kitchen staff went on stroke kind of. I’m not really sure why I recounted this story, except maybe it’s funny…

At dinner we talked about the trip and the things that had gone wrong. Some people had tried to add up the costs of everything that we did and there was like $100-150 unaccounted for in the umbrella fee we paid for the trip. This put everyone in kind of a bad mood. I kept getting mosquito bites and went in to reapply deet, but decided just to stay in and read because we were leaving at FIVE a.m. the next day. The white sheet on my bed was speckled with bugs of different size and king. I was really glad I had made my bed so there weren’t (m?)any in it, and I shook the sheet out and drowned it in bug spray. But it was still not so easy falling asleep imagining the little bugs crawling all over you.

The incontrovertible proof that the weekend had been sub-par was that everyone was ready to leave on time…at five in the morning. We drove and drove on the dirt road uneventfully except for some head bumps, shoulder bashes, and of course a fresh dirt coat. Then we stopped to help the other van fix something. Then our van stalled and the driver had to pop the clutch while 3 people pushed. We kept going but then we stopped for 45 minutes while the drivers tried to fix whatever had gone wrong with the van. Then, our old bus came and picked us up. By this time we were off the dirt road. It was like 11 or so. We stopped again in a town to buy snacks or lunch. We were back on the road when there was a loud pop. We had blown a tire. The driver braked gently down the hill we were on and stopped in front of a banana stand. I don’t even remember how long we waited there. I had resigned myself to the fact that I might be returning to campus sometime that week, but no longer had any hope that it would happen remotely soon. Anyway, the bananas were really good. The bus luckily had a spare that would get us to Kumasi.

We got to Kumasi without any further calamities. Vivian had called ahead and ordered a buffet dinner for us. We were given around and hour to eat dinner at the cultural center restaurant and to do any shopping. Then we were going to switch buses and drive straight through to campus. The bus was actually on time! Also, it looked like an airplane from the seventies. The seats were red leather and really retro looking. There were red curtains, tied back with a blue string that seemed like an afterthought. And there were these tacky little yellow lamps on the side. It was really weird. Everybody had a different way of describing it, a different funny thing or movie it reminded us of. The seats were actually really comfy. This bus was over-air-conditioned instead of under. We made good time until we hit Accra traffic, which was still moving slow even at 10 pm on a Sunday. While we were sitting in traffic the driver I guess decided the bus was too quiet, and started playing the strangest song. It started out sounding kind of like a spaceship, then a reggae beat kicked in, and then this soft male voice started singing. It sounded like it was made in someone’s basement—20 years ago. The music woke up my friend sitting next to me and we both just died laughing—at the music, at the fact that they decided to play music at all, that we had been up since 5 and everything had gone wrong. We really could not stop. The song went on forever, or it was looped maybe and so soon we were singing it to each other.

We finally made it through the traffic only to be held up again because no one was attending to the locked gate of our university. We were seriously waiting at the entrance gate of our university with no way of getting in. Even at the time I could see the humor, and so now I think it’s pretty hilarious. Everyone of course had a different idea about solving the problem. Even though some solutions were unlikely and far fetched (just drive the bus into it, it will open!), nobody said them jokingly. We really wanted to get off the bus and sleep in our own beds, and nothing seemed too extreme. Vivienne said Ago, a sound we had long begun to associate with disaster. Ame, we replied, which was by then the rough equivalent to “Now what?” She had a fit of laughter while she explained the problem, and was just starting to fill us in on some elaborate plan where taxis would take us home when the guard finally turned up with the gate key. We finally pulled up in front of the hostel at 11, after 18 hours of traveling.

Also, about a third of the people who went on the trip were sick by Wednesday. Two people went to the hospital, one with malaria, one with dysentery (apparently it’s not just from Oregon Trail and you can die). I don’t really want to share any details about how I spent my Wednesday because it’s gross…but I’m better now.

There were definitely positive aspects of the trip but…mostly it was a disaster. People were really pretty good about not letting their attitudes make things worse than they were, which is really saying a lot I think. And now when travel plans go awry I can think “Well at least it’s not as bad as Mole” and laugh.