Saturday June 30, 2012  Africa:  Day 20

            It wasn’t exactly the most peaceful sleep the night before.  I woke up a lot during the night imagining that things were crawling on me. Kelsey and I also fell asleep with the TV on (I think both of us were happy to have the black and white Nigerian movie adding a little night light in the creepy room), and all of a sudden at about 4:30 we both woke up to the TV suddenly turning off.  Slightly unsettling.

            We all met up to have some breakfast that the hotel manager promised us.  However, the girls working here this morning told us that they would make us breakfast, but we would have to wait for them to go to the market to buy the various ingredients.  We decided to walk to a different hotel a little bit up the road where we thought we had a better chance of getting food.

            We stopped to stand on a beautiful 850-foot suspension bridge that extends over the Volta River on our way to the hotel for breakfast.  We sat in a little gazebo right on the edge of the river and feasted on a full English breakfast of toast, jam, beans, sausage, omelets, and watermelon. 

            S. woke up this morning with his foot hurting from an injury a couple of weeks ago.  It kept getting worse as the morning went on, so one of the workers at the hotel offered to use some traditional healing practices to help. He sat S. down and rubbed the milky sap from what he called a dwarf plant on the injured foot.  This man then told us stories of the dwarf people that live in the jungle, and how no one can see the dwarf people unless you are chosen.   The dwarf people will take the chosen person into the jungle and teach  him about all the medicinal uses of the various plants.  This man explained that while most people can’t see the dwarf people, you can often sense them when you are in the jungle or on the water.  They do leave footprints, but their feet are backwards.  If you see small footprints walking away from you, it is most likely a dwarf walking toward you.  He warned us that the dwarves can be dangerous if you are in the mountains and they sense that you don’t respect nature.  Again, I had another moment of “what are the chances that my life would take me to the edge of  the Volta River watching and learning about the traditions of the African jungle?”

            We learned that the hotel offers a boat tour of the river taking us up to a large dam that separates the river from Lake Volta.  We had wanted to take a boat, but it definitely wasn’t a hard decision to take a small private motor boat instead of a large tourist boat.  It was so peaceful as we floated along the smooth water watching beautiful birds fly in and out of the large palms and thick dense growth of the woods that lined both sides of the river.  We would occasionally pass a fisherman in a canoe setting tilapia traps.  Whenever we passed some huts on the side of the river, all the kids would come running out to wave and cheer for us and the women would look up from their work washing clothes or bathing children in the river.  The warm sun,  the sparkling water, the sound of the birds, and a different shade of green everywhere you looked made me feel that I could be very happy spending the rest of my life on that little boat.

            We eventually came back and watched  more of the hotel workers try again to fix S.’s foot. This time they put him in a lounge chair on the small dock and proceeded to twist and pull on his foot in order to relieve the pain and swelling.  I think they mostly succeeded in making Stephen twist and pull the rest of his body into contortions because of the pain.  They all kept telling him that he just has to clear his mind and believe that it will work.  S. ended up choosing to stay in the town at least just for tonight because he didn’t want to continue on our journey getting further and further from Accra.  He will decide tomorrow if he is going to take a bus and join us in Ho, or if he will go back.

            The girls and I took another bus further into the Volta Region to the town of Ho.  I wish I had a camera to document all of our reactions when we pulled  into the alley where the hotel was supposed to be. All we saw was a half-built building  with pigeons and debris flying in and out of the rafters.  We were relieved to see that the first couple of floors have actually been finished very nicely.  I think the owners are building the hotel one floor at a time.

            

We unpacked our things, grabbed some lunch/dinner at a larger hotel down the road a little bit, then took an hour-long taxi ride to a monkey sanctuary between the towns of Ho and Hohoi.  Unfortunately, we got there just as it was getting dark and the guides told us that it was too late to go into the jungle to see the monkeys.  We walked around the main building  for a little while and spotted the sillhoutes  and listened to the chatter of the monkeys in the giant trees around us.  Even though we didn’t really get to see what we came for, we did get to watch a beautiful sunset while we drove through the beautiful green mountains.