Traveling the World: Day 2 in Ghana

***Actually wrote this on my second day here, just haven't had the chance to post until now. Enjoy and sorry for the less than great picture quality. I had to really downsize the files as internet here, while fast, is very limited in how much data I can use.

Wow – it’s hard to believe I’ve only been here for 48 hours. The days are long as we rise around 7 AM and stay up talking and sharing our experiences until well past midnight. In 9 minutes, it’s one of our group member’s birthdays, so we of course needed to stay awake for that.

I’ve begun to pick up on a number of common themes between Ghana and the other third world country that I’ve visited, Nicaragua. The nature is similar – tropical plants and animals are abundant (although not the exotic ones I might’ve hoped to find). The roadways and traffic are startlingly familiar to me. Today we drove from Afia to Mountain Paradise north of Ho, in the eastern part of Ghana, where we are staying through tomorrow night. This drive is normally between 5 and 6 hours, but of course, we ran into a bit of a delay.

I was in the middle of sharing an experience with our group (per teacher request) when we had a rather violent tire blowout while traveling on the highway, this at probably around 70 miles per hour. Thankfully the bus kept moving straight until we could pull over, but it shot my nerves for quite some time. I had a similar experience with a tire blowout in Nicaragua.

I became motivated to take this photo when I noticed just how close one car came to hitting our drivers as they tried to fix our flat tire.

Some snaps of the scenery while waiting for our flat to be fixed.

From left to right: Michelle, Mahlet, and Joe.

There are also very few road rules and even fewer police there to enforce them. People simply drive to get from point A to point B without much obedience for lane designation. The horn is used liberally, but its meaning is different from in the States. It’s used to warn, rather than to “yell” at someone. Our driver used the horn nearly every time we drove past a person walking in the road who was facing the other direction. I also watched our bus move past cars many times with mere inches between our vehicles. This is common, and people seem to have developed an amazing ability to do this without causing an accident. This is important as the 3.5 million people living in Accra are often confined to just 2 lanes in either direction.

We passed through a few villages on the way as well, and my initial impressions seem to be on the right track. People are amazingly friendly here. They wave and smile proudly and are eager to welcome and serve us.

And the lodge itself…it’s gorgeous. The rooms are rather simple, but the focus is on the surroundings. We are high in the mountains and the view is flawed only by a few cell phone towers and patches of land cleared by controlled burning done by local farmers. Sadly, just last month one of these burns grew too quickly and was carried upward by the wind, destroying a significant portion of the Paradise lodge. Ironically enough, the owner of the lodge had already been working with local farmers for quite some time to teach them how to farm effectively without needing to clear the trees first.

Here's a whole bunch of pictures I took upon arrival.