We were very fortunate to have this whole weekend off – our outreach got canceled on Saturday and no one leaves Accra for longer-distance outreaches this week, so Sunday was free too! Saturday morning involved our first taxi ride. We decided to go to the central market in Accra to explore the city a little more. We had a group of 6. I was hoping we could go “Cameroon style” (fit as many people in the cab as possible)…but the cab driver in our first cab was not playing that game, so we split into 2 cabs. My cab was me, Matt, and Laura and we made it to the central market after a long, hot, traffic-filled 45 minute cab ride. We looked around for the others for a short while, but gave up after about 10 minutes and just walked around on our own.
The central market was two things: hot and crowded – crowded not just with many people, but with many things. There was stuff everywhere – mostly cheaply made shoes, trinkets, clothes, and kitchen utensils, but also local “fresh” foods (“Fresh” in quotations because most of it was effectively cooking under the blazing equatorial sun). The fish stench was especially pungent. After a couple hours in the market, we headed back to the guest house to get break from the heat in some air conditioning. Upon arriving, we discovered that the rest of our group never made it to the market, but were stuck in cabs for 2 hours trying to just get to the market, before giving up and heading home.
Sunday was much more eventful. We all took a 3 hour van ride to Cape Coast. Our first stop was Kakum National Park, which is referred to as a rainforest, although it technically is somewhere between a moist evergreen forest and a semi-deciduous forest. We took a short hike through the forest and then went walking through the canopy on rope bridges! It was absolutely beautiful and full of tons of greenery all around.
We stopped for lunch at a hotel that had a restaurant on an island in the center of a pond and the pond was full of…crocodiles. Some of us took turns touching the crocodiles…their skin is much softer than I was expecting. We finished the day at the Cape Coast slave castle. Cape Coast was one of the largest pick-up points during the slave trade and the castle is where slave traders stayed (while the slaves stayed in the dungeons below the castle). It’s crazy to think that the castle is about as old as our entire country and was also really devastating to hear about the horrible lives the men and women who lived in the dungeons – and life didn’t get much better once they left. Cape Coast was a really friendly, vibrant beach town so the castle was really juxtaposed in its place there.
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