Weekend Adventures III: It's over a week late, but tough

On our final day in Cape Coast, we got up bright and early after a late night to go to Kakum National Forest. It's one of the few chunks of tropical rain forest left in the region, and it's beautiful. The main attraction is a canopy walk - a series of bridges and supports about 40 meters up in the air so that you can walk around the canopy of the forest. The bridges swung around a little while you walked on them, but were clearly safe. It was a lot of fun, and it's apparently pretty unique in the world.
There was also a nature walk available, but we didn't have time that day. Some of us are planning to head back to Kakum on one of our three-day weekends and go on a long hike and camp. Hopefully that actually happens, because we'd probably get to see elephants, and maybe monkeys.

After the park, we drove back to Accra. We stopped at places on the side of the road to buy pineapples, because apparently the best ones come from the Cape Coast. We also bought kenkey, a sort of fermented corn dough wrapped in plantain leaves eaten with soup. I didn't have any, but apparently it wasn't too good. That might have been from the 4 hours it spent in the hot bus before we had a chance to refridgerate it though. And we bought palm wine, which is delicious. It tastes kind of like Sprite mixed with coconut vodka. Kind of. I snapped a photo of some shops on the street just to give you an idea of what Ghana looks like. The entire country (that I've been to so far) is basically this. Clothes shops, general stores, food stalls, produce shops, the occasional internet cafe, repeated forever. Cape Coast looked a lot like Accra, although they did have better named shops, including "Blood of Jesus Sewing Supply."

Once we got back to Ghana, George, one of the Aya Centre staff members, had managed to get us tickets to a Black Stars game. They're the Ghanaian national team, and they were playing Sudan that day. The game started late because it's Ramadan right now, so they wanted to wait until the Sudanese players would have a chance to have a drink of water. We got to sit very close to field level about halfway between midfield and the goal. Fantastic seats. And Ghana won 2-0.

The game was very exciting, and the crowd was like nothing I'd ever seen. There were various bands throughout the stadium representing different supporters clubs, along with dancers, shouting, and a number of plastic trumpets that sounded like the apocalypse when the entire stadium decided to blow them at once. We also managed to sit in what looked like the "riot section," with people arguing over seats the entire game and throwing water on eachother and almost starting fights. Ever other section seemed to be enjoying the game, but ours really just wanted to fight. Fortunately I think everyone assumed that we were sitting in the correct seats since we were white, when in fact we were supposed to be up in nosebleeds somewhere. Apparently no one ever sits where they're supposed to, but I think I might if I go again.

Then it was home, where I went to sleep at 9 and crashed.