Last trip of the term

The last of our official trips was this weekend, and we traveled to the Volta region. It’s the easternmost region of Ghana, requiring a trip over the Volta River to get there. Sadly, I didn’t get to see the dam or lake, but the river is still large and impressive. This trip was also much shorter than the others, as everything’s closer and we didn’t do as much.

Our first visit was to Wlii Falls (pronounced “vlee”), where we parked and took a half-hour hike along a very pretty trail, crossing rivers and streams the whole time. All of us Pacific Northwest kids on the trip loved it, as everything was green and shady, as well as cooler than in Accra. The waterfall was pretty big, and Tom, Z, Beth, and I hopped in and swam around. We basically giggled the whole time because the mist was so strong that we couldn’t look at the falls, and it was like being in a wave pool. It was another of my favorite times here so far. There were also a multitude of bats living on the cliff next to the falls, and they were swooping around as we swam.

That was really it for Saturday, except we went to the hotel, swam, and played ping pong all evening. I surprised myself with how not-bad I was at ping pong after not playing for a while, but Z still won every game we played.

We left the hotel at 6:30 Sunday morning in order to make it to a sacred monkey sanctuary, because apparently the monkeys are only out near the village in the morning. There ended up being about 15 mona monkeys running around, and we had fun feeding them bananas. We met the “chief” of one monkey family, named Commando, who wouldn’t eat out of our hands but stole the bananas and then ran off to eat them with his back to everyone. I also managed to get a small monkey to sit on my hand while eating a banana. Pictures will come, I promise.

We ended up getting home around 12:30, making this trip the shortest and least educational, but nearly the most fun. I considered doing something useful yesterday like working on a paper or laundry, but instead hung out all afternoon reading and chatting, and then watched Superbad with my roommates.

Now, I’m at my internship again, and today is our monthly meeting with a group of HIV-positive locals, so maybe there’ll be something for me to do. Most likely not though. I need to remember to take this blog down before I start writing “Worked with a women’s NGO in Ghana doing all sorts of extremely important things” on my resumes and grad school applications; otherwise the truth will come out, which is that I haven’t done jack in about a month and a half.