Holy Mole

Precursor: some combination of the spotty internet and my inability to operate this website is causing some testy formatting on the blog. A smart man once said, "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again." I think even he would have admitted that to try indefinitely would be a major waste of time. Long story short, if some pictures look out of place or the formatting looks funky, I apologize. The technology gods are elsewhere right now. On to the post...

To those of you thought that title would be beneath even me, well you just overestimated me didn't you? It is as fitting a title as one would find, and for that reason I make no apologies. As a precursor to this post, as my good friends over the years would tell you, I have grown to shall we say eschew showers on trips of less than 4 or 5 days; it wastes precious time and within hours I'm always dirty again anyways. Suffice it to say that this trip fell perfectly (depending on your perspective) into that 4 to 5 day range. With that in mind, let's see if my average retelling abilities can begin to do justice to our breathtaking experiences.

We started off the weekend with a shotgun wakeup at 5 AM on Friday morning; for this occasion we actually moved our luggage to the office and stayed there. We awoke with Justin and Andrew, coworkers from BYU’s MBA program (and travel companions for the weekend), and set off. We had a great sunrise drive --beautiful enough to keep sunrise-ambivalent and sleep-loving me awake throughout. Our first day's driving was to be the longest as it took us all the way north from Koforidua to Mole National Park. We drove northwest to Kumasi, capitol of the Ashanti region, and got our first glimpse of what is truly a cultural and population hub of western Africa. However, we had time dedicated to Kumasi on Sunday and Monday so we took the bypass roads and avoided its infamous traffic. We headed north from Kumasi and were fortunate enough to have great road for most of the drive. When we began to get bored but were unable to turn on our music in the car, we played some of Andrew’s music over the loudspeaker mounted on top of our truck. Nothing like a little K-Ci and Jojo to serenade the mostly Muslim northern Ghanaians on a Friday afternoon.

Our drive was also broken up by a few of Debi's attempts at playing aide worker. We brought hundreds of pens and pencils, stickers, and other fun items to distribute to the children of Ghana. However, there is so little of that sort here, and white people are so rare in most parts, that once we gave one thing away everyone immediately catches on and a mob forms within seconds. It would be ideal to find a place where there are only a dozen or so children and nicely hand things out, but alas it seems like where there is one child there are a dozen (or in many cases, where there is one parent there are twelve children). The ratio of children to adults is through the roof already and prospects only look worse as future generations perpetuate the problem that worsens exponentially. At any rate, to keep the kids at something of a distance, I displayed my laser rocket arm in distributing footballs and characteristically overthrew them nearly every time (in fairness they're not exactly Randy Moss in leaping ability, timing or hands). In one town I drilled the local mosque with a toss and we decided that our missionary work needed to come to an end quickly.

After I took my inaugural lessons driving a stick shift (whopping success, no surprise there -- all minor hiccups were immediately and justly blamed upon the vehicle and/or road), we finally arrived at Mole National Park. It had been a long day of relatively boring driving, and we were ready to start seeing some damn animals; anticlimactically, that evening we saw only some amphibious yawners and an enormous whirring beetle (not the name of the type of beetle but rather a description of its size and favorite activity). To give you an idea of its strength: some drunk-for-the-first-time Dutch kid trapped it in an upside down glass and gassed it with bug spray; ten minutes later, the beetle announced its escape with the crashing of the glass to the floor and its signature whirring noise. Justice be done. Sick and excited at the prospect of seeing the baboons flood the park in the morning, I retired early and set a 5:30 alarm.

It was roughly three minutes from the time I got out of bed and the time I saw baboon number one -- this is the only precise baboon count I can give since they were so prevalent everywhere throughout the weekend. I stepped out of the door into the moderately cool African morning, only to hear rustling to my left as a baboon, unperturbed, picked berries six feet away from me (that is the brick wall to our room; I took the picture from our doorway). I eventually moved to the Mole Motel's lookout, which overlooks a huge watering hole and marsh area of the park. From there, I could see the many kob, bush buck and water buck (all members of the antelope family) grazing and drinking; watch the silhouettes of the crocodiles as they paced the surface of the watering hole; and watch the ever-present (and often annoying) baboons as they continued up the hillside in search of easily-obtained food. There wasn't too much time to spend watching from afar, because we had a walking tour planned for 7:00 that would take us up close and personal. More importantly we hoped to walk alongside some elephants, which besides being exciting in their own right would give Debi one less thing to clamor about. Here in Africa they call that killing two birds with one stone.

Osman, our fearless guide, followed through on his promise that we would see elephants by ignoring the other guides' warnings and taking us on an elephant-tracking expedition for the first 20 minutes of our walking tour. After many footprints and a number of increasingly-potent piles of elephant crap, I sighted the first elephant through the trees, maybe 60 yards away. The next 40 minutes were surreal. We followed two living, breathing elephants as they grazed and lazed the morning away. We then branched off toward the salt lick after our all-knowing guide promised us we would find the elephants again.

The salt lick is very important for herbivores as they don't get all of the proteins necessary without it; hence there are many bucks and kob to be seen around it. We also saw the imprints of elephant tusks deep in the salt lick, which reminded us: all these antelope-family creatures don't hold a candle to the elephants -- where are they? Our guide caught on to our lack of enthusiasm for his favorite animal, the bush buck, and we returned to the trail of the elephants, who were bathing (if one could call it that) by blowing mud from the swamp all over their backs. Still hands down the best shower I would have had on the trip, but hey. We returned to nap and at breakfast caught this monkey red (jelly) handed enjoying what someone neglected to put on their toast.

We spent a misguided afternoon in the notorious neighboring town of Larabonga, which boasts the oldest mosque in all of Ghana; however, it also boasts the most conniving, devious set of juvenile delinquents. And the mosque isn't even cool (see below). It wasn't even top five of the mosques we saw this weekend, and we couldn't enter it. At any rate, we barely escaped without bodily harm, property harm, or theft and headed back to Mole. Debi of course thought this ordeal was hilarious; I was slightly less delighted to risk any of the aforementioned things to glimpse a few pieces of only the most common type of fabric in the country. Which then turned out to not even exist.

Probably because of the psychological trauma associated with the prospect of defending my dear mother from these miscreants, my trip-long illness flared up and I was forced to miss the driving safari, which by all accounts was unexciting. In the evening we were able to see six elephants bathing in the water hole from our motel. Two of them remained for a long time and played with each other, wrestling with their trunks and dunking under water. Just another surreal experience to jot down -- little did we know the next day we'd be witnessing the elephants' bath from 25 yards away.

I've stolen a little of my own thunder here, but after an evening of watching the baboons fight for sleeping territory, a sheepish bush buck sneaking through the hotel seemingly unnoticed, and a night sky that included a particularly clear view of Mars, we again turned in early in order to wake up for our specially-ordered 6:30 AM walking tour. After witnessing another stellar performance by the baboons, we hustled to begin our tour -- we could already see six elephants in the watering hole from our room.

Twenty minutes later we were the envy of the entire hotel as we sat at water’s edge watching the elephants bathe and cool themselves. The many crocodiles in the water made sure to keep their distance -- apparently they can munch on the different members of the antelope family but not the elephants. We spent most of our allotted time simply sitting and watching the five elephants that had remained in the water and the one that had exited. We were also lucky enough to see a monitor lizard scampering to cover, hyena prints from that morning’s scavenge, a recently-abandoned crocodile nest, and the whirl and dive of one crocodile still on land and unprepared for his human visitors so early in the morning.

We sadly packed up to leave Mole, but we had another monkey sanctuary ahead of us and a good day of once-in-a-lifetime wildlife experiences behind us. I noticed as we left that my zipoff pants, which once had been comically clean on the bottoms since it was always too hot to zip them on, were now equally disgusting on the bottom after our Mole hikes through the muck. Which isn’t to say my lack of showering wasn’t taking its toll on the upper parts as well. Tired, dirty and sick is no way to go through college. But if you aren’t at least two of those three when you leave Mole you’ve done something wrong, and I was definitely all three. We said goodbye to our very lazy warthog hotel-mates and hit the road (IN FAIRNESS: if I were able and willing to eat the things that warthogs eat, I would also live a very sedentary life in the African heat, just saying).

Our only stop between Mole and Kumasi was Boabeng-Fiema monkey sanctuary, so-named because it is between the sister towns of the same names. We arrived there at around 2:30 and began a tour of the forested areas. Our hopes were admittedly low due to the fact that Boabeng-Fiema does not permit feeding of the monkeys anymore -- they had become overaggressive. I have to say after seeing it that it was still almost as cool as Tafi Atome. There are two different types of monkey -- the mona monkey (the same type we saw and fed at Tafi, but for some reason far prettier and with a shiny, greener coloring) and the black and white colobus monkey (which we had not seen before). The colobus monkey is far shyer than the monas, but it sits in trees dangling its beautiful, somewhat bushy white tail and seemingly taunting visitors to the forest. We were lucky enough to see the monas and the colobus monkeys playing together, although apparently sometimes they fight for territory. Halfway through our tour, we heard an as-yet foreign noise from one of the monas which turned out to be their leader calling them. To what, we wondered?

With that question fresh in our minds, we wandered to another section of the woods and saw a very old parasitic tree that had completely consumed its former host. This left the inside hollow and climbable, at least for the more nimble member of our group. Debi was content to snap my photo at the top of one of the more fun and underrated parts of the trip.

When we returned to Boabeng we quickly learned what the leader had been calling his subordinates to. It was time to descend upon the village to feed. Apparently this is a twice-daily activity for the monkeys, and since legend says that monkeys played an integral role in the founding of the villages, the villagers worship the monkeys and would never so much as shoo one away. They raided the food store rooms, ran freely about on the telephone wires, broke into houses -- one even used the cover on the electrical gauge on the side of a house as a mirror. (This may have (unintentionally) been one of the few sound economic decisions we've witnessed; by embracing the monkeys the villagers kept up their main stream of income -- tourism to the monkey sanctuary). The forest also contains a monkey cemetery, since allegedly no monkey ever dies in the woods, but instead wanders into the village to die so that it can be buried. I admittedly have little patience for such tales, and choose to believe it’s just because the monkeys eat in the villages, where the food’s so bad that sometimes it probably kills them on the spot. But one way or the other, monkey cemetery and monkeys raiding shack.

This is also the last picture my glorious camera took -- it had been running on one charge since we left the states. So sorry for the text-heavy conclusion to the weekend...

While Debi and I were exploring the sanctuary, our traveling buddies Andrew and Justin decided to save their legs and wallets. They struck up a conversation which among other unquantifiable joys yielded us a faster route to Kumasi that Brandt’s (NOT highly recommended) guidebook did not include. So it was goodbye monkeys, hello open road, and finally we arrived to a lovely hotel in Kumasi, with the amenities one can expect at an African hotel -- A/C, pool, and recently jacked-up prices that you don’t learn about until you arrive.

I am sorry to say that Monday was the last day of our trip, and even more sorry to say that I caved and showered before arriving home. I wouldn’t exactly call it running water, but the ambling water at the Ashanti Gold Hotel eventually got me clean. When the water eventually made it through my hair and ran off my body, it looked like I had just played catcher in a summer doubleheader in Death Valley. Fresh and somewhat happy about it, we explored the famous Kumasi central market. It was absolutely enormous, but even more amazing was how busy everyone was. Monday is a major market day in Koforidua, and the same must have been true in Kumasi. Debi of course wanted to peruse the stores for fabric, and as she spacily wandered back and forth through stalls the businesslike, rushed women of the market hurried to pass her. You got the feeling they would like to have given her the Sheldon Brown/Reggie Bush treatment but couldn’t quite figure out a way to do so without spilling the baskets on their heads. We did manage to pick out some amazing batik (essentially hand-painted tie-dye), both for ourselves and for gifts. We then headed to the famous cultural center, where many other art forms are displayed, usually by their creators. The way Debi was going, these guys could have sold her fire in hell, and I even caved and bought a painting of the stilt village that we are visiting next weekend. After two trips to the cultural center, the second of which lasted a calculated 800% longer than it was supposed to (135 minutes/15 minutes = 900%), we headed back “home” to Koforidua where I sit writing this now.

It is odd that our time in Africa ends in less than a week. We have a few days of work and then a loosely-planned (as everything is with Debi) trip to Cape Coast and the surrounding thrills next weekend before we fly home next Monday (through Amsterdam, London, Raleigh, and Chicago). I am excited to maximize this week but also to be home. I hope that all is well and that everyone gets and takes the chance to do something like this at least once. The time and the cultural differences make you think a lot about how we are built and what our role is in the world, and a great deal of my beliefs have been both confirmed and altered here. It is very easy to bury our noses and ignore the perspective that we’re lacking in our day-to-day lives as Americans. And the clichés aren’t correct; you have to see for yourself what constitute the “problems” and what “needs” to be done. Because the answers (and questions) I’ve come up with on my own are drastically different than anything I’ve heard.

I will quit preaching; for those of you who know me I think I do manage a decent job keeping my constant desire to philosophize -- which can get old -- out of this otherwise narrational blog. Everyone enjoy the NBA Finals twofold for me and quit pretending you care about soccer all of a sudden. You know who you are. And go USA.