Kakum National Park and Winneba

Our trip last weekend also took us to a more pleasant area, the Kakum National Park. Here USAID helped construct a canopy walk to promote tourism (the pros and cons of USAID supporting ecotourism can be an issue to be addressed another day). We were able to go on this canopy walk over the rainforest, and it was incredible. I was reminded of my trip to the rainforests in Costa Rica during high school. I remembered a lot of what we learned about the layers of the rainforest. Highlights of the canopy walk included seeing monkeys swinging through the trees! After wards we went on a nature hike through the rainforest. I (along with Libby Howell and Becca Timmermans) was “buddies” with Isabel, our professor’s 4 (almost 5) year-old daughter for much of the hike. I really enjoy the fact that our professor brought her family to Ghana with her (her husband and other daughter, age 7, are also here). Also while we were hiking we found that there were 5 of us wearing Chaco sandals, so we made a Chaco commercial video on one girl’s camera. It was so much fun! Though it was a very “touristy” experience, it was sweet to do a canopy walk over a rainforest in Ghana. Not everyone can say they’ve done that!

After visting Kakum National Park, E (Elisabeth Risch), Katie Sytsema, and I got dropped off at a small town called Winneba, about halfway between Cape Coast, where we had been, and Accra, the city we live in. We had quite the experience visiting Winneba. A few highlights:
-we stayed in a very nice beach resort
-our rooms were taken by someone else named Elizabeth. Luckily, they still had 2 single rooms and then they gave us an extra mattress to use
-the food was amazing (particularly the coffee, and omelets with cheese in the morning)
-a professor from the Netherlands who’s setting up an electrical engineering lab at a poly-technic institute in Ghana bought us a round of beer
-we met an American (Elizabeth, who probably stole our room) and an Australian (Fion) who worked with an AIDS prevention agency and had a discussion about religion and religion in Africa with them
-we went to the beach! and went swimming in the gulf of guinea! (basically the atlantic ocean, but it’s actually called the gulf of guinea here on the coast of Ghana)
-I bought a hard-boiled egg from a lady on the side of the road, and she put spicy peppers on it, and it was yummy!