beach week

the five of us on our last day at green turtle lodge... smiling but sad to leave the menu.

adam and lauren came to visit for ten days (liz's brother and gf). anyone ever visiting ghana MUST stay at Green Turtle Lodge. this cutesy place is on a deserted strip of sand in the western region, about 8 hours from akropong. opened by a british couple, it's super eco-touristy. you stay in huts constructed from local materials, all employees are native ghanaians, solar panels run your lights and fan, outhouses use self-composting toilets, and shower water is recycled for plants that thrive on soap minerals, they serve delicious fresh ghanaian cuisine (the brkfast special was french toast with honey and bananas. i don't even like french toast or honey that much but now i'm a #1 fan!), a fun happening bar with fruity alcoholic beverages, there are board games (SCRABBLE!) and books to swap. i'm a walking-talking advertisement for the place. i can't help it!

my sister vanna-whiting the outdoor shower (i vow to build my own one day cause their is no better way to get clean than under palm leaves)

solar-paneled beach hut

adam (sporting my patriotic hankerchief) and lauren enjoying lunch of guac and plantain chips

liz and i went back for four more glorious nights this past week. we just had to milk our holiday for all it was worth (school start tuesday ahh!). highlights this time around include:
1. met two hilarious brothers who graduated upper dublin HS (small world! hi nick/burt!) and made a day trip with them to a stilted village near the border of cote d'ivore.
2. played an international game of mafia on night with a group including a swiss couple, two german girls, a british couple, four loud americans (that's us) and a lone romanian. we discovered that the jack is called "boober" in german, which liz accidentally called the "booby" , which proceeded with ten billion jokes about whoever got the "booby" was the killer.
3. most memorable: one day a group of us visited a small village down the beach. tons of kids come out to greet us as usual. as they take our hands and say things like "my friend, what is your name? give me a pen. where are you going?" i'm practicing the local tongue on them with quasi-success. suddenly the 15 or so small ones crowded around me start yelling "book-a-son-eee". really loud. i have no clue what it means and tried asking the adults in the village (who would either snicker or give me stone-cold faces). the kids just kept on yelling it enthusiastically, so i repeated it too! that really did it. everytime i yelled the phrase, shouting it and rose my hands up, they shouted it too and rose their hands up! i was so curious. what crazy things was i saying? i finally found a ghanian with better english and he explained, laughing, "oh, they think you look like/are bruce lee". HAHAHAHA! yes, for years to come the kids in the akwiidaa village on the coast of ghana will be reminiscing back on the day that bruce lee came to visit them... even though he/she was sort of a short, long haired, skinny feminine version? i have made my mark!

other noteworthies during adam/lauren's stay:
the rest of the week we gradually made our way back to our region by stopping at all the hotspots along the coast. Elmina Slave Castle had a really informative and interesting tour (the guides at other sites have been way less than knowledgable). but at the same time it was extremely emotionally disturbing as we walked through the dark/suffocating dungeons that thousands of slaves were imprisoned and tortured before they were crammed onto boats across the atlantic.

the view from the slave castle of the ridiculous fish market below

we stayed at Hans Cottage Botel near Kakum National Park. this old place wasn't really a boat-hotel, more like a bunch of moldy 70's style buildings over huge decrepit fish tanks. it had a run-down summer camp feel, but did boast many crocs in the man-made resevoir! their rates were kind of pricey and lauren's dinner of beans and plantains tasted like a basement. literally.. if you could make the musty smell of a cellar into edible food it would be these beans. we were disappointed after seeing No wildlife at Kakum besides a squirrel (though the canopy walkway was thrilling) so it was a crazy suprise that behind the botel was a farm with 7 foot tall really ugly but wierdly mesmerising ostriches! i've never seen them so close. they resembled part gross-turkey/part creepy dinosaur with their goose-pimply skin and humongous talons.
getting nutty at the botel (this is pre-basement beans and lots of star beer)

the canopy walkway at kakum (it was richety and riviting!)