Chapter 24...The wild wild (Upper) West!

Last weekend seven of us Bolga volunteers embarked on the seven hour bus journey to Wa for a long break away over the Independence weekend! The weekend started on a sad note with the end of the VSO love story that I know you were all enjoying following (Daniel and I ended our long distance VSO romance very amicably so don’t go worrying about there being tears and sadness in Ghana), and ended with a visit to Bolga Regional Hospital (again don’t worry we were not there for me)!

With Monday 7^th being a public holiday in Ghana to celebrate the country gaining independence on 6^th March 1957 a group of us decided to make the most of the extra day off work and headed to Wa in the Upper West region with a view to spending two days at Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary! So on Friday 4^th at 4:20am Rachel, Hannah and I hopped into a taxi to the Metro Mass bus station in town where we had to wait for a couple of hours to purchase our bus tickets! There’s a strange rule here that bus tickets can’t be bought in advance so it’s a case of first-come-first served (on the day of travel) at the bus station, which as I found out causes complete chaos!! Everyone forms an orderly queue then they wait and wait and wait until the bus conductor arrives with a wad of tickets and a whole lot of power! In my typical optimistic (cloud 9) view I saw a scenario where he will start at the front of the queue and sell tickets accordingly! In reality it is a hectic bundle to try get a ticket with, I’m sure, some bribes being given where necessary! It also turns out that once all the seated tickets are sold, standing ones are then sold (for the same price as seated) and people then stand in the aisle of the bus for the seven hour journey or until they are lucky enough to grab a seat when someone leaves!

Luckily on the outgoing journey (this should give you a little hint as to the hellish return journey, but lets keep the suspense building for now...) all of us managed to get a seat and had a relatively comfortable, if not very bumpy, ride to Wa! We did encounter a 20 minute breakdown three-quarters of the way through, but then it wouldn’t be right if we didn’t, as I am starting to learn about the Ghanaian transport system!

The buses armed guard! 

We arrived in Wa at 2pm all feeling extremely hungry and thirsty so we decided our first stop should be a local spot ‘Prisons Canteen’ for a Star (the best-selling Ghanaian beer)! I’ve never been much of a beer drinker before, but in Ghana I actually crave beer on a regular basis, which does surprise me! After a well-earned drink we walked the 15 minutes to ‘Mammy’s Kitchen’ where we got served a huge plate of fried rice and chicken, which again was much needed!

After re-fuelling it was time to head to GES guesthouse where we stayed for the weekend! It was basic, but served our needs (until the last night, but again lets keep the suspense building...) very well! That evening Anna (a volunteer in Wa) invited around twenty volunteers to her house for dinner, a delight of local food including T-Z which is yet another maize based dish, apparently different somehow to all the others I have tried (I haven’t as yet been able to identify the difference in taste)! Anna asked a local lady to cook for us and she started the evening off with an explanation of what all the food was and how she prepared it all, which took an awful lot of hard work! I spent the evening meeting new volunteers and catching up with three of my ICT family – Adrienne, Bas and Jeannine, which was just lovely! It did shock me how attached I feel to those people I started this journey with and I was surprised by how emotional I felt to see them again!

 

 

So after a late night walk back to the guesthouse we managed a lie-in on Saturday waking up at 8am! The plan for Saturday and Sunday was the Hippo Sanctuary which is an hour tro-tro ride out of Wa. We started with a cooked breakfast of toast, omellette and beans at ‘Mammy’s Kitchen’ then stocked up on food and drink, which you can’t get at the Hippos! At midday our group of twelve plus some locals were squashed into an open-sided, over-crowded tro bumping our way to Wechiau! As we are currently in the dry hot season the dust was flying everywhere with some rather funny consequences at the end of our journey...(oh and there were no showers at Wechiau so this was us for the next 24 hours!)

These two looking like umpa-lumpas (or however you spell it)!

After another shorter tro ride, half an hour walk and 2 hour boat ride down the Black Volta river (which is still Ghana on one river bank and Burkina Faso on the other) we eventually reached our goal for the weekend...the hippos! Now before I get you all too excited we only saw them in the water so there are mainly photos of hippo ears, but nonetheless here they are...

Post hippos the sun was starting to set so it was a quick dash to our hippo hides where we spent the night lying in the open air under the stars! It was one of the best nights I’ve ever spent in all my travels because the sounds were just amazing, the stars were bright and the peace I felt was heavenly! The tree we were under was creaking, the bugs and creepy crawlies were buzzing, the hippos were snarling away in the water beneath us and us volunteers were chattering away under our mosquito nets! It was a hot night, but one that I will remember for a long long time!

Our eight person hippo hide!

We woke at 4:45 on Sunday morning (Independence Day) in total darkness with the stars still shining and the hippos still munching away on the land! We dressed by torchlight and went to the toilet and brushed our teeth au natural! We then headed back to the boats to start our return journey back to the lodge! In the pitch black and silence of the early morning we heard the hippos charging back into the water from the Burkina Faso river bank, which was just astonishing to hear, especially because we couldn’t see a thing! So that was our last experience of the hippos at Wechiau and it was now time to return to Wa...!

Following a long shower to scrub off all the dirt and an afternoon nap back at the guesthouse we all trekked (45 minutes) to Alem’s restaurant for dinner, which was yam chips (delicious) and chicken! Rachel, Hannah and I shared two meals between the three of us as we’d had a cheeky lunch on our return to Wa of rice and chicken at ‘Prisons Canteen’ An early night was needed by all after the adventures of the last few days so we got a taxi back to the guesthouse with the idea of lying under the fan and drifting off to sleep, however as always things very rarely go to plan...!

Having packed and got myself ready for the 3:30am start we had on Monday morning I clambered into bed all hot and flustered, but ready to drift off into dreamland for a couple of hours! Just as I was dozing off and my roommate was reading the power went off completely meaning no lights and more importantly no fan, which in 30 degree heat is not fun at all!!! After half an hour of trying to lie still in bed so as to not use up too much energy and create more heat I ventured out to speak to the guesthouse owner who told me it wouldn’t be long until the power came back on! On my return to the room my roommate informed me that in Ghana that means it won’t be on again until the morning! ‘NOOOOOO’ was all I could say!

So at 3:30am after five hours of running back and forth to the kitchen to raid things from the freezer to keep us cool we headed to the bus station to start the long process of ticket buying all over again for our return journey to Bolga! Our well thought out plans to ensure we got seven seats on the bus completely fell apart when Alice and Jackie who had nominated themselves as ticket buyers for the group came over to where the rest of us were sitting with seven standing tickets!! Once again all I could say was ‘NOOOOOO’

By the time we left at 6am we had manged to get one seat at the start of the journey which for some reason hadn’t been filled so the seven of us agreed to rotate that seat at half hour intervals! Then half way in Tumu we managed to get two more seats so Hannah, Rachel and I shared those! By Tumu we’d had to stop the bus once already for Rose who gets travel sick, then just 20 minutes short of Navrongo (45 minutes North of Bolga) we had to stop the bus again for Hannah who had been sick and fainted, which was very scary indeed! After about 15 minutes we got back onto the bus having arranged to get to Navrongo and get Ishmal (favourite taxi driver of some vols as he has the nicest car in Bolga with a/c) to pick us up from there and take us to the hospital! He rushed to meet us, but with two passengers already in the car, which meant it was a tight squeeze in the back! Luckily though the lady who was already in the taxi is a nurse at Bolga Regional Hospital so we dashed there and got Hannah checked out in super speed! After blood tests and doctors it emerged a few hours later that she had a bacterial bug so we left with anti-biotics and headed for home!

I was finally back home (somewhere I missed all weekend), in my room under my fan and surrounded by my things! My first long weekend away taught me a lot of things about what’s important in life...the main things being the people around you who, especially when so far away from home, become your main support network, your friends and your family! Also though, the importance of all you lovely people all over the World who are my friends and my family, who are supporting me on this crazy but extremely exciting journey and who I know will be my support network no matter what!