Mosomagor

After the slave castle tour I met up with the other girls, we got some breakfast, and then Megan, Thien Vinh and I left to go explore Kakum national park, specifically a small town turned eco-tourism project named Mosomagor. It took a while to get there after taxi-negotiation mishaps and poor directions, but one helpful man pointed us in the right direction. After a long ride, we arrived later than intended in the village and were greeted well.
We met some of the women and children around and arranged an evening hike. We then began a quick tour of the village, followed by some rice and stew for dinner.






This is a little girl pounding cassava (a really big potato like root) to make dough that is served in stew. The finished product is called fufu, which I mentioned a while back. Pounding it is very hard work, but many Ghanaians treat it as a staple and really like it.





We also saw a group of women extracting palm oil from a bunch of palm nuts. They sometimes use a grinding machine to get most of the oil out, but the traditional method is to boil the palm nuts until the oil floats to the top and then skim it off by hand. Pretty skilled, I'd say. They use palm oil for almost every dish here.




Once the tour was done and we scarfed down some rice, we hitched up our backpacks and began hiking into the rainforest. We hiked down the dirt road, through another village, and then entered Kakum National Park with a pretty clear boundary of large trees. The sun set very quickly and soon we were just following our required armed guard down a path in the dark. It was nice to walk with the sound of cicadas and limited vision, unsure of where we were going.
We fortunately had plenty of water and would stop every so often to break and sip it. After about an hour and a half of walking, mostly in silence, Megan in the lead said "ow...Ow...OOWWW!" followed by Thien Vinh. That was our first and only direct interaction with the fauna of Kakum in the form of soldier ants. These ants were vicious. They crawled up my legs, under my socks, into my shoes, and I even found one on my head. Responding to a threat, it is perfectly reasonable that most ants would sting to stave off the threat. But these ants, I'm convinced, were playing offense. They wanted to take us down. We painstakingly ran through the forest to a clearing where we pulled off our shoes and, one by one, removed the ants that had a painful death grip on small patches of skin. Even as we squeezed them off, they bit our hands leaving these little raised red spots all over us. Fortunately we didn't see them again and made it the rest of the short way to our sleeping quarters:
We bravely ascended a flimsy looking ladder to get to the raised tree platform where we would spend the night. We unpacked our meager belongings, spread out towels and sheets, had a late night snack of bread and cheese spread with some water before journaling, reading, exploring the self-timing option on Thien Vinh's new camera, and eventually falling asleep to the jungle cacophony of insects and the occasional howling mammal.

We woke up the next morning to a light filled canopy, drowsily looking around at what had been pure blackness the night before. It felt magical to be up so high, but because we had a bus to catch from Cape Coast, we had to skedaddle pretty quickly.
We stopped to see some of the very interesting flora along the way including what was described to us (almost certainly a lie) the tallest tree in West Africa








We were also able to spot and avoid these little bastards so they couldn't bite us up more. There was one ant attack, but Thien Vinh only got bitten once and there were no casualties













We also saw this tree, pretty cool, whose roots pull up so much water during the night that if you cut an exposed one first thing in the morning you can full a liter bottle without much trouble. Good to know if you are ever wandering around a Ghanaian rainforst. This tree is called the umbrella tree because its leaves fall in bunches that look like umbrella covers.




The last plant we stopped to see and sample was a cocoa pod, the base ingredient for chocolate much revered by people around the world. The pods come off of the trunk of the tree and are this bright yellow color with white pulp surrounding big purple seeds. You put a seed in your mouth and suck off the white pulp before spitting it out. It tastes like lychee to me, if I had to compare it to something. The bitter seeds are also dried as the first step toward making yummy chocolate.
When we returned to the village, we said farewell to the people we'd met, got our taxi back to the nearest town and a tro-tro from there back to Cape Coast. At that point we were pretty hungry and looked for two restaurants that the Brandt guidebook told us about that didn't exist before giving up and going back to the same beach-front resort and ordering mini pizzas and vegetable curry. Shortly thereafter, we taxied back to the bus station and hopped on a big windowed bus to make the ride home. I met a couple from USC medical school studying for 6 weeks at the teaching hospital in Accra. They were very friendly, and it was fun for me to talk about Ghana and sound a little bit knowledgeable, because I'm confused here so much of the time.

As a special bonus for reading so far, here are updated pictures of what my room looks like (there should be green sheets on the bed, but they were drying after being washed). Stay tuned because next week there will be storied of elephants and waterfalls with lots of pictures, now that I know how to make them big :-)