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on Pat in Zebilla (Ghana), 04/Mar/2010 10:28, 34 days ago
At Christmas I travelled with 4 other volunteers from this area via Kumasi to Koforidua to join other volunteers for the holiday. A volunteer who lives in Koforidua and has a large house offered to host us and the group grew and grew! There were 19 of us, working in different areas all over Ghana, gathered together for Christmas lunch. The men grabbed the barbeque tools and looked after the chicken, beef kebabs and sausages. Others of us chopped up vegetables and fruit so there was rice, lots of salad&jacket potatoes too. And fruit salad for dessert. A real feast. We played a Secret Santa game and all ended up with a gift, some more desirable than others!In Kumasi on the way to Koforidua I visited the cultural centre there and looked down on the market, supposedly the largest in West Africa, but left exploring that for another time.A couple of days after Christmas 11 of us set off travelling, heading firstly to Benin. We had some fluent French speakers amongst us which made arranging transport, haggling over prices and getting hotel rooms very much easier. In Benin we visited Ouidah, once the capital of the slave trade and now the centre of voodoo worship, and Abomey, where the Kings of Dahomey had their palace. We then went to the capital, Porto Novo, for New Year and visited a stilt village on New Year‘s Day. After that it was back to Togo. We stayed in a seminary in Togoville on Lake Togo (the hotel was too expensive and there was little else on offer) and then went to Kpalime in the hills. It was lovely to walk in the forest and see hundreds of brightly coloured butterflies and we also visited some waterfalls where you could cool off under the cascade. Back across the border in Ghana we went to Hohoe in the Volta region. While there we visited the Wli Falls where you can swim and there are about half a million bats, climbed Mount Afadjato, Ghana’s highest mountain, and then visited the Akosombo Dam and Lake Volta.People left the main group at various stages of the trip so there were eventually just four of us who needed to travel back northwards from the Akosombo. We heard that the long distance buses were all booked up and so embarked on a tro tro marathon to get back. Seven tro tros, lots of Fan Yogos (strawberry iced yoghurt) and an overnight stay in Techiman later I reached Zebilla!So it’s been an interesting, very different and very warm Christmas and New Year.Problems with my password have meant that there's been a bit of a gap between writing this and posting it!