volta region

A few weekends ago, I travelled with the International Programmes Office at the University with about 40 other international students to the Volta Region of Ghana. The Volta Region is on the eastern side of Ghana, pretty close to Togo. Lake Volta is the largest man-made lake in the world…just a little fact for you there!

The beginning of the trip was amazing, minus the having to be on the bus by 4:45am part (even though we left an hour after we were supposed to…typical). However, the bus was air-conditioned (amazing!) AND we were served breakfast and cold orange juice. We first went to a monkey sanctuary at a small village. The sanctuary was started by a Canadian as a development project, to both get tourists into the area to improve the living conditions of the village and to preserve nature and the monkeys. We got to feed the monkeys bananas…it was so fun! Next we traveled to Wli Waterfall, the largest waterfall in West Africa. It was beautiful. Many of the other students went swimming underneath the waterfall, but I stayed back and climbed up some rocks to get a better view of the falls. While I was sitting there, a rainbow appeared at the bottom of the falls…it was amazing.

Then the trip got a little more exciting. We packed back into the two buses to drive about five hours back to the place we were going to stay at night…huts on a beach! However, that didn’t exactly happen….First, the bus I was on ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Why the driver didn’t fill up earlier, no one knows. So, everyone on my bus piled out and found random things to do….people starting kicking around a soccer ball, some went exploring, others (including myself) climbed on top of the bus (there is a ladder because often suitcases are put up there or people sit up there on trips) and laid there. About 40 minutes later, the other bus of international students came back with gas to fill our bus up until we found the next gas station. So, we then continued on our journey to find a gas station and filled up so we wouldn’t get stuck in the middle of nowhere again.

About 30 minutes later, we stopped at yet another gas station so the other bus could fill up…why he didn’t fill up when we filled up is still a mystery to me. By this time, it was 6pm, which was when we were supposed to have arrived at a town from which we would take a boat ride to an island where we would stay at beach huts…unfortunately we were about five hours behind schedule. We continued on our journey, got lost on our attempt to find dinner, continued on our journey again, our bus backed into the other bus by accident on one of our random stops which no one had any idea why we were stopping (whoops), and got lost again on our way to find our beach huts (and backed into a tree, whoops again).

We finally arrived in the town after 11pm, and unfortunately by this time it was lightning and very windy. They wanted us to take a canoe to the island, but Aasiya and Moses (the people who work at the International Progammes Office) decided it wasn’t a good idea to take a rickety canoe in the dark during a lightning storm. So, they left all us sitting on the ground next to the bus to try and find accommodation, and while we were waiting, the power in the entire town went out. Perfect. I found the whole situation absolutely hilarious. And actually, the power going out was the perfect opportunity to see the stars from the top of the bus!

The 40 of us were split up into two hotels, with most of us sleeping 3 or 4 in a double bed. My room even had air conditioning! The hilarity of the weekend continued as the water in our bathroom stopped working…the power in our hotel went on and off several times…all 40 of us crammed into a tiny room to eat breakfast the next morning, to have the waiter bring out a plate of 5 pieces of toast at one time….We eventually ended up getting to the beach on Sunday, and it was wonderful. The 40 of us had to go to the island in three separate shifts on the canoe because it was ‘safer,’ but on the way back all of us fit into the same canoe. No use in asking why… Oh, Ghana :)