Hey, Hey

Just a bunch of still pictures of the Mona Monkeys. 'Cause you just can't have enough of them.

East of Volta

When we went to visit the mona monkeys we also did some excellent hiking up in the hills east of Lake Volta. Our resort (really a collection of dowdy cabins) was perched on the lip of steep hill, looking across a deep valley at one of the highest peaks in Ghana. Each evening an impressive electrical storm blew up the valley and in the morning it was shrouded in mist.

From our front door we could just start walking — climbing, really — down into the valley where a swift creek burbled under the canopy of green.

But the real adventure was on the top and backside of the peak across the valley. Just short of the peak (off camera to the right in the top photo) was one of the most charming little villages we have encountered here.

Down to the waterfall from the village is a steep hike, a very steep hike, often involving repelling by rope off the muddy hillside.

The decent down the far side of the hill brings you to the middle of a waterfall. The falls drop several hundred metres to a pool and then drop another several hundred metres to the valley floor. We are at the midway point. I'm one of the tiny heads relaxing in the pool.

The water was cool and clear, but the rejuvenating effects were quickly gone as we retraced out steps up to the village.

We bought a car!

What I really wanted was one of these:

They are everywhere. My friend Ralf jokes that if his country had one WWII everyone would get to drive one of these. (It's a joke. IT'S A JOKE!) But the idea of no air bags, no crumple zone, no air conditioning counted against it. On the other hand, you can get one for about $1500. And when else was I going to drive a beetle.

So instead we got this:

A Toyota Yaris. It provides a number of firsts for me: first automatic transmission, first sedan (called here a saloon car). And while my eye was tempted away from the beetles by any number of exotic French, Chinese, Indian, and Korean cars that aren't available in North America, this one came with a great price and a great track record (I bought it from a friend).

Mona Monkeys

Way back in I think October we went on a road trip into the hills east of Lake Volta. Daniel, a visiting Fulbright scholar, organized a bus load of us and we set out for an eco-resort. Daniel's partner and his young daughter where visiting, and the real point of the whole trip was to fulfill his daughter's desire to see monkeys.

So the highlight of the weekend was visiting a jungle reserve rich with tourist-friendly mona monkeys. Once considered sacred, and hence protected, their new-found protection is their ability to charm tourists.

Only steps off the road, and armed with bananas, we are swarmed by about 20 monkeys ready to disarm us, who play and climb all over us until they are too full of banana, and then will have nothing further to do with us.

Video courtesy of Richmond Kwesi

A new leaf

Many of you have urged us, repeatedly, to keep up the posts. My sister, Vandy, was the first to suggest the technique of posting one (and only one, if necessary) picture a day with one (and only one, if necessary) sentence. Well, here is one picture and six sentences.

The day before I flew to Canada our adopted house cat, Little Thing, gave birth to two littler things. And the day before I returned home, Anna-Marie reports, they transformed from tiny blobs into real, honest to goodness, playful kittens.

Anna-Marie is off to Spain with the camera (and charger) for two weeks, and I didn't get a chance to upload more recent pictures of the kittens so you will have to make do with this one day old portrait.

DAY 4 THURSDAY

EXPLORING NEW BRIGHTON


I walked into the little town of New Brighton today. It has an impressive number of fish and chip shops, several thrift stores, a really great public library, and not much else. It feels a bit like new year's day there — a place where the party always seems to have happened yesterday and everyone's in denial about clean up. But I don't want to give the impression that I don't like it here because I'm quite enamoured of New Brighton. I like that its not a manicured resort town where I feel as if I took a wrong turn and ended up in the Truman Show. I like it that the library staff are not a bit interested in enforcing the rule about limiting internet use to thirty minutes, and that the backpacker's hostel serves breakfast all day. Hell, I like it that there is a backpacker's hostel. I like it that people stop to chat when I walk on the beach.

Kid's surf school.

Kid's surf school.

The very cool library.

New Brighton's main street.

Surfers head out.

*     *     *

I stopped for a haircut and asked for it short and boy-like so it will take a while to grow out. I usually feel most like "me" with short hair but in Ghana its difficult to find someone who knows how to cut obruni hair.

Me: Let’s go really short, say, something between Baby Boy’s First Haircut and a Rockstar With Bedhead.

Stylist: You mean like Justin Beiber?

Me: (Unsure if she is being ironic.) New look or last look?

Stylist: New.

Me: Oh. In Canada, I live really near Justin Beiber’s hometown.

Stylist: Gosh! How exciting! That’s really awesome!

Me: I think many of us are real tired of him.

Stylist: (Silence.)

Me: (Now that I’ve stuffed my foot in my mouth, I try not to bite down.) Uh, maybe something like Pete Doherty meets Lawrence Welk?

Call me Beiber-Marie.

DAY 3 WEDNESDAY

(MORE) COMMUNITY and the KINDNESS of STRANGERS


COMMUNITY in MICROCOSM

I lived with four other people on Mabel One, the ground floor of one of the residences our group was assigned at the University of Cantebury. This training was the most international I have attended and my floormates – an American living in Australia, one Brit, a woman from Spain and another from Australia, as well as me, a Canadian living in West Africa – were typical of the group’s diversity.

My floormate Annie is lovely in all possible senses. I like it when she talks about her life because I get a sense of someone who has worked out for herself what it means to live with integrity. Annie plays Hare Krishna chants loud in her room and misses her kids a ton. So does Alicia at the other end of the hall. Miss her kids, I mean. Alicia plays bands like Maroon 5 under headphones while reading the training manual. We talk a lot about the similarities between our families and lives in Alicia’s native Louisiana and Nova Scotia, my ground zero. Both turn out to be the kind of brilliant people you can borrow cash from and talk with about what constitutes a good moisturizer while loading washing machines.

I think Tony is a kind of bodyworker wizard who can synthesize complex ideas across modalities and make it look easy. And he’s fun, too, in that zany bodyworker kind of way: one night he stuck his hand under my hip bone and pressed something that caused my whole left leg to feel as if it were being played like a fiddle. By the end of the training I was kind of addicted to the sound of Tony's laugh.

Gloria is tiny and quiet until she laughs, at which point she seems large because she laughs with her whole body, as if mirth were a static charge. I see this same charge when she dances. I admire her for several reasons, not least because English is not her first language and, demanding as the training is, I can’t imagine having to deal with the mental fatigue that comes with trying to operate in a second language.

Tony

Gloria & Annie

Alicia

I’m posting this with a shout out to my floor-mates — gold stars, you beautiful people, for being the reason our residence changed from mere accommodation to a temporary home.

The KINDNESS of STRANGERS 2

I took the bus into Christchurch today to see a show at the Museum, then walked through the botanic gardens and along Riccarton Road to the shopping mall. My camera battery died and I needed to find a place that sells Canon cameras to ask if they can charge it. At one store, I meet a guy named Adam who tells me to go to another store to ask his friend Lance to charge the battery. Lance isn’t there, but John is, and since John recommended Lance for his job, and since Lance says Adam is a great guy, and since I am friend of Adam’s, no problem. (Well, okey dokey to all that.) John mined the packaging of a new Canon for its charger and I left the battery for the night. 

When I returned the next day, I handed John a ten-dollar bill and suggested that using it to buy a beer after work might be a good idea. Based on the amount of times he said, “Really?,” I get the idea John is chuffed, just over-the-top happy about this, and I get a glimpse of what someone looks like when their instinct is to do a nice thing is completely unmotivated by potential reward, and a reward arrives anyway. 

John decides between lager and ale.