We never did update our cycling journal, did we? With only six hours left here in Africa, a month since our cycling tour has finished, and my total apathy towards adding even the first entry in April tells me that there is precious little time to complete the shenanigans of writing about all of that now; instead this blog update coming on feels more like a photo whirlwind good-bye to ghana followed by the cycling journals first entry. It’s a doozy, so sit back, relax, and think up some nasty things to write in the comments section at the end…

For five weeks Kirstin hosted a group of Amnesty International students and we were obliged to play with them.

(The family here in Bolgatanga, Ghana)

(just a cuddle bunny)

(the tree-planting gang in a village higher up than ours)

(african elephants)

(suspended canopy walkway)

and now:

THE cyclying tour journal...

(Right click and "save as" the above image to download the GoogleEarth file)


Bolgatanga (Ghana) – Leo (Burkina Faso)

West Africa is not a particularly popular place among living things whom choose to parade a thriving lifestyle bountiful in extravagance and grandiose reproductive prosperity. No, that attitude is better suited for lands and individuals radiating far away from here –places not dominated by an ever-encroaching Sahara desert. Here people, plants, and all furry or scaly or feathery or slimy little creatures hang on to life by the thinnest of thirsty threads and, I expect, are wondering why they didn’t just decide to go evolve somewhere else for awhile; perhaps somewhere nice and moist and tropical. It’s true that life is everywhere here, but in this post-harmattan/pre-rainy season western part of Africa the land is dry, the roads are long, lonely, unchanging, & dusty, and the air is void of breezes, sounds, and activity…it is into this environment that we begin our bicycle ride: Kirstin on her hand-painted electrical-taped mountain bike and I on a single-speed.

We are starting this ride as three: Kirstin, Me, and Sampato. The first two you know; Sampato is new to this blog. He is, by trade, a motorcycle mechanic. He is, by passion (and by "passion" I mean "hope"), a mango farmer, bee keeper, and cafe proprietor. Motorcycles he fixes, mango trees he is growing, bees he is planning, and cafes he is dreaming. As a friend of Kirstin's she had hoped we would meet him upon our initial arrival here in Northern Ghana. However, when we arrived there we heard of the bad news: he and his wife were caught in a house fire, his wife is okay but Sampato is in a village hospital badly burned while struggling to survive. Wow. A sadness crept over the next few days and we wondered if we would ever meet this quiet friend and, subsequently, benefit from his groovy furniture making skills.

Imagine how surprised I was when, a few days later, I met Sampato, not mummied up in body bandages or glowing, lifeless, and hovering inches above my bed at night as I might only have expected, but on a 100 mile bike ride away from his village standing on Kirstin’s doorstep smiling and greeting us. Er? “Is this the fellow that is supposed to be dying?” I enquire. I was assured by distant burn marks on his arms and legs that he was either 1. a walking ghost or 2. a product of a glorified and badly researched sensational African rumor.

He was alive, in perfect health, and of one of those rare African breeds that’s does (and enjoys) traveling long distances via bicycle.

A few days later he greeted us with a gift of honey from his village. A gallon jug of honey. Delicious, raw, direct-from-the-bee, dark and chunky honey itching to be eaten by the spoonfuls by dripping gooey smiles. When we learned that our ride out of Ghana could be routed through Sampato's honey-saturated village we jumped at the opportunity to have him take us there. And that first bit is what you're about to read.

We have two months to ride to Africa’s northwestern coast; if all goes as planned we’ll pass through a handful of countries, eat plenty of fantastic (if not mysterious) food, and hopefully (please please please) find our path blocked time after time by wild baboons, lions, elephants, and crocodiles. But to begin this trek we must first learn to befriend our bicycles, practice dodging confused goats and chickens on the road, navigate the process of requesting a village spot of earth to sleep on, and always hope for the days-end bath.

Looking at the map Sampato’s village (Tarsaw) appears to be about 170 kilometers away on roads marked "secondary roads" & "other roads or tracks or trails." That description leaves a lot to the imagination. Sampato calls these roads "bicycle roads." I think that sounds perfect. And so we begin our ride with a well-equipped guide loaded to the gills with motorcycle parts to bring health to the motorcycles of the needy people of far away lands home to remote villages where nature and the radio still compete for human attention.

The road out of Bolgatanga is a good road. We would find pavement all the way to Sandema about 70 km away. It should be noted: the next two months of this journey we are expecting a lot of savanna and an opportunity to be well acquainted with the sun. Imagine how pleasantly surprised we were to be zipping through a cool, paved, tree-shadowed corridor. Don’t get used to it. Don’t get used to it. Don’t get used to it.

Reaching Sandema the day was growing late so we collected food in town with the plan to pedal on a few more kilometers and then hole up some place in the bush. That someplace turned out to be a farming field attached to a quaint house of a nice gentleman and his family. The food we gathered in town and brought to camp looked real nice…but it wasn't.

The beans were scrumptious but they suggested regurgitation once we realized they housed "beans worms." Had any of the beans wanted to stay down, and we disagreed, we could send the pepper sauce down to renegotiate the deal because it tasted a few weeks past fresh, in the soup swam dead bits of animal bones that we gave to Sampato to consider, and the bagged hibiscus juice for dessert was bloating its bag so urgently that whatever was fermenting inside must have felt that fermenting outside would suit it better. Drinking that would have really sent someone running for a place to be sick. Had there been anyone to return the food to we would have, which there wasn’t, had they been around they wouldn't have taken it back.

Only the fried Yam chips could be eaten but not without a hunger for nutrition.

Aside from discontented stomachs, sleeping was comfortable and starry. Only the women who joined the household around midnight and started up a fight could stir us from our dreamless sleep.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

If it wasn't for the countless NGOs (non-governmental organizations) working in their selfless manner to bring fresh water to the far-out villages of west Africa, not only would people have a considerably more challenging shot at surviving in this dry region, we would warily be filtering water out of disappearing pools of unthinkably murky water. Thankfully (for us, maybe not for the ecosystem grotesquely unbalanced by the unnatural human population) these organizations have erected an army of groundwater pumps coincidently everywhere that we have needed a water bottle filled.

(wow, those little fellers are letting me do it myself!)

From far away we know those sparkling metals and vibrant colors as aluminum pails and the vibrant dresses of the village woman grouped around a single pump balancing these oversized bowls unwaveringly on their heads. They can trek 100 pounds of water along rooted pathways and through winding village alleyways, without faltering, home to wash their family's clothes, cook their family's food, and bath their family's persons. I can't imagine how much work it is to fetch the necessary water because I’ve never had to properly do it –haul it in on my head– and so we roll up on our fancy bicycles and fill comparably half the weight in water in our own the bags. On such occasions, arrival at these hand-pumps there are greetings exchanged while a million small children materialize out of the trees to form a tightly knit circle around us. Enclosed in this nest our bottles are snatched anonymously from our hands like juicy bits of meat, filled, returned by raggedy T-shirts and grinning teeth and typically we are grudgingly freed with a full load of mineral-rich groundwater jiggling in the bags.

Cuisine report:
This morning it was off to a wonderful breakfast of bambara beans and a bowl of porridge served from underneath a non-descript baobab tree. Mmmmm.

Not-Mmmmmmm was Sampato's addiction to coffee and his need to mix the instant stuff in with his mealy porridge. Echhh.

Soon the dirt road turned to alternating double and single track and occasionally a push through a dry river bed. There gets to be a point as the road degrades when tourists, and by extension white people, no longer frequent its passage. At a certain point white people like us are no longer a curiosity but something to be reckoned with. We sat with a chief who asked us for groovy village installments like buildings and well pumps. Hmm, how about a mango? Adults demand our attention for a fleeting greeting or full fledged (non-English) conversation whilst children either appear in masses to quietly gaze at our passing or run away in fits of screaming horror upon seeing my preposterous white face and Kirstin's devilish blond braids.

Fortunately as the road narrows to bike paths so too does man’s influence. The scenery is becoming beautiful. Without enough people to cut them down the trees around here are obliged to grow and reproduce creating diverse arid forests. With these trees come loads of birds singing their songs. But no big wild animals yet.


In Nobalo, a village approaching Sampato’s, he was surrounded by about everyone with a motorcycle. We rolled in early enough, but he was up past midnight fixing everything from carburetors, to tailpipes, to tires, with not much more than a hammer. We slept on the floor of someone’s house and ate wonderfully crafted vegetarian food by special request.

It was with a heavy heart that the town waved him goodbye the next morning in the form of motorbikes yet to be repaired. He would return, he promised, as we puttered away from an adorable town of mango trees and honey bees.

Before noon we would arrive in Sampato’s village, Tarsaw, and settle in to his house. Here is a village life that we find endearing but our friend with a nomadic heart finds it a stranglehold on life.

His story (though it seems to change from time-to-time) is something like this. When Sampato was a small boy his Uncle died and, through whatever means that made sense to the elders, his uncle’s wife was passed to him. More of a mother than a wife, and more of an elderly lady than a teenage girl, she kicked over awhile later easing the way for Sampato’s newer wife to climb the wife hierarchy. She was hand picked by the old lady-wife, and was described by Sampato at first as very “hogly”. She came from another village, (something something something) Sampato's village is mad at him and his family for marrying incorrectly, (something something something), the wife’s village is mad at the husbands village and now everybody is in trouble. Life at home is a bummer for awhile, things don’t look so bright for the future, and then through magical means which I never understood, amends are made and everything is okay again. Our friend is still searching for his “chosen wife” and would probably leave everything he has built with wife number two if he found someone better (ie an American, or a rich woman that he could ride bikes around and drink coffee with.)

(Cracking Peanuts)

But still the family isn’t happy and remains together for the sake of tradition and social reasons. Remember the burning of the house? A result of his wife tipping a kerosene lantern over in the bedroom. According to Sampato, his wife is threatening to leave with the children if he can't raise the money to replace the burned away roof. It’s about nine square feet of wood or aluminum covering.

Yikes! If only divorce was always so colorful, eh?

Crazy as a loon the woman may be, but she sure can cook. Another special order vegetarian village cooked meal proves to me that Ghanaian food is fantastic –provided it doesn’t have meat in it –which it nearly always does.

And that's not just me poo-pooing on dead animal food. Meat can be cooked deliciously, I’ve known a few eel rolls in my life that can agree, however Ghanaian meat dishes are dreadful. For whatever reason they choose to chop up meat into its most pathetic cuts, let it sit long enough in the open air for the repulsive flavors to replace the good ones, and then cook it in a stew so these tastes overrule the delectable spices and mashed up veggies of the soup. But not everyone can afford hunks of boiled goat spine in their stew and that's when sun-curled, time roasted, and smashed miniature fish is added for flavoring, nutrient and that fun little crunch of bones, eyeballs and gills. I guess it’s an acquired taste, however, because there isn’t a Ghanaian out there that doesn’t love their goat and fish stew.

We spent two nights in Tarsaw touring the area, meeting the people, eating food, doing laundry, etc. etc. just to prove how boring it really was. But the Mango tree kept me on my toes. Growing in the courtyard of Sampato’s house this giant tree provided shade for the day and pleasantly rustling leaves of the night. However, always there was the restlessness in the background of my mind that I would be struck. “WHAM!” would go the tin roof when a mango crashed down onto it thus jerking me upright from my relaxed position. “FLOPST!” say the mangos when they hit the ground. A whistling and then, “KONK!...Flop” is the sound I wait to hear when one sails out of a tree and bashes me or Kirstin on the head.
Before leaving Tarsaw for Ghana’s border with Burkina Faso our host fulfilled his promise and packed my Camelbak with two liters of the darkest, richest, rawest honey I'll likely ever suck out of a hose. Mmmmm, that will power us far on this journey for sure.

The Border to Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso)

Cuisine Report:
Crossing the border from the English-colonized Ghana to the French-colonized Burkina Faso was undramatic in all ways except for one: the change of food (ah, and the switch from English to French. That one left me both deaf and dumb). Suddenly in place of street food choices of mammaly beans & rice or nasty fishy beans & rice we had spaghetti, fresh salads, mangos, yoghurt and baguettes to feast on. And feast we did.

(I remember one campsite in particular, I call it Entomology camp. The number of insects scurrying under the leaves was astounding. The diversity in ant types was staggering though everyone else had me running for safety in the tent.)

We made the decision to keep our bikes off the few super highways of west Africa that connect major cities in the best way that single-laned - pot-hole-peppered roads do. Planning to stay away from using these routes wasn’t necessarily because the drivers of them tend swerve away from road blemish and into cyclists, or that they swerve away from other swerving cars and into cyclists, or that they swerve around animals and into cyclists, rather it was the peace and serenity of the clean air and simple village life of the long dirt roads of which these grimy highways have come to replace.

Every day riding these dirt roads through every village feels to us like riding through an endless parade where we are the main attraction on the greatest float amongst the most excitable crowds. Every aware adult in sight of the road (and there are a lot of them) requires a wave and a "Bon jour." Every shopkeeper, every pedestrian carrying on their heads logs, bricks or chickens, every woman pumping water, every circle of outdoor boozers (and there are a lot of them), and every person sitting for no other purpose but to sit (and there are more of them than anyone) requires a wave without which they are offended and will certainly cast a wicked Ju-Ju spell on some of our more critical bicycle components. The waves and the greeting are manageable, even friendly and welcoming the first half of a day; it’s the kids that drive us nuts. It’s the kids that can make a peace-lover turn violently wicked. Like a bear smells honey, and with 100x the ambition of an American child racing for an ice cream truck, the children of the villages come tearing out of their sedentary lives making for the road. From there they choose to either stand on the road's edge screaming and waving like rabid banshees or, if they sense our fear, come chasing after us down the road with sadistic little intentions of fulfilling that same cardinal desire that is quenched when an able-bodied someone with a foot fetish competes in a tickle competition against paraplegics. All the while, and without fail, the children chant their little song of "Tu-Ba-Boo, Tu-Ba-Boo, Tu-Ba-Boo." We assume that means "foreigner," maybe even, "hello foreigner, welcome to our village, so nice of you to roll through," but more likely it's just a way for these rotten little kids to skirt around the imposed social rules of “respect for one’s elders” to taunt faceless foreigners devoid of social status and feeling.

But they're not all little monsters (yes, they are). Village kids living along roads-less-traveled are quiet, polite, and totally fascinated by us and our gadgetry. When we actually stop the float, dismount, and materialize into real people the adults are friendly and the kids form a village-sized circle of curious and unwavering eyes that crowd in close enough to squeeze oranges. And then they just stand there and stare; fascinated by our smallest movements such as drinking water, scratching our heads, or checking the power levels of our soar panels charging an iPod which is transmitting an fm radio station to a radio we have playing an audio book. Kirstin tends to break the spell by asking one of the elders to have the gelatinous human fortification do a song and dance routine until we're ready to leave. That gets them shaking up a bit.

Ooh ooh: Mango consumption has increased heavily since we entered Burkina Faso and its smaller villages. Ghana offers little that resembles an edible mango –more of a pale yellow stringy capsule of goo– but Burkina is swimming in deliciously perfect Mango trees glutton with beautifully perfect mangos and these backwater Burkina villages are absolutely drowning in them. At 20 CFA each, or about $.03, they’ve become quite the bargain and the staple fuel to power our riding.

Today while resting under a tree eating a few of these mangos a strange little fellow walking this long lonely dirt road stops and is offered a drink of water by Kirstin; he returns the favor by offering us small packets of what looked like heroin. We politely refused.

Evening time and riding through the village of Klesso we stopped for rice and stew. A short conversation later a gentleman had invited us to stay the night with him and his family along with the hinted possibility of dinner. We accepted.

A simple and traditional village it was and his, Seidu is his name, house fit in as it circled around a mango tree. Making up the complex were his mama and papa Smurf parents, a kitchen, wood shed, and outdoor shower with walls high enough to cover ones navel. We greeted the elders of the town, were on display for the village children (despite Seedu continually whacking them with sticks and throwing rocks), bathed, rested, and Kirstin conversed in French. After nightfall Seidu had disappeared for some time eventually returning with our choice of dinner being held by the feet: A chicken, small hen, or Guinea Fowl. Groovy but our vegetarian lifestyle scored us a pot of spaghetti noodles (with traces of veggies and seasoning) instead.

(scroll through the panorama above)

Tinkling one house behind us his brother tapped away on a balophone setting the mood. A balophone is much like a xylophone but instead of metal its keys are made of local hardwood and underneath each is a calabash (a gourd) echo chamber. And so to candlelight and local music we feasted on spaghetti and baguettes in a little African village in the middle of nowhere. We were told, too, that sure they have driven through before, but we were the first whiteys to stay in the village.

Oh, and late that night Kirstin rose to use the potty in the bushes about 25ft away, disoriented herself, wandered helplessly through houses for a good 30 minutes looking for us. Finally, surrendering and prepared to curl up snug with some chickens and pass the night warmed by pigs she noted the searching beam of Seidu's flashlight and managed to stumble home without having to resort to the chicken/pig plan.

Seidu and his family represented the amiable hospitality Africa is famous for, it’s a shame he cornered us the next morning as we waited out the rain and repeatedly asks us for the money to rebuild his house. Was it more of an insult to give him only the $2?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A week into our trip and we reached our first goal: Bobo-Dioulasso where our American friend Biko put us up for a few days of recuperation with live music, the river, chocolate croissants, wine, and laundry.

That was good fun. But from there we didn't know what to do. Head north into Mali toward Bamako and then farther north still into Senegal were the road is reported to become very dull, or, head west into Guinee were the mountais are spectacular but the county is ebbing and flowing between peace and a violant political revolution?

Next Time...

Ryan Writing:
March 20th-ish

It should be noted in that famed book of world records that it is the Ghanaians who are the friendliest people on Earth. The tourism board in Thailand will fight that claim; self proclaimed American southern hospitality hasn’t done much over the past few hundred years to defend their title; the Eskimos would have a chance at the record but for the baby seal vote; and it should be noted, too, that the lecherous drunken Ghanaian men don’t do much to perpetuate their country's stereotype; but overall my vote is for these quiet west-Africans whose cultural habits demand excessive greetings, prolific hugging, and will, literally, give you the food they are eating and the shirt off their backs; a place where just being nice isn’t good enough. Not being a nice foreigner, then, should be the ultimate taboo but who would know when the response is always so blastedly friendly?

Cola nuts. Makes you all funny when you eat them.

Like nearly every African nation Ghana’s history is marred by pain, fortune, difficulties, and foreigners…and generally tends to be lost on me almost entirely. But I do know the following: 1) its Independence from British rule dates back 50 years and about two weeks from the time of this writing. 2) its British colonialism originates at a time when white people thought black slavery was a pretty neat idea and therefore decided to send Ghanaians all over the world to do really rotten work, 3) slave exporting began when it was realized that, instead of gold & silver, people were easier and more profitable to mine out of the hills, and 4) I also know that the cocoa bean was, and still is, a really groovy export despite the fact that the chocolate for sale here is shit (not literally, but there is plenty of something like poo for sale. Apparently it’s good for heating food and painting your house with).

We’re pretty much equatorial, here, too. Missed it by a few degrees, but we’re close enough not to have much of a cold-to-hot shift between winter and summer though not close enough to be confused by which way the water is supposed to swirl down the sink. Mostly it’s just hot…and the water always swirls clockwise. There’s rain sometimes as well, but that doesn’t stop it from being hot. Or so I’ve heard. All that my experience can offer is what we are experiencing now: Harmattan. If you, the reader, have any friends who are professional sandblaster dudes then this is a word you may want to pass on to them. They could use it in some early morning jokes like, "So, this guy walks onto a construction site and says, ‘krikey, has someone already started sandblasting in here?’ and the other guy says, ‘oh no, it’s just Harmattan’". They could all get a good laugh because the other workers probably know what it’s like when the southerly winds blow off the Sahara desert bringing with it endless amounts of sandy dust keeping the skies a hazy brown and the nose a mortared cylinder of concrete.

However, I’m told that Harmattan is ending soon and that saddens me, not because I’ll miss the limited visibility and rock-solid snot rockets, but because as the Harmattan departs the rains come. When the rains come it is said that the freaking sweet trails that snake everywhere across the landscape are bogged down in mud. This probably pleases the toads that make a mess of our garden but it ruins the super cool and equally direct pleasure of riding bicycles to town, to someone’s house, or to that-mountain-over-there that makes getting groceries like some sort of psychotic mountain bike cross-county race.

Here in Bolga it is peaceful. Peaceful, at least, in the way that chicken clucking is soothing, neighboring morning (every morning) drumming is calming, and the persistent pleading of the kids here to wash our dishes, sweep our house, and water the garden evokes a desire to sit back and let things happen.

They really do do that, the kids. After school there are no video games to play with or Kool-Aid to get high from. Only the excitement of cleaning Aunty Kirstin and Uncle Ryan’s house. "Are there any more bowls for washing?" "Uncle, can we do the watering?" And they do a good job. And they’ll do about whatever you tell them to do. It boggles the westernized mind but gets the dog washed.

And they really do that, too, the neighbors. I don’t know why, or who, but every morning someone, somewhere off in the distance is bonging around on a bunch of drums. It’s cool. Makes one wake up and look around for tigers or headhunters with bones through their noses.

What else…? Funny words! Of the many things Ghanaians probably do brilliantly certainly one of them is screwing with the English language. About everyone speaks English, but everyone also speaks it a little funny. It’s some sort of coded version of English that they use to filter out intruders or perhaps to get back at us for popularizing Celine Dion, Phil Collins, and evangelical Christianity. Those travelers not scruffy enough to have figured out how to buy a mirror probably haven’t yet asked for a Milor in the market, or drank fresh mulk from a cow, have already run out of flim for their cameras, and likely are still in need of odolic oil for all of their hydraulic needs. They may have been already confused when a Ghanaian gestured at their shoulder while complaining of a pain in their hand or mentioned the need of new shoes for their legs. Too bad that this unfortunate traveler has missed the opportunities to think these misunderstandings through while waiting for someone to return after a brief, "I’m coming…" never to be seen again.

Where has all this been leading? That’s right, a journal of our time so far in Ghana! Being here in Africa I would like to be reporting a brain-hemorrhaging amount of excitement, near misses with death, mass chaos, continued cerebral stimuli, dogs and cats sleeping together…but I'm not. Instead life has been unexpectantly... domestic. Even if it is a pile of mud, a lot of our attention is spent making it a nice pile of mud. A mud pile for living in. A house. And a really nice house it is. Having gotten running water, 90% of a self-composting toilet, 70% of a remodeled kitchen, wall fans, a garden, bookshelves, beds, and a really groovy crocodile-mosaiced-outdoor-shower we’re feeling pretty cozy. See, domestic. At least as domestic as one can get while sharing a house with countless well-to-do toads in a country where cats and dogs are dinner for most people and the food we feed our cats and dogs is better than most peoples' dinner. Anyway, journaling...
Before we arrived in Bolgatanga I asked Kirstin what it is she does while she is there, "Well, it takes a lot of effort just living" she says. I didn't believe her. Before that I also never had to make tofu out of dried soybeans if I wanted stir-fry, ride 6-miles on a dirt road or trail to get to the nearest market, wash my clothes with water fetched in buckets balanced on my head (now we have piped running water and cause for celebration- possibly a reason to drum all night), or futily sweep the house daily with a floor made of hardened dirt.

In truth I don't have to do these things nearly as much as I should, or at least as much as I should in a house of sexual equality, instead we rely on the kids of the family or well meaning friends over for a visit to offer a hand in our staying alive. It's rare that I have to pull my weight as the dominant sex by referring to Kirstin as a bad Ghanaian housewife for not having cold drinks & dinner ready as soon as we walk in from a hot and tiring bicycle ride.

Watery poo for the garden.

Besides riding our bikes and indulging ourselves in tasty treats we manage additional fun: occasional rock clambering excursions, killer bunny nights, and local festival begoings.

Festival (No cloths allowed. Bath towels okay; feels like a pool party)

And that's about it.

However, in a week’s time we set off for why we've excused ourselves from the rat-race of our normal lives: to ride our bikes as far west as possible. Hopefully that's to Dakar, Senegal with lots of funky cool stories along the way, yo.

Ah, and here is the worst thing about Ghana: its buses. Ghana had to go the extra mile with this one because here it isn't my usual hatred toward buses - the temperature & coziness discomfort or their usual disposition toward killing its passengers- but because of the music videos. The trouble is, if Christianity is correct and good Christians are the only ones allowed to spend eternity together in a nice place called Heaven, then they will surely be playing some pretty groovy music. Because the Ghanaians seem to like Jesus the most out of everyone, then I expect they'll get to play DJ and that means a never-ending stream of obscenely repetitive Ghanaian gospel music videos well into the twilight of forever. And that's what Heaven will be like; a reward of music to all those who worshiped JC. Hell, then, will play the same music for similar reasons.

I think it must be assumed then, that Ghanaian buses driving late into the night are, for someone like Kirstin or I, Hell.

Last night was no exception. Although we paid for the luxury of an AC bus, the driver did not see fit to use it much at all. True hell was realized for the three of us when a two part Nigerian film entitled "executive billionaires" was played at top volume. The bus, with no windows and no AC was stuffy, nauseating and sweaty. And we thought the night would never end. Halfway through the night

Kirstin Writing:

Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Wednesday morning, 7:10am. I am sitting under the thatched roof of my veranda in my most excellent mud mansion. Enjoying a fresh cup of coffee (thanks, mom) prepared in a fancy schmancy stove top coffee maker, (thanks again, mom) and thinking that I should write a few lines in the journal before I forget stuff that has happened since we got up to the north..

Life in the Upper East Region passes both quickly and slowly, at the same time. Yesterday, 50th birthday of Ghana found us in our regional district, Tongo, which is about four miles down the road from our compound. 6th March, as Ghana’s independence day is? called, is a celebration mainly to showcase the militant marching skills of children and teens, as well as a bell and whistle show for big men and other important people. The golden jubilee also saw a charming and impressive traditional dance performed by deaf-?school graduating seniors. A "good" party in Ghana almost always consists of shoddy awnings, plastic chairs and a bad sound system. Yesterday was no exception. We did have fun though, and chowed down on yummy bean cakes? steamed and deep-fried ?in shea butter and doused with hot pepper powder. We bought a watermelon and some bread, hopped on our bikes and flew home on a downhill tailwind. The best thing to do on a hot, dry African afternoon is to take a cool bucket bath with peppermint Dr. Bronner’s (thanks, mom) and take a nap under the fancy new wall mounted fan. Life here can be sweet.




Backtracking, last entry left you hanging at the Mali embassy, wondering if we would get our Mali visas and get out of Accra. We did, and we did. After a freezing cold (air conditioned) bus ride that stretched on for hours, we slept in Kumasi: an infinitely more pleasant and enjoyable city than Accra. The streets are cleaner, quieter and hillier. The commerce areas are bustling with action and you can buy just about anything you can possibly think of including the stuff you definitely don’t want to be thinking of. You can walk everywhere, and it boasts one of the largest open air markets in West Africa. You could spend days just looking at fabric. We spent hours, and walked away with 2 yards each…the all purpose towels (regular towels tend to get stinky here, but a 2 yard wrap does the trick nicely, and you can wear it around the house sarong style. Kumasi is also the heart of the Ashanti region, and my old Peace Corps stomping grounds. Ryan and I walked around the city, ate fresh yogurt, fruit, juice, and generally grazed off the tops of people’s heads. At 7pm, we boarded another air conditioned bus and headed up north.

At about 6:30am, we dropped at Winkogo junction, called the family, and started walking towards the house. Aubrey (an old friend, family member and our general "go-to" guy) met us along the way with the car and picked us to the yard. (Forgive me if my English sounds strange, I’m melting back into my Ghanaian self, happily). Many happy hugs and handshakes later, plus an excited tour of the houses and general reunion with dogs and things, we started settling into life here. The kitchen definitely needed some work; although Linda did well by making sure we had gas in the stove. Clothes were dirty, dishes too.

Why is toothpaste always sold from a wheelbarow?

A pleasant surprise was Biko, American brother to a friend of Linda and mine who lives in Accra. He’s been staying here for the past couple months, learning culture and language, and most importantly for us, building a self composting toilet for my house! Biko grew up on "The Farm", a hippy commune in Tennessee, famous for being one of the most successful communities of its kind in America. Established in the ‘60s, I imagine some of our older readers may even have heard of the place. Anyhow, Biko is endowed with ideas and masonry skills, and he has fashioned a fantastic place for us to free ourselves. Construction should be done soon, and I can’t wait to christen the thing! He’s been good company; we’ll be sorry to see him go. His plan is to leave tomorrow, cycling to Bobo Dioulasso in Burkina Faso to study the art of the Griot for 3 months, and then on to Bamako to hopefully work with none other than African superstar Salif Keita on a hospital project that focuses on Albino patients.
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Last night we hosted an impromptu dinner party for Dan, Howa and Linda. (Dan and Howa are the Ghanaian couple we live with, Linda is our American friend who calls this yard home. Her house is incredible, more on that later.) On the menu was Tobani, a steamed bean cake dipped in fresh spicy tomato sauce (peppe) and a delicious salad complete with dried cranberries, sun dried tomatoes, fancy cheese from London and real lettuce. Good conversation, a few beers, these are the little things that make life nice.

Ryan is settling in nicely as well. We’ve ridden bikes into town, gone to market, stocked up on foodstuffs, and are steadily picking away at fixing up the house. He’s been collecting cow manure with the wheel barrow and bringing it back to the garden that is part of our house, preparing to plant some of the seeds we brought over. We’ve got herbs, veggies and some pretty flowers to grow, and hopefully they’ll be blooming and fruiting by the time the kids get here. Hopefully the house will be kicking ass by the time the kids get here; that is the goal.

For those of you who know people here, everyone sends their greetings back to "Ma Katy", "Pa George" and Jack. Mommy Edwina is down in Accra helping her daughter with her newborn, Bella now lives with family members in town. Kwabena, Suguru and Sunday are all in the yard, as well as a couple of new guys. Dan and Howa are well, and everyone thinks Ryan is great, according to Dan, I "found a real brother" for myself. I think I scored, too!

Well, I can’t spend all day on the computer, there’s things to wash and do, and small boy Zibrim is wanting to play. Until next time…

Ryan Writing:

April 5th
What happens at a Papa Festival is nuts.

Kirstin’s former Peace Corp village, Kumawu, hosts this annual festival of masculine bravery confused, as it ususaly is, by an adrenaline-testaterone cocktail of shear idiocy. Beacuase it hasn’t happened in six years we made the long trip down there kowing that it aught to be a good one. So we went. And here are the results:

Cow=0
Man=1

The day starts with the usual big-important-man parade and ceremonies. And that drags on for a looooooooong time. The stereotypical large umbrellas/fanning of the wealthy person is commmon throughout the day and accentiuated by their twirling and the spinning. I say that this may impress a group of traveling jelly fish but otherwise the massive umbrellas just just block better views and poke people in the eyes for an added laugh. It doesn’t seem uncommon either to bring along your very own dancing midget. They are well trained and needn’t even be on leashes!

The day is also full of funky Ju-Ju magic rituals performed in public and in private by anybody with a dead chicken in their possession, anyone with the predisposition to keep their eyes tightly rolled back in their heads, or anyone else capable of relaxing in a trance-like stupor (being drunk qualifies).

The whole day leads up to about twenty minutes of frenzy which is the Papa Festival, which is this: A bull is slaughtered in the public square, brave (read bug-eyed whack-job) men run up to the animal hacking off a piece of carcass as big as they choose, the person then runs for nearest open building seaking calm and victory. This last bit is made troublesome by an angry mob of audience armed with canes and bloodlust beating the fellow all the way home.

That’s it really. The festival is over when the bull has disappeared. I’m not even sure that a clear winner is ever decided or a maiden available to the victor.

We purposefully skipped the slaughtering of the cow and never penetrated the seathing mass of action that surrounded the hacking up of the cow but we were on the ground armed with cameras as canes and body parts flew through the air. Back from our bike trip I hope videos will be posted here. They're pretty crazy.


That was a little over a week ago. Our plan to follow was to get back home to Bolgatanga as quickly as possible and get ready to close up the hose and leave on our bike ride April 2nd. However, there had been a hang-up: sickness. The three of (Kirstin, myself, and the other American woman, Linda, that lives here on the property) were laid out flat by something very angry in our intestines. I was wriggling about at about 2% energry for two solid days; it is only today, five days later, that Kirstin and Linda are feeling well again. The plan is to leave on our Bicycle ride tomorrow (the 6th).

Off again...

The English? Let's talk about the English while we're here in London. What do we have to say about them? Hmmm...

Hold on, we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's back up and make an introduction to what you, the reader, will be reading here for the next five months (should you stick around that long) --then we'll get on to dragging these Brits through the mud and analyzing their weird little habits (like pancake day and…speaking funny english).

Ryan and Kirstin (further known here as "we") decided to ride their (further known here as "our") bikes through west Africa; it was Kirstin's idea first and Ryan decided he should ride, too. Why not? (no good answer to that one right now, we'll come back to it later if a good answer comes up - which Ryan is sure it won't - unless parasitic worms get involved - which they better not). Here's the basic rundown: planned departure date from the US is February 18th, or rather that was the planned departure date; February 18th has come and gone and, incidentally, taken us with it to London. Where. We plan. Or rather. Planned. To stay for a week. That too has already come and gone with loads of fun and pictures. Some of which you will be experiencing now:

Departing London on the 25th of February we land in Accra, Ghana where we meet up with local friends of Kirstin, Ryan learns about Africa & works on not using his begrudgingly-bought travel insurance, and begin the quest for visas into other countries. From the coastal city of Accra we head north to Kirstin's house, chase out the goats and pigs, spend a few weeks working on the place, then head out for two trying months on a bike ride to Africa's north-western coast in Senegal. We'll be back in Ghana by June 12th so that Kirstin can fly to the U.S. for ten days to export a group of amnesty international kids (a swell time to visit Ryan, smother him in chocolate and attention, and let him act out for you the many cultural faux pas of the region). We then all travel back to Los Angeles July 29th to try and find jobs.

At least that's the plan.

(Holy smoke! We're flying over the Sahara desert right now and let me tell you: it's big looking. Camels may be cute and cuddly but airplanes definitely seem like the best way to navigate the place.)

Right, so, anyway we're about to land in Ghana and haven't said anything here about England. So here goes...

It's a great place to cycle. We got off the train at Heathrow, unpacked the bikes, left some luggage at the airport and headed off down the road under the winter skies London is famous for invoking a pasty complexion onto its white folk. And what can be said about cycling in London? It's freaking sweet. Cycling lanes everywhere twist windingly through roads that swerve liberally around brick and stone buildings plenty old to make us both go, "oooooh". Incidentally, another common London bike lane practice that brings out a similar verbal response is the sharing of the bike lane with the city's buses. Who thought it would be a good idea to segregate all but the largest and most impenetrable vehicle with the smallest and most vulnerable? Don't know. Only that these gentle giants proved much safer than the average London driver.

Pasty average white folk are not who we visited in London: James and Sarah (who you may remember as stars from Ryan's previous blog entries) are, in addition to being rising Killer Bunnies fans, two crazy cats willing to make it their mission to see to it that we experienced a proper English lifestyle. Fish & Chips, televised rugby, guided London bike rides, porridge, funny words like "aubergine," must have shopping list items like: ‘Worcestershire sauce’ and ‘aubergine’, all were clues into English life. However, those these were good and telling Britishy things, it was Pancake Day that really got the culture moving.

"Happy Pancake Day..." our morning note from Sarah read, "James will pick up the ingredients on his way home". Pancake Day? Could it be? Do the English really? Do the English really, really, eat, celebrate, and demarcate an entire day towards pancakes? Tea and Crumpets Day, maybe, but pancakes?

Yep, and it was awesome. Spending the evening with the rest of the nation dolloping lemon and sugar on the sweet cakes and spinach, ham, cheese, etc. on the savory ones was no less a ritual then facial war painting, tongue piercings, and the standard cannibalism Ryan expects in those shady African nations to come.

Tea time stole the show in it's ability to induce culture shock and residual tremors of caffeine and sugar highs. Looking around the pink chinaware tea-room one wonders what little girl was allowed to decorate such a place, and what kind of society sees it necessary to consume, between lunch and dinner, a breathtaking supply of cream & sugar pastries, cream & sugar tea, and cake loaded with sugars & fats punctually every day? The decor aside, that's the kind of society grown up from indulging between trips to and from conquered impoverished African, Asian, or American colonies. Yummers.

In the middle of all that we took an indirect ride south out of London to the village called Haslemere: home to Alison (another star from Ryan's India blog) and family (husband Rufus and daughter Liberty -ahem, hippy alert-). London doesn't seem to fancy itself easy to navigate. Bollocks to roadsigns, we did manage to escape the grasp of the city and on to those squiggly small roads that squish across the map like a bowl of dropped ramen noodles.

By nightfall we made it somewhere; sometime after nightfall we made it to Haslemere. Dark, cold, and getting late mixed with not-quite-sure-how-to-roam-the-coutryside-toward-Alsison-and-Rufus's-house we conceded and holed up in a local pub with chips and booze. Not long after our savior walked through the door, whooed Kirstin with his charm, and drove us back to his place: Alison and his place. Ahhhhh, that was nice.

The next day Kirstin admitted her desire to see the quiet English countryside in daylight. We saw it, rally car style, as Alison raced us through the flooded narrow streets of tarmac oxcart roads. Whoo eee! that was good. Ryan was giggling in the backseat like a little girl on nitrous oxide the whole time. Destination: Guildford castle. Result: no castle in Guildford but...a Shopping Mall! Mentally prepped for chainmail, drawbridges, and plump tourists complaining of no elevator we instead shopped for stinky soaps, girly jewelry, expensive electronic devices, and a disco ball. Alison, you're as much of a wacko as you have ever been ;)

Back in London with James and Sarah we finished our England trip to visit their biggest stash of worldly stolen goods: the British museum collection, bought loads of chocolate and European cheese, and wound ourselves through the ridiculous high-security Heathrow airport and on to Africa. Thanks gang for a hotel-free and really amazing English trip and final indulgence in western society.

(name that stone)

______________________________________________________

Kirstin's Notes:

Friday, March 02, 2007

We’re sitting in the Mali embassy…for the third time in three days. The walls of the sitting room are concrete, the ‘windows’ are simply concrete blocks with decorative holes in them, which create a cross-breeze that is quite lovely when coupled with the ceiling fans. The floors are chipped terrazzo and the walls are a bland yellow beige. Not a bad place to pass 3½ hours, which is what we are set to do while we wait for our Mali visas.

(Vic and Eric, our hosts)

Compared to the American embassy (why we went there will be later discussed), the security of this building is nonexistent. Not that the US embassy has all that much to boast about, but at least they have a bunch of guys wearing snazzy uniforms, revolving gates and a metal detector. This place has a nice uncle-type sitting in a shed at the entrance, who greets you with a smile and ushers you into the main building, where another smiling auntie-type tells you that your visa is not yet ready, and to come back tomorrow morning. We came back tomorrow (yesterday) and they said to come back tomorrow morning (today) and so we came back tomorrow morning (today) and they told us to wait until 3:30 this afternoon. So we sit and wait.

We want to secure the visa here in Accra because rumor has it that if we wait until we reach the Malian border, there might be a considerable amount of bribery involved to enter. Seeing as we’ll be on bike, we don’t want to risk that possible scenario.

We arrived here, in Ghana, on Sunday night. On our first day in Accra, after a hot, sticky night with no ceiling fan (Ghana rations its electricity, blocking out entire areas once a week), we managed to ship the bulk of our stuff up to Bolgatanga by STC (a Ghanaian bus service) for the comparably steep price of about $60. The shipment included our bikes, and most of our large bags. We kept the electronics and our small backpacks with us. The rest of the day was spent lollygagging around the city with Vic and Eric, old friends of mine from my Peace Corps days, who we are staying with while in the city. We also bought a phone and now can be contacted at (011 233 249 236149), at least as long as we are in Ghana (until the end of March, and after June 1st). As it was our first day in Africa, but not our first day on the Greenwich Meridian, we were spared the jetlag but slammed with humidity, heat, and big-city pollution. By late afternoon, we were all exhausted. We stopped at Kaneshie, a huge covered market selling all manners of foodstuffs, bought ingredients for groundnut soup and banku (a delicious tangy (i.e. fermented = Ryan thinks it’s gross) dough-ball, consumed along with the soup). A cold bucket bath never felt so good. We are also delighted to report that the discounted natural bug spray that we bought 5(!) cans of at REI works like a charm; we’ve been relatively bug free so far!

Tuesday’s mission was to secure our Burkina Faso visas. I remembered (incorrectly) that the Burkina embassy only accepted CFA currency, so we spent the better part of the morning traipsing from Forex (foreign exchange bureau) to Forex, all of which seemed to be out of CFA at the moment. Desperate and running out of time, we took a cab to the expat neighborhood Osu, and found our CFA there. We then rushed to the Burkina Faso embassy with only half an hour to spare before the same day visa return cutoff time. The secretary here was exasperatingly lazy, probably stupid, and completely unhelpful. Although we were the only ones in the place, she found it necessary to make phone calls about parties and such, and to call her boyfriend. Each time we went into the office to ask a question, she could be found yawning and stretching, on the phone, or with her head down on the desk. The woman inside the office was professional, prompt and friendly, however, and she happily took our passports and money and told us to return in the afternoon. We did so, and happily received our passports with stamped visas inside, our $57 each having been devoured by the visa-money machine. Easy. And the Burkina Faso embassy, does, in fact, accept dollars.

Allow me to explain our passport situation. Actually, just Ryan’s. Mine is brand shiny new with lots of pages and pretty holograms. Ryan’s, on the other hand, is almost 10 years old, and sports a picture of him with what the woman at the Mali embassy describes as “woman’s hair” and what the man at immigration in London said looks “absolutely nothing like him”. It’s old, ratty, beat up and has been through the laundry, literally. There are visas from India, Nepal, Russia, Laos, Thailand, Ghana, and now Burkina Faso as well as entry and exit stamps from Mexico, Japan, England, and the Philippines. There is only one visa page left in the thing, not to mention that its long journey through space and time has caused the protective plastic coating on the important page to peel halfway off. We remedied that in London by peeling it all the way off, hoping no one would be the wiser. However, still everyone who gets their hands on the document eyes Ryan suspiciously before telling him that he should get a new passport. We could just envision the headache and bribery required to get over some of those corrupt African borders, and it was keeping me up at night just thinking about it. The lady at the Mali embassy was highly doubtful that the consular would issue a visa to a passport with no pages to stamp (apparently Mali requires TWO whole pages), so we went to the American embassy to get more pages stapled into the already questionable document. The lady at the US embassy also told him that he should get a new passport, and could, right there in Accra. $67 later, Ryan’s shiny, pretty holographic passport, full of pages, will be available for pick up at the embassy. Eric is going to do the honors of retrieving it, and will bring it to us when we meet again in 3 weeks at the Papa festival in Kumawu, my Peace Corps village. Ryan will have to travel with both the ratty old passport holding all his visas, and his shiny new passport, with all the blank pages ready for lots of bureaucratic stamps and signatures.

After we left the US embassy, we decided to give the Mali embassy another shot. We went there, this time talking to the secretary of the consular. She at first flat out refused to issue a visa to Ryan, on the grounds that his passport didn’t have enough pages, but after some stubborn insistence, Ryan managed to convince her that there was indeed (and there was indeed) a blank page. It didn’t look blank at first glance because the stamp on the opposite side had bled through. But on closer examination, it turned out to be a usable page. We returned the next day, only to be told to return the next day after that, which is today. We still wait in suspense, hoping and wondering if the embassy will find it in its heart to issue our visas. That brings us full circle, back to the beginning of this entry.

Other than visa stuff, we’ve spent our time snacking, walking, sweating, and riding in tro tros (the local transportation). Ryan is amazingly adaptable, it seems as if he’s been here for a long time. He knows his way around the city as well as I do, (it took me almost three years to get to where I am with Accra), and relies heavily on his “manly intuition” for matters of bargaining and buying. The house we’re staying at is in Accra, but outside of the center, and requires a smoggy, trafficky ride into town. Vic, Eric and their son Uncle are sleeping in one room, and have allowed us to stay in their bedroom. Evenings have been spent cooking, talking, listening to music, bathing, napping, and working on little projects. I’ve been crashing out at around 10 every night, 16 months away has erased my ability to cope with the heat here. But slowly, I’m adjusting. I have been dictating the meals, trying to introduce some of my favorite Ghanaian dishes to Ryan in a fish and meat free form, home cooked. On the road, almost all food is bought off the head of a teenage girl and sucked out of a plastic bag. The fruit is great, and we’ve had our fair share of pineapple, coconut, banana, mango, watermelon and oranges. Ghana is great for snacking. Fried plantain chips, doughy fried plantain balls, fried bean cakes, ginger-corn porridge, hard boiled eggs with hot pepper sauce, curried spring rolls, little cakes and biscuits, beans and plantains, rice and stew with salad and spaghetti on top, ground nuts, strawberry frozen yogurt, plastic bags of water, all abound and are happily consumed (mostly sucked out of a plastic bag. Note: steer clear of the meat, vegetarian or not, it’s pretty gross.

I should mention that Ghana is undergoing a great celebration on Tuesday, 6^th March. Celebrating 50 years of independence is a big deal for any country, and Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence from colonial rule. It’s been a rocky ride for Ghana, with drought, famine, military coups, poverty, inflation (right now, $100 changed into local currency is delivered in a bag), disease and many other obstacles. However, as tough as life has been here, everyone is fiercely proud of being Ghanaian and everywhere you look (I mean EVERYWHERE) you can see red, gold and green stuff…from opulent fabric hangings to key chains, Ghana shaped car air fresheners, and pens with little banners that roll out and have red, gold and green calendars. You can buy a “Ghana @ 50” T-shirt, mug, hat, flag, button, magnet, keychain, bracelet, and poster all within a one block radius of anywhere. Good to know someone’s making money off of their freedom. We hope to be up in the north for the festivities, as far as possible from the mayhem that is sure to occur here in Accra.

Our big plan for what we will do next keeps changing. Originally we wanted to take a ferry boat from Akosombo to the north, but after finding out that it leaves once weekly, and that we’d be on the boat during the big day, and that one recently sank and everyone on board drowned, we decided against it (for now). Then we toyed with the idea of going to the Volta region (a mountainous area to the east) to check out the breezy beautiful stuff over there. However, the amount of energy, time and money required to do that don’t add up if we want to be in Bolgatanga by Tuesday. So now our plans had been to dash over to the Mali embassy in the morning, pick up our passports, and take a car to Techiman, and then head over to Boabeng Fiema monkey sanctuary for a day or two, before hopping in a car and heading home, to my friends, family, dog and house. Seeing as we’re still sitting in the Mali embassy, the plan remains a mystery. All we know is that we’ll be up north very soon, hopefully with visas in hand in a cooler environment and closer toilet.