Travelin' Travelin'

Well, Evelyn, Scott, and I have been doing a ton of travelling lately. We went from Mole to Tamale to Yendi to Bimbilla to Demanko to Kpasa to Nkwanta to Hohoe. Not all in one day, of course. We stopped for the night in Bimbilla and for 2 nights in Nkwanta. At Bimbilla we stayed at the Teachers Hostel, a place which takes the dubious award of "Cheapest Lodging So Far". We were able to get a room for something around 25000 cedis a night, which is less than $4 Canadian. of course, as with everything you get what you pay for. We got a room with 2 beds in it and a fan. After a lot of work we managed to get the fan to work, though it was on a timer so it did not work throughout the whole night. The washroom was shared, though there was no one else at the compound so this really wasn't an issue. The one problem, however, was that we couldn't get any fresh water. We had to wash and flush the toilet with water from a barrel which the lady had assured us was fresh (or we think she did, since she didn't speak any english and we don't speak any of her language...I'm not sure she was even speaking Twi). Despite all of this, it was actually a perfectly acceptable place to crash for a night in between tro-tro rides. It started raining hard and we all sat in one of the rooms and ate some of the food that we had with us. It was like camping! =)

The next day brought a bunch of tro-tro rides. We couldn't get a ride from Bimbilla to Nkwanta and we had to stop in both Demanko and Kpasa. At Demanko we got the chance to play Oware with some of the locals! I have decided that I need to find an Oware board before I leave Ghana, since it was definitely a fun game. Scott is looking for one too, and we can hopefully find them in Accra before we leave. In Kpasa we were lucky because we managed to get a ride almost immediately after getting into the village. Yay! It's quite interesting getting around in Africa. Since tro-tros leave whenever they manage to get enough people for a full trip, you never know exactly when they are going to go. That means you never know exactly when they are going to be at the next location. Thankfully, the relaxed nature of Africa means that this doesn't bother anyone, and we know as travellers that we have to give extra time to travelling. Everything works out in the end and so far we have gotten in to places with a lot of extra time to hang out and wander around.

So I managed to change over my Canadian Travellers Cheques in Hohoe today. The last place I tried didn't accept them, so I wasn't very hopeful that they would here. As far as I know they wouldn't actually accept them here either, except that the lady thought that I had American Travellers Cheques. They accepted them and gave me my $150 USD worth of cedis. I walked away to count my money and noticed the error, so of course I went back to the teller and told her about the mistake. Of course, they had already accepted the cheques, so they really couldn't take them back. I also got the best rate so far (7500 cedis per dollar compared to 7000 before), so that was really nice. She was really quite thankful that I had come back, since I'm sure she would have gotten into a lot of trouble for that.

Well, we are heading out to go see some waterfalls tomorrow! Should be quite interesting, actually. This is arguably the thing that I have been most interested in seeing since we left Mole. Hopefully I should get a chance sometime in the next couple days to write about it! Wish us luck!