Fall Break. I honestly have no words...or I guess that I have too many. I think it is safe to say that in our NYU in Ghana group the three of us had the most ambitious fall break plans to start with - we joked before we left that we'd come stumbling home a week or two later, bruised and limping from some injury, or that we'd get stuck in some prison in Niger and have to be bailed out by NYU. WELL. HOW CLOSE WE CAME. Not really - there was only one incident with the police, but we did make two visits to hospitals and came home with a plethora of bruises. So it begins.
Day One.
So we had planned to leave Thursday afternoon, even though I did not believe this would happen because Holley and Maggie have class on Thursday, but they were all like 'oh yes we are so amped lets start this woohoo'. And then Holley got typhoid and was throwing up and being really grouchy and had to go to the hospital. So our departure was postponed to Saturday and on Friday, Maggie and I got to go hunting around Accra for bus tickets while Holley napped in bed all day. Quite the charmed life she leads. We left early Saturday morning, Holley not feeling so fantastic but poorly attempting to hide it. We were taking a bus from Accra to Aflao, which is where you cross the border between Ghana and Togo. I will say this about fall break - we did spend a majority of it traveling and sitting, but I am so grateful for those hours (and hours...) spent driving because we really got a fantastic idea of how a place LOOKS. The scenery, the colors...it all changed from one country to the next and we were able to see that as we went. The first bus ride was no exception - I have never seen more beautiful beaches than on that bus ride. The coast of Ghana and of Togo looks how a coast should look - the water is bright blue, the sky is slightly lighter, and the sand has a beautiful golden tint to it that you just cannot accurately capture in a picture. We were passes through little towns where people were able to live right on the beach - we saw groups of forty men pulling up the boats from the water, all in a line, and people working and cooking with this gorgeous background behind them.
When we were on the first bus, the man who was handling luggage and the tickets would only speak Ewe (common language in Ghana, and also Benin and Togo), so when he was making announcements to all of the other passengers the three of us were looking at each other hoping it was not vital information we were missing. At the end of his speech he added, for the foreigners in the group - "If you can't understand me, it's because you need to learn Ewe. LEARN THE LANGUAGE!" I didn't realize then how many times we would hear this phrase --> SOMETHING TO NOTE ABOUT OUR FALL BREAK: We traveled to four countries where they only spoke French (although Hausa and German were popular as well - we got asked so many times if we were from Germany or if we spoke German). If they spoke English, people would always say they could speak "small small English", and that was usually all they could say. They were also very French-like in that Holley and I were constantly asked WHY we would go to French-speaking countries if we couldn't speak French. They were not impressed when we offered up our knowledge of Russian and Spanish. So for the week Holley and I were struggling with the language barrier - past "Bonjour" and "Je suis American" I would just smile and laugh and wait for Maggie to translate (she did an excellent job, by the way and we would not have made it through the week without her).
Over the course of break we ended up crossing a border five times, and it was just as confusing the last time as it was the first. I'm used to getting off of a plane and being shuttled by airport workers through customs. This was quite different. Every time we took a bus we would have to get off at passport checkpoints and then at border crossing and literally walk across the border. The first time that we had to do this was in Aflao, crossing into Togo, and we were a little out of our element. And it showed. We got off the bus and literally stood for at least a couple of minutes looking around and trying to see what we should do. This is not an easy task, especially when you have people hounding you to get in their taxi or change your cedis to CFAs (the currency used in all of the countries we visited). After trying to cross into the country and being shushed away by Togolese officials we realized we first had to go to the Ghanaian office, get ourselves stamped out of the country, and then make our way over to the pathway where people were crossing. The officers looked at our passports, asked how Obama was doing (he had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, so pretty good), and then we kept walking until we reached the next officer. I really believe we made a truly easy thing - walking a straight line that just happened to cross two countries - incredibly difficult for ourselves, because whenever we saw a police officer we would get all flustered and not know what to do with ourselves but hold out our passports when really, we probably could've just kept walking. So we ended up talking to a majority of the police officers working the border, including some women who wanted to know how long we were in Ghana, if we could speak Twi, and what we were doing going to Togo. Just chatting it up between Ghana and Togo. So we get to the end of this path and there's a big group of people being stopped by an official. Random people are being pulled through and everyone is pushing and we're just like wahh what do we do and then this drunk old man with bloodshot eye starts grabbing for us to come through - he's standing next to a police officer, I don't think he has any authority whatsoever but he kept motioning and reaching for us trying to pull us through...so we went. And the policeman ignored us and the drunk old man brought us into Togo. It was lovely.
We had read that when we got into Lome, the capital of Togo, we would immediately be bombarded with cab drivers wanting to drive us anywhere at a really exaggerated price, and that is exactly what we found when we got there. Although the books said that it was better to just walk a ways past the cabs and find one further away from the border area, we ignored this advice when a really attractive driver started talking to us. We were trying to get to the bus station, so we negotiated a price and got in his car. First clue that this was a bad idea - I sat in the drivers seat, and when the driver got in he got out the wires that he rubbed together to jump start the car, and then gave me a very heavy look with a extra wink thrown in. Charming. He also was in love with Maggie and kept telling me that he was going to marry my sister. Once again, Maggie gets all the boys.
As soon as we started driving he was asking us where we were going and offering us other ways to get there - 'friends' of his who would drive us there in their car for a ridiculously expensive price. We continued telling him we wanted to go to the bus station, but if we learned anything about this man it was that listening was not his strong suit. We had been driving maybe a mile or two before he pulled over the car for the first time, getting out of the car to negotiate a price for us because he thought it was a much better idea to charter a private car into Benin than take a bus like we wanted. Every time he got out we told him not to, that we were taking a bus, that it didn't matter how much it cost, we weren't going to take a car, and every time he ignored us. He kept stopping again and again despite all of us asking him to stop and threatening to get out - he though it was hilarious, and at one point he actually play-punched my shoulder and laughed like the two of us were best friends who just couldn't get over the crazy white girls in the back seat. When the moped gang of his friends showed up and surrounded our car, opening the truck and taking out Maggie's bag to move into another friend's car, we realized that it was time to leave - after repeating to him that if he did not go right now to the bus station we would leave without paying him, we just got out and walked away. This is when the joking stopped and cutie driver turned scary driver - he and his friends started following us on foot yelling at us to pay him the money he owed us, and after arguing for a few minutes with him that he didn't take us anywhere and we weren't paying we crossed the street. And then they followed us - the driver and one of his friends got in his car, pulled across the street and tried once again to get us to pay him, but we continued walking away from him. We thought that he had left when.......he showed up AGAIN, this time with a cop in the passenger seat! Amazing. It took us fifteen minutes in the country of Togo before we had our first encounter with the police.
The policeman got out and started speaking French to us, and when Maggie asked if he could speak English he yelled (I may have a limited understanding of French but it was pretty easy to figure out what he was saying) that he was in Togo and he speaks French so NO he was not speaking English. Already we were at a disadvantage in the he said/she said battle with our driver. We ended up having to pay him because apparently he had already taken us past the station without pointing it out or stopping the car, so obviously we were at fault. After we paid him the driver tried to take our bags and get us in the car again to take us to the station but we declined - once you call the police on me we are no longer friends or business acquaintances. And you will not be marrying my sister!
So it was midday in Togo, we had crossed the border and already had our first run-in with the cops, and we still had another country to get into. We had to keep it moving. The plan for the day was to get to Cotonou, Benin, to stay the night. But once in Lome, we had no clue how to go about getting a bus into the city. All we knew was that we wanted to get far far away from this cab driver and his plethora of intimidating friends. So we wandered until we found a bus sitting on the side of the road - we had no clue where it was going, but it was a vehicle. I had no clue where they were going - they were speaking French, so I wandered around looking for a bathroom and ending up meeting two Ghanaian men who told me that we needed to be careful because some people are good, but some are bad, and we needed to watch out for them. Hmm. The guys from the bus ended up being incredibly nice and walked us to the market where we could get a tro-tro to Cotonou. We ended up having to wait for at least an hour before the tro-tro left, and during that hour we met the man that we call Fred. Fred is a Nigerian who popped up outside our window and started talking to us. He made an impression, to stay the least. Holley gave us all Russian names to have, and then Fred and I fell in love. He started referring to me as his wife, even though I tolldddd him I have a husband, and then quickly made a bad impression on Maggie, ruining him forever. Holley he decided was snobby, Maggie was childish, but I was smiley. You can see Maggie's blog for explanation on that, but for the hour or so we were waiting Fred kept me company and kept referencing 'my eyes, oh those eyes' and talking about how I was 'thin like spaghetti'. All he wanted was an e-mail address or something to remember me by, but I believe in playing hard to get so I didn't give him anything.
The tro-tro we were on was completely full - Holley, Maggie, and I were in the back row, and once again, being tall comes SO in handy. The rows were so close together that I was not even able to face forward, meaning that we had to buy an extra seat so that the three of us could have our own row without having to squeeze another person in. There were also some voodoo women in front of me who really enjoyed turning around and screaming out the back window, a few inches from my face. The three hour ride ended up being about six hours which I spent turned sideways, which I'm sure Holley loved. We didn't have a Benin visa, so we had to hold up everyone while we got that taken care of - getting visas at the border actually turned out to be really easy and cost only about twenty dollars, and at times it was cheaper to get the visa at the border rather than at their embassies before hand. The tro-tro also kept stopping to buy food, or to go through police checkpoints, so ended up waiting around for a long time on the side of the road while people held plates of fish up to our window. I do need to add about the first couple days of the trip, when we were doing our most intense traveling - the first three days of the trip, none of us ate or went to the bathroom for at least twelve hours. We would go all day, from early in the morning until eight or nine at night, in the car or on the tro tro without eating, without going to the bathroom, and while drinking little to no water. I have no clue how we did it or how we did not pass out, but for the first three days we were only eating one meal a day. I never want to be called a spoiled American again. So we ended up getting into Cotonou around nine at night, when we had planned on arriving early afternoon. Te first of many times that our travel estimations would prove to be way, way off. We did get to see a beautiful sunset and absolutely gorgeous beaches, and given that it was the first day and that we had just traveled through three countries, we were all feeling pretty positive and impressed with what we had done.
It was quite dark by the time we got in, and we had no clue where we were and ntohign but an address for our hotel, so when we finally got off the tro-tro, the confused looks that we patented that week came back. Our driver, Justin, took pity on us and brought our guide book around to cab drivers, who jumped all over it and started screaming to each other "CONCORDE CONCORDE" (which was the name of our hotel). Quite an amusing sight to see twenty grown men huddled around a West African guide book. Justin ended up bringing us to the hotel in the empty tro-tro, which was pretty amazing. He gave us his number and told us to call him at any moment - he actually turned out to be super nice and helped us out a lot. Throughout the week it was amazing to see how nice people can be - we wouldn't have been able to get through itif it hadn't been for people offering to help us or bring us places or just talk to us and reassure us that we were doing the right thing attempting to see so much in so little time.
Looking over this....I cannot believe that this was day one. And that we endured seven more days that were just as, if not more, insane than this one was. There are pictures that you can find HERE, although they are from the entire fall break and it will ruin the surprise of what happened --> SPOILER: We saw giraffes.
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