I am way behind in my blog entries, and if anybody is frustrated by my slowness, I am sorry. What’s worst, though, is that everyday here brings something new and interesting, and that every time I don’t write whatever it is down, it is lost in to the recesses of my memory, probably never to be recovered.
Anyway: Two weeks ago, this journal found me running down and scaring my friends on the trail above the Upper Wli Falls. The falls themselves were incredible. They are tucked in to a niche on the mountain side, and are at least one hundred and fifty feet tall, the tallest falls in western Africa. The water comes shooting over the lip at the top and sends little white rockets shooting down that burst in to spray before ever reaching the base.
To approach it, you wade in to the wide pool at the base. The spray from the falls reaches you at the edge of the pool, and as you get closer it is so intense that you must walk backwards. It is hard to breath, and I imagine my self on the beach as Hurricane Katrina lashes the ocean and sends it flying. It is impossible to reach the very point where the fall breaks with the water. We do find a little cave in the rock right near the bottom though, and I must yell to the American girls we meet and I bring there for them to hear me. We don’t have much to say, however, but mostly giggle hysterically to be in such a wonderful place. I am tempted to ask one of them, Isis, to kiss me, and I am sure she would not have refused. (A week later, some other American girls we meet at a bar bring back to me bittersweet memories of high school: ‘Did you, like, hook up with her? Cause we kinda have a thing with her, she’s just, like, totally gross)
We left the upper falls and went back to the village of Vli for lunch. Then Katie, a weird Australian we met, and I headed to the monkey sanctuary at Tafi Atome. They fed us rice and woke us up early in the morning and gave us bananas to feed to the sacred simians. The monkeys were very disappointing; I figured we would be walking in the forest to go find them, but they were ready and waiting for us at the edge of the village. There was a house bordering the forest, as we approached I saw the tree above it shaking, then one, two, three monkeys dropped out of it on to the roof of the house and clambered down to greet us. Soon the area at the edge of the forest was positively crawling with scrambling, leaping monkeys eager to relieve us of our bananas. The biggest monkey, the troupe leader, did not take any bananas himself, but when one of the other monkeys came back for seconds, he would pull him away and push another monkey who hadn’t had any bananas yet towards us. If you held the banana firmly in your hand, they would greedily dig at the tender meat inside and leave a limp yellow peel in your hand with in seconds.
As soon as the fruit was exhausted, they left as quickly as they came, and soon all the trees were still again. I wanted to chase after them, but we went off to eat porridge instead. Later that day, we went to see the Kente weavers at the traditional weaving village of Tafi Abuipe. Kente weaving is to hard to explain, but basically, a number of threads are stretched out by a rock fifteen feet away. At one end sits the weaver and his apparatus, and he pushes horizontal threads through the vertically stretched ones with incredible rapidity. Kente is a very durable material, and I am the proud owner of one scarf, given to me on my birthday, and was promised another one by Francis, our guide in the village. After seeing the village we headed back to Accra, five hours on a tro tro that left my ass red and raw.