Ghana Mama: 9 Days of Photos

For those of you who didn’t know, Mama spent her Spring Break visiting me in Ghana. She had only traveled out of the country once before (Israel when she was 17), so I wanted to make sure her trip was jam-packed full of excitement. Between touring slave castles, swimming in waterfalls, and playing with monkeys – I can now say mission accomplished.

Here we go…

Our journey started in Cape Coast. Despite spending less than 24 hours in the city, we managed to tour two different 400+ year old slave castles, hand stamp and dye batik cloth, and lose my camera… bummer!

The photo above was taken at Cape Coast Castle; my photos from Elmina are lost forever. The rooms on the top floors were occupied by soldiers, governors, and generals. Slaves were kept in dungeons underneath. In each male slave dungeon (pictured below) over 200 men were kept at any given time.  Touring these slave castles was a very eerie experience for both of us.

After leaving the castles, Mama and I headed to a Global Mamas batik dying workshop. The Adinkra symbol designs were hand-stamped by us.  Mama will be writing a step-by-step blog about the Batik experience.

After leaving Cape Coast, we met up with Logan in Accra for some good old fashioned Chinese food.  After ordering a vaguely labeled ‘Chinese vegetable’ dish, baby bok choy arrived to the table!  Words can’t describe how excited I was to be eating a full plate of green vegetables…

The next morning we visited my catering school. Discovering that my classmates were on holiday was disappointing- but we had a great discussion with my teacher, Auntie Charity, nonetheless.  Behind us are the numerous kitchen stations that each of my classmates work at.

Later that day, we left for Hohoe and Kumasi. Logan was our personal guide in Kumasi since he has been living there for the past 7 months.

In Hohoe we hiked for 45 minutes to the largest waterfall in West Africa, Wli Falls.  When we got there, our guide hit his machete on a large rock, making so much noise that thousands of fruit bats came out of the mountainside above us!  The water was ice cold and felt delightful.

We then went to the Tafi Atome monkey sanctuary.

Back in Kumasi, Mama was quick to make friends. The two boys below are Logan’s host brothers.  A little shy at first, they soon warmed up to Mama.

We spent much of two days with Logan’s host family – one of the personal highlights for us. Yusif Aziiza,  Logan’s host mom, was an amazing hostess!  She is a very outgoing wonderful person.  In honor of Logan’s 18th birthday, she prepared a traditional Ghanaian meal,  with jollaf rice and seasoned roast chicken.  She also had a scrumptious birthday cake made for him.

There you go; 9 days summed up in 9 photos. More details about various locations we visited will be incoming; I  wanted to start with a broad overview of the trip.