Travelling in Ghana on Friday the 13th: B Prepared

We decided to spend this past weekend in Aburi where two of our research members are analyzing traditional herbs used to induce uterine contractions to stop hemorrhaging in women who are about to or have just given birth. Aburi is famous in Ghana for its botanical gardens which were planted back in the mid-1800’s by the English colonists. Interestingly, I found out that Aburi, due to its location on a hill/mountain side, was one of the few places where colonists did not succumb to malaria as there used to be no mosquitoes (this has begun to change as travel has increased and with the effects of global warming).

BUSES

Anyway, we opted to take Friday off of work as the bus ride is more or less an all day affair. On Thursday, it dawned on us that Friday was the 13^th. Ooooooooooh. We woke up early Friday morning, and as we were having breakfast it began to pour rain in torrential cascades. We hopped into a taxi and arrived at the STC bus station. I decided to buy a newspaper as we waited to board. As I turned away and looked at the front page, I saw that the giant front page picture was of vehicular carnage – with the caption “21 Die in Two STC Bus Crashes!” The crashes were pretty bad, but we were slightly reassured by them both having occurred late at night when it was dark.

While the girls fretted over the crashes in the paper, I made my way to the little snack shop for a soy milk. Somehow I managed to lose my boarding ticket in the process and spent the next 15 minutes searching high and low among the cockroaches and dirty feet to no avail. Luckily, it only cost a dollar to get a ticket reprinted, and off we went.

The bus we boarded was a standard large travel bus, only it was very run down with the seats starting to break and stuffing pouring out, and the curtains stained and a nasty dirty floor. But we settled in as best we could. As we were pulling out of the station, two of the girls prayed for a safe journey on Friday the 13^th. They should have prayed for that AND a bus with no bugs.

BUGS

One of the girls spotted the first cockroach about an hour into the ride, coming out of the crack where the seat meets the back of the chair. As the girls are deathly afraid of cockroaches and pretty much every creature that moves, they quickly stuffed the crack with our “STC Bus Crash” newspaper. Shortly after, the bus stopped for lunch.

I ate my PB&J and put the bag in the front seat. The other passengers got back on and started munching away at their fried yam chips and pork kabobs. And then it began….a steady stream of cockroaches pouring out of the seats, ceiling, curtains, and worst of all – my purse (EEWWW! It must have been because the sandwich was in there)! Now normally I am extremely annoyed from having to sleep with the lights on every time my roommate sees a cockroach, but even I was freaking out. And to make matters worse, as the cockroaches descended on us in an increasing frenzy, our bus was stuck in the insane Accra traffic – so close and yet so far away from the bus station. So there we were, cockroaches streaming out of the sandwich bag I’d put in the seat net of me, the other three girls standing out of their seats the last hour (one of them cried at one point when a cockroach was on her lap) and a bus that was not moving. Needless to say, we were beyond thrilled to jump off the bus, although that itchy feeling of bugs crawling on us took a while to subside.

Our fortune turned when we arrived at the bus station and a medical resident friend of ours was there (he had done a short residency at U of M this past fall and we’d met him then and now worked with him at the hospital). He’d just finished a clinic on maternal and child health, and was so generous as to give us a ride. Of course, the awful traffic from a Friday afternoon persisted, and it took a while to get to Aburi – but no complaints! We were in an air conditioned SUV cockroach-free.

We arrived at Aburi in the botanical gardens where our guest house was, exhausted and dreaming of a clean, good night’s sleep. Wrong! We were given the keys to our rooms, located across the hall from each other and accessed from an outdoor hallway, illuminated by a giant fluorescent light. Unfortunately for us, it had just rained heavily, and apparently it was just the right conditions for a frenzied hatching, mating and dying festival by what looked to be small cockroaches with huge wings.

Now, I am not kidding when I say that we were both laughing and crying at this point. The hallway was filled with thousands of the flying bugs, attracted to each other and the light above our doors. And our keys were of the old kind that are impossible to correctly insert to unlock the door. So we would take a deep breath, run into the sea of flying fornication, and attempt to unlock the door while yelling and jumping up and down as the bugs descended. On the floor were massive writhing orgies of them. It took a good five minutes of this before we finally got the doors open. And of course the bugs had been crawling into our filthy rooms under the door, so there were about fifty in each room. To add insult, as the bugs mated they lost their wings, so there were thousands of wings lying around, and little bugs running around gasping for their last breaths. It was…disgusting, even for me. Sleep did not come peacefully that night my friends.

BOTANICAL GARDENS

We were supposed to begin a bike tour at 9am, but as usual things were running on Ghanaian time, so we took a walk around the botanical gardens. The gardens were so relaxing, and we had the quaintest breakfast on an outdoor pavilion overlooking the forest canopy. Breathing fresh, cool air was something none of us had experienced in 5 weeks. The gardens are absolutely stunning: giant palm trees majestically lining the main entrance to the gardens and our guest house, massive mahogany and other trees stretching over 300 feet high, hundreds of different species of flowering trees and bushes with benches under them…and an old helicopter. What? This amazing old helicopter had crashed into the gardens back in the 60’s and was still in its spot. I had a great time climbing around in it and taking a couple of pictures.

BICYCLES

Saturday turned out to be the best day I’ve had here in Ghana. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been missing exercise, and how good it felt to get out and break a sweat not caused simply by the scorching sun. It was a cloudy day, and we had signed up for a 12km biking tour of the surrounding area. Now it didn’t sound too taxing or long. But we were in for something else.

Our bikes had all at one point been nice mountain bikes, with front and rear shocks and suspension. But now, the brakes felt pretty shady and the tires not quite centered. We rode off, all ten of us girls and two guides, through the town of Aburi. As it is situated on a beautiful mountainous ridge, our first 10 minutes were cruising down hill as we wound through the town. It actually felt dangerous and I went very slowly. For one thing, it wa a pretty sharp descent and the brakes didn’t feel so hot. But mostly, it was on account of there being a large funeral celebration in town, which took up all of the street with chairs, dancing, singing and hundreds of guests – which we were working hard to avoid. As I was bringing up the rear, I could see that some of the girls were pretty out of practice of riding and I was afraid they’d crash into a mourner ( I myself was having flashbacks of a crash I had trying to take a steep turn riding downhill in Jamaica…).

Of course, as soon as we got to the bottom of the valley between two ridges we had to ride back up. I suddenly found myself at the front as I pedalled hard to the top. It felt so good to be breathing fresh air and working my lungs in a beautiful location. Once we reached the top of the road and recovered our breath, our guide turned us off the gravel road and onto a 1.5 foot wide trail heading straight down the ridge through the amazing array of agricultural crops. I’ve never been mountain biking as off road as this: careening down this steep narrow path full of rocks and roots, corners and streams. We often had to get off and walk the bikes as the path was too steep and rocky! But it was amazing. We got to stop and eat one of my favorite sweets: sucking on the sweet white pulp encasing cocoa beans. And we saw every crop in Ghana, from yams and cassava to bananas and plantains to mangoes and papaya to cocoa and calabash gourds.

I was enjoying myself so much and felt so full of life (something that the hospital has been sucking out of us all) that I began to sing random songs. I know that if I start to sing it means I’m in a really happy place, because it usually only happens when I’m riding my horse in Montana. Aburi was the best break from the dusty hot monotony of Kumasi and the stealthy cloud of despair and resignation that cloaks us in the hospital. And although we were surrounded by bugs, at least we couldn’t see them.