Ghana: Day 1

Okay, so I am incredibly far behind on my blog right now because of how busy I have been in Ghana. I have to do about 4 blog posts in the span of one night, and I have 96 hours of stories to tell. So forgive me if I forget some details, but I have the pictures to make up for it when I get home.
We arrived in Ghana early in the morning. After a few hours of getting ready (or I should say of Gabriela considering and reconsidering what to bring with her), she, Maria and I finally went out to find the much-touted Coacoa beach. We were very dubious of the cab drivers in Ghana after our experiences in Morocco. The driver who approached us told us that the fee to get to Coacoa was “fifty”. We automatically scoffed and turned to go. Eventually we settled on “okay, okay, thirty-five”. We were satisfied with that price, since the driver told us that the beach was an hour away and 35 Ghanaian cidi is the equivalent of about 23 dollars. Between the three of us eight bucks cost seemed cool. Unfortunately, we were yet again sucked in by the manipulative ploys of foreign cab drivers. No sooner had we arrived at the beach did the cab driver demand his pay. We gave him 35 cidi, and he handed it back angrily demanding “no, dollars”. We were naturally like, oh HELL no, and tried to get this guy to grow the hell up and treat us like people. The “hour trip” had only taken twenty minutes, so we sure as hell weren’t paying more for a cab in freaking AFRICA than I would for a ride to the airport in Iowa. Unfortunately, we were three smaller women, and he was a rather large man. He started to get very angry and raise his voice at us, so we bitterly gave in and handed him his godforsaken 35USD. Pissed off and poorer than we wanted to be, we headed out to the beach.
Coacoa beach turned out to be the backyard of a Ramada Hotel. We were not amused about this, so we walked about two blocks to the right and opted to go to “Shining Beach”, a beach populated entirely by Ghanaian locals. We had to pay 2 cidi to get in (though the “guard” was basically a skinny guy in a wooden hut). We handed the man a 5-piece and waited for change. After about a minute, he told us (without looking) that he didn’t have any change and that we should come back later. Rolling our eyes, we went to the beach and forgot about the 3 cidi we knew we’d never see.

Immediately upon lying down in the sand, we were approached by a man. He seemed genuinely surprised to see three non-African women in a sea of natives. We were wary, since the last two men we’d met were kind of douchebags. But this guy welcomed us to the beach, told us to make ourselves comfortable, and assured us that anything we wanted was all ours. He introduced himself to us as Tyler. We LOVED Tyler. Not only did Tyler charge us absurdly low Ghanain prices for food (1 cidi for water, 2 for a large alcoholic drink, and 5 cidi for a plate of food that even I couldn’t finish), he took us in like we were a part of his family. But more about that later.

After Tyler left to get us drinks, we were approached by another man. He introduced himself to us as “Prince”, and welcomed us to Ghana. We got a weirder vibe from him than from Tyler. He was about Tyler’s age, probably late twenties, but was extremely well-dressed for a man at the beach. He stood over us as we lied on our beach towels and began starting up an awkward conversation about how beautiful we were. Essentially, we knew his game right away.

Gabriela and I were very weirded out by Prince at first. He proposed marriage to Gabriela within about five minutes of talking to her, and kept on insisting upon how much he loved “white women”. This was rather ironic, since Gabriela is not white by American standards. In fact, she’s pretty Hispanic. Apparently “white” doesn’t necessarily have to do with skin color in Ghana, Africa. He nicknamed Gabriela his “African Queen”. Maria was his “Princess”, and I was his “Angel”. I think it’s because I was the whitest. He insisted that he was an “exercise trainer”, but insisted that he was very good at giving massages anywhere we wanted. Then Prince proceeded to regale us with tales of how good he was at sex compared he was to our white boyfriends (we made up names of boyfriends we had in America to stop him trying to get us to take him to the US with us. Mine was Sheamus from the WWE). We were very cordial to him, of course, and let him talk to us for nearly an hour. When he finally left, however, Gabriela and I breathed a sigh of relief. Maria told us very frankly that we shouldn’t have been surprised by the way that Prince was acting. She said that in certain cultures, intense statements of masculinity and sexuality are parts of mainstream conversation. Maria is from Singapore and is very well-traveled. From then on, we just laughed and smiled whenever a Ghanaian man made comments to us that were suggestive in any sense.

Tyler was a welcome face after the ordeal with Prince. He brought us a gigantic concoction of blended pineapple with a touch of what I think was rum, but Gabriela thought was vodka. It was so yummy. There’s nothing quite like fresh, local pineapple. But what he served us next was amazing. He gave us a local Ghanaian dish called “Banku”, which was a combination of sauce, rice, beans, bone-in fish, and my all-time favorite part of Ghanaian cuisine, a spicy black paste called “pepe”. It was so very, very good, and so very, very spicy. It was really hot with high humidity outside on the beach, but I was sweating bullets from the spices in the food.

After lunch Gabriela and Maria wanted to go swimming. I decided to stay behind and guard all the bags, as we weren’t sure what to expect from Ghanaians yet and I didn’t care to test out what doxycycline’s side effect of “extra sun sensitivity” meant by going in the water. They ended up bringing back three local boys with them. I think they were all brothers, but I’m not really sure because their accents were difficult to understand. They were very nice, and like everybody else on the beach very intrigued by us. They wanted very badly to hang out with us for awhile. We did so, but left when Gabriela got upset. One of the boys had explained that his father was very sick, so he’d had to quit school to support his family. All he wanted was to go to school, but couldn’t afford it. “You can help me. Please help me”, he said. It was very upsetting, especially for Gabriela who is getting licensed to be a teacher.

We called Tyler over to pay for our food and drinks. He asked why we were leaving so soon, and I explained that Maria was having an allergic reaction to the salt from the ocean. This was an excuse, but not a lie. She really was getting a bad rash. So, shockingly, he told us to follow him to his house so she could wash the salt off her skin. We were hesitant, but Maria told us that her allergic reaction was getting really bad, so she needed to do something. So, we followed him a little bit down the way and went into his backyard. It was a very simple place. I can’t really describe it without pictures. But suffice it to say, the “shower” he provided for Maria consisted of him filling up a large bucket with water, leading her behind a curtain outside and telling her to rinse. She did so and felt much better. Then Tyler insisted that Gabriela wash off too since she also had saltwater on her. This sounds creepy, I know, but it was actually incredibly generous of him. He did not have any sort of running water in his home. The water literally came from a hand-pump in his yard, and he gave us a LOT of it. He gave us so much, in fact, that we were worried that he and his family might run out of it. But he brushed it off and insisted that the girls get clean.

Tyler wasn’t done making us feel at home yet. After the girls washed, he insisted that we meet his sister and her baby. He literally called her out of the house as she carried in baby in her arms and made her pose with us for photos. Then he gave Maria the baby to hold. The baby started crying, and he kept scolding her. “Hannah, Hannah! No! Smile! No crying!” This man wanted us to have a good time with his family.

But that wasn’t all. Upon hearing about our awful cab driver, Tyler insisted upon getting us a fair price to get back home to the ship. He told us to hide in the back while he hailed a cab, because the second a cabbie saw an American “the price goes up three times”. For what cost us $35 to get there, it cost us 20 cidi to get back, which is equal to just over $13. Tyler was a saint. Although we had tipped him for the food, I made a point of giving him some extra USD for helping us out so much. He looked shocked, absolutely shocked, and gave me a huge hug. “God bless you.”
We went back to the ship ranting and raving about our Ghanaian angel.

That night we went on a hunt for food. However, it was about 8 at night, so most Ghanaian places were no longer serving food as Ghanaians usually eat pretty early. We had meant to eat earlier, but were accosted by the merchandise men right outside the ship who wanted to sell us woven bracelets with our names on them. Having had quite a bit of experience with this in Morocco, I was able to avoid their tactics. Gabriela, Maria, and John, however? They’d gone on the camel trek in Morocco and weren’t used to these guys. Before they knew it they had been suckered into shaking a guys hand and getting a bracelet they didn’t want tied around their wrists. “HOW DID THIS HAPPEN TO ME?!” I laughed really hard at them. But that took a long time, so we were starving by the time we’d finished getting away. We settled on the first place the cabbie showed us, a hole in the wall called “Southern Fried Chicken”. We were skeptical, but very hungry, so we paid the cabbie and went inside. This would soon become our absolute favorite place in all of Ghana…but the reason why is better explained on the story of Day 2.
TO BE CONTINUED!!!