Aventure Grande - Partie Deux

Sorry, I meant to post this earlier but I went to a soccer game instead. Not to brag, but it was pretty awesome. The match was between Accra – Heart of Ork and Kumasi – Asante Kotoka, two Ghanaian Premier League teams. It was in the national stadium in Accra so there was a pretty large crowd and my oh my do they get excited about the game. Anyway, Kumasi won 2-0 which was disappointing since I decided to root for Accra, but hey, I had only been a fan for two hours so it wasn’t too heartbreaking. So today is part two (or three depending on how you’re counting) and we were about to go hiking in the forest on Tuesday morning. This will be fairly picture intensive… hope you don’t mind.

No cockroaches. It was an excellent night's sleep. I awoke early in the morning and once Corbett and Hannah were ready we took a stroll back down to Chez Paul for breakfast. This time, we were careful to sit in the same superior table as we had last night. Paul walked in and stood there confused for a second and then said something in French. After translation it turned out that we had again chosen the incorrect table. We stayed put this time. Breakfast was the standard omelette, baguette and fruit.

After breakfast, we met up with our hiking guide at the hotel. He, like everyone else, only spoke French so Corbett was to translate for the duration of the hike. We set off, starting in the village.

Our first stop was a set of plants near a house in the village, there were a wide variety of uses for the assortment of plants he showed us but I honestly don’t remember much about them. Before heading into the forest we made a quick stop at the studio of a local artist who used bee wax gathered from the jungle, mixed with pigments to paint cotton cloth. The color permeated the cloth and the wax prevented bleeding of colors. The art was then dried, the wax residue removed and it was done.  Of course, we didn’t have time to watch him do all of this but he thoroughly described the whole process. Hannah bought a big painting of fish around a coral reef, Corbett bought a 3 painting series of musicians and I bought an elephant with it’s trunk stretched upward (a symbol of good luck).

I bought the orange one on the right

Back to the hike… We made our way down a gentle hill into the forest, passing coco, coffee, papaya, plantain and banana trees. Man, there was a lot of food hanging in this forest. We meandered through the bush stumbling upon pineapple, avocado and cola nuts. Cola nuts are in fact what is used to make cola flavored soda but in their raw form they were extremely bitter.

Coffee beans

There was also a wide variety of insects in the forest. Butterflies were everywhere, probably in higher concentration and variety than I had ever seen before. Enourmas millipedes several inches in length crawled along the path but I didn’t notice until after I stepped on one. Not to mention the huge and colorful grasshoppers.

To complement the fruit, butterflies and insects there was also many exotic and colorful flowers in bloom. The forest was teeming with life and color to a level I had never seen before in my life.

Eventually, we arrived at a small waterfall and it’s shallow pool. It was only a small fall but it’s remoteness and surroundings of lush plants and butterflies made it quite remarkable.

After visiting the waterfall to cool us off we began our hike up Mount Klouto. The hike was fairly long but not strenuous since the route wasn’t very steep. The view from the top provided a great vantage point on the region around Kpalimé. The city itself could be seen in the distance, right in front of Mount Agou. On a nearby peak, a chateu could be seen rising above the trees. A man from France built the chateau for his wife but after living in it for two days she decided that it was too remote so the couple went back to Europe, leaving the chateau for the people of the nearest village.

Mount Agou in the distance

Nearby, a small hotel was under construction atop the mountain. If anyone wants to go to Togo in a few years that’s the place to stay, trust me. In fact, I think I’ll tag along to make sure you find the place alright… please, I insist.

Hotel under construction

By the time we made it back to our hotel 6 hours… had not past, not even close. I guess the guide was exaggerating when he tried to sell the hike to us. Oh well, it was certainly worth it. We grabbed some water and rode back to Kpalimé, still on motos.

From Kpalimé we took a shared taxi over 100km to Atakpamé (pronounced a-tock-pah-may). Somehow, we fit 9 people in one (small) car. Two sat in the front passenger seat, the driver shared his seat with another passenger, four of us crammed into the back seat and a ninth guy sat atop the luggage behind the back seat. As we drove northward, the jungle became less and less dense and the mountains that had stayed by our side to the east for over a hundred kilometers, finally became subdued hills. We were entering savannah land.

We arrived in Atakpamé immediately after a rainstorm and within a minute of standing on the rain-soaked streets, before our legs could stretch out or find some food, a tro-tro to Dapaong, our chosen destination (for little real reason), arrived. We had to take the opportunity or else we could be waiting an unknown amount of time for the next one. We crammed into the crowded tro but they weren’t ready to leave. First, the mate needed to kick a blind man off for some reason. This, or something else, caused a stir and shouting ensued for several minutes. A crowd of vendors descended on the stopped tro (as they always do) like a flock of vultures. Shouting in rage, shouting of food names, arms reaching into the windows shoving food in my face, arguing inside the van full of over 20 people, drizzle dripping into the vehicle, exhaust fumes filling the air. Noise, chaos, absolute hell and I didn’t understand a word being said. A local passenger who happened to speak English leaned over to Corbett and said “This is what it’s like in Africa…” She knew. We all knew, it certainly wasn’t new to us but I was still far from used to it.

Eventually, we departed and a few stops later the driver insisted that I move to the front seat since I was too tall for my legs to fit between the seats in the back. The front was indeed nice. How had I never thought of this in two months of taking tro-tros?

We were on our way north and the sun began to set over the savannah. I stared out the driver's window for a good 15 straight minutes… hopefully he wasn’t creeped out by my apparent looking at him but the sun set was just too good to not look at. It was a typical savannah sunset like you might picture when you think of Africa. The deep orange sun swelled into an enormous disk which silhouetted the sparse trees on the dusty plain… Sorry I didn’t have my camera close by.

At 9:30PM we arrived in a town called Sokodé (pronounced sock-o-day). None of us had ever heard of it before and honestly, I was expecting to be in Dapaong already. According to the mate, we wouldn’t reach Dapaong until 1AM at the earliest. This would make searching for hotels quite challenging. We were tired of traveling and really without options so we cut our journey short and got off at this random town.

We found a nice enough hotel with a restaurant attached, ate our food and went straight to bed from extreme fatigue leaving the question: ‘what is there to do in Sokodé?’ for the morning.

TO BE CONTINUED…