This was my second last weekend and pretty much pure mayhem. Tom and I went to Kumasi to join our friends from the uni on their field trip. We got the VIP bus (very swanky, worth the money) on Saturday, arrived in Kumasi full of goal and multifrutas (drinking on buses is always a good idea), proceeded to barter with a taxi driver by taking him to a bar to get shots….not our finest moment…totally confusing one of the locals in the process who thought we were married and kept asking “But how does it work?” (Tom is very tall and I am very short, if you get where he was going with that).
We made it to the hotel, sneaked in, and joined the students for a giant game of Ring of Fire with about 30 of us in one hotel room. The thing with ring of fire is that it gets messier and messier as people introduce their own rules, by the end of the game if you pulled a red card everyone would start chanting “What,what, show us your butt” and there is no way you can work your way out of that one with a whole room full of people chanting!
Ring of Fire
Looks like I’m naked and hiding here…I’m not
It was absolutely tipping it down with torrential rain like I had never seen before, and we couldn’t get any taxies to come to our hotel so we ended up walking right across the uni to find a main road where we could pick some up. That is commitment to a night out right there/drunken stupidity, it’s hard to tell. We finally made it to the Golden Tulip, a pretty expensive club in a 4* hotel (not sure who made that choice?). Luckily for us there were Smirnoff promoters outside giving out free drinks –something I never expected to see when I came to Ghana. It was a fun night, I vaguely remember a lot of tequila shots,a lot of dancing, and a lot of visits to the Smirnoff stand. Finding my friends soaking wet because they had jumped in and immediately been kicked out of the hotel swimming pool. Finding out everything that went down in the morning was so funny –too many people in not enough beds with too much going on, one guy refusing to pay a prostitute because he didn’t realise what she was…until we got discovered for sneaking in to our friends rooms and the management tried to charge us for the whole price of the rooms again. That was fairly awkward, and resulted in us leaving as quickly as possible. I know it was a pretty awful thing to do but in our defence we had shared our friends beds and the rooms had already been paid for –it didn’t really make any difference that we were there and we definitely shouldn’t have had to pay for the rooms over.
Free drinks in hand :)
We made our way into Kumasi to see the market and lost our feet in the crazy amount of mud there. I know it’s the largest outdoor market in West Africa and one of those things that you are supposed to see but we really couldn’t handle it. Sometimes I think it’s important to just not do the things you don’t want to do. There is no point going to see something, just because you think it will be cultural, or because it’s what everyone else is doing. You should do what you’ll enjoy instead. So we headed to Lake Bosumtwi and it was beautiful. I always feel so much more at home in the natural places than in the cities. I was amazed to see just how different it was, with different trees growing and birds flying around. The resort we wanted to stay at was full so we stayed at Rainbow lodge, 5mins down the road, but spent our time in the first one. Most of that day was spent just lying in the sun reading before taking a great nap. The evening was spent drinking lots of clubs (Ghanaian beer) at our own resort, getting into deep discussions on ethics and extra dimensions and meeting Jorge –one of four Mexicans in Ghana. There was crazy rain again and we ended up completely abandoning shoes to walk barefoot in the mud to the next hostel, something which feels strangely nice on your footsies. There were only a few people still up at the other hostel but we had a nice time drinking and chatting with them. We got home crazy muddy and ended up having a water fight in the shower as we tried to wash our feet off. Woke up so confused as to why all of my clothes were soaking wet!
I had a great time in Kumasi, but it was really the beginning of my realisation that it is the people you’re with that make you like a place, because without my friends Kumasi would have been just another city. From Kumasi I started on my great solo adventure travelling up to Mole National Park…more next time :).
Xx
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