Small Comforts

When you have been traveling long enough, you start to appreciate things you barely noticed before. I was wondering when we would reach this point. Surely a good sickness increases the speed of its onset. So, here I am. Sitting in the offices, home and headquarters of Global Brigades Ghana, enjoying the simple things.

Good British cheese. So good that sharp cheddar on top of yesterday's white rice cooked in oil and garlic is downright delectable.

Good books. Scratch that. Free readable books. I have engorged myself on obscure history and hiking tales this week. The Pueblo Revolt had enough on the flap to get my attention. It is the story of the first American Revolution, the book claims. Nobody pays attention because it was the Pueblo revolting against the Spanish monarchy, not British. But, it counts, the back cover argues. And it is an interesting history of colonialism. No matter that it is another continent, another European empire, a different indigenous people. It is enough of a backdrop for my current travels. And the bookshelf at Global Brigades merits some good picking. I devoured Bill Bryson's A Walk In the Woods in less than 24 hours. He is self-effacing enough. He intersperses enough local history and environmental politics to keep an 850 mile walk in the woods interesting. His comedic comrade Katz conciliates his efforts. Perhaps Kerouac next. Or back to Steinbeck. Or Hesse, if he doesn't get too philosophical and hard to follow. (Why can't they all read like Siddhartha?) Anything that has some relevance and inspiration for this blog-writing traveler with ample time on his hands. I think often of the books I have passed in the tiny English sections of used and new bookstores along the way. Books I decided against, from a history of Basque Country to a dusty worn Nabokov to Martel's follow up to Life of Pi gleaming and crisp on the shelf. In hindsight, it seems like any of them would be a welcome gift, a downright blessing.

Americans. What can I say? I like em. They are welcome sights, accents, world views even, especially when they are interesting people doing interesting work. I supposed the traveling American is, in general, more interesting than the stationary one. At least, I think I am. More interesting than I was, that is. My concerns seem mildly more interesting. I used to worry about being on time, how much I have to do, or what's for dinner. Now I worry about getting off the roads of Ghana before dark, not getting sick, and what's for dinner. And the answer to what's for dinner always satisfies me, as long as it is something and it doesn't make me sick.

Domestic chores. When you are traveling for a year, there is nothing quite as comforting as doing laundry or cooking. I even found myself mopping a laundry room today with a smile after the washing machine had hopped across the room, divorcing itself from its drain pipe. It's a washing machine. It does laundry a million times better than I do with some washing powder, a sink and some feeble attempts at agitation. I can't even get visible dirt to disappear from my clothes without it's help. So, I am happy to clean up after it and hang my wet clothes on the line in the sun.

And then there's cooking. This really is the traveler's ultimate joy. For months, we have marveled with awe-filled mouths through markets of incredible ingredients. Seafoods of all sorts. Spices by the basket and pile. Grains. Beans. Vegetables I have never seen before. Vegetables I have never seen so beautiful before. And, in general, it is all food grown or caught within 50 miles of wherever I am standing, be it Marseille, Madrid, Morocco or Mankessim. But I am most often missing one critical ingredient – a kitchen. Or at least a stove. So, most of it is captured only by the camera rather than my dreaming taste buds and hoped-for increased culinary cunning. A kitchen here at the Global Brigades House in Ghana makes even the dirty onions in the local market look good. And that's a good thing because the vegetable options are somewhat limited – garden eggs (like mini eggplants), habenero-like peppers of green and red varieties (we will see if they are spicy!), garlic, red or yellow onion, huge flavorless brown yams that look like gourds, and tiny tomatoes. And I avoid the meat altogether. Leave it for the flies. Same with the seafood if I can't see the sea where it was caught. We stumble across a cucumber and a few small green bell peppers, try not to bump into the ladies with bags of bread on their heads, and meander out of the market a few bags of vegetables richer than we entered. Tonight we cook. Pasta and vegetables. Sounds delicious!

A house. This is a tricky one, because sometimes a hotel is just a better option. But if you have a good host and some space, a house can be grand! For example, we are now couchsurfing outside of Mankessim, which is a bit off the tourist track. We have our own room and bathroom with shower, sans hot water (we have ample hot air here in Africa instead). Actually, it is almost our own wing. We have to cross a courtyard to get to our room. We have stayed in houses that left us wanting for a hotel. Actually, we have left houses in favor of hotels. But not this one. And with each day, the promised land draws closer.

Where is this promised land, you ask? Well, for us, it is in Johannesburg, South Africa. Yes, Johannesburg, South Africa. This is a place that before the trip, I swore off. Heard it was ugly, dirty, crowded. My sister was held up there at gunpoint once. Why would I ever go there when South Africa has Cape Town? But, alas, we have friends there. Tabitha and Lee. Tabitha is Annette's classmate from law school. And coincidentally enough, two Halloweens ago we met them at Commander's Palace for dinner. It turned out Lee proposed to Tabitha that evening. So, we have shared some moments. And we even share the same place of proposal for our two marriages. That practically makes Johannesburg home! And, as I understand it, they have a guest house. Yes, our own little house, next to, but separate from their's. It sounds wonderful, doesn't it? We will spend Thanksgiving there and do good American things like cook a big feast and watch American football. (He has every game the Saints have played this season recorded). And it is our next stop. Only a few weeks of elephants, tro-tros, bumpy roads, a few dozen more plates of red-red and plantains and a plane ride away.

Birds, school children, palm wine, monkeys and missing cidis

I woke up to birds chirping outside my window the last two mornings. Birds chirping and the morning sun peeking through my window to catch my eye and call me out to the beautiful day. The birds probably chirped the mornings before. But for a week or so there, the mucus clogged my ears and clouded my mind's sharpness to notice.

But a few days in Big Milly's Backyard took care of that. If ever there was a backpackers' beach resort, Big Milly's in Kokrobite is it. Accommodation, restaurant, juice bar, alcohol bar, all contained within a compound that opens out onto the beach. All purchases are made using a tab system and tallied at the end of your stay. One need not leave the compound except to swim or walk the beach (which I unfortunately discovered eventually turns into the village toilet if you try to walk far enough...). We checked out after three nights and nearly four days to a tab of 266 cidis, about $175 U.S.

After a night of storms, the air was fresh and cool. We started early to catch a taxi back down the dirt road to Barrier - which as far as I can tell is named after the toll booth on the main road - where we would catch a tro tro to Cape Coast, we hoped.

We caught the first tro tro that passed in a matter of minutes. It was going to Takoradi, as shown by hand symbols I don't yet understand and the driver calling "takoradi, takoradi, takoradi" like he is a helicopter about to take off. And he drives like that too - about to lift off. Takoradi is past Cape Coast, so it looked like this tro tro would be our chariot for the day. And it was relatively empty. So we rode in peace, space and coolness on paved roads for a while. We passed a village flooded from the previous night's rain. The news suggests there may be more.

About mid-way through the three-hour ride, we stopped long enough to pick up a full complement of passengers. So, we rode, knees pressed against the seat in front of us, one foot on the wheelwell, for an hour or so. I kept my nose close to the window like a dog and only adjusted my legs enough to keep my foot from falling asleep.

We arrived relatively effortlessly at the Mighty Victory Hotel in Cape Coast by 1 p.m. in time for lunch an a visit to Cape Coast Castle. Ironically, it is perched between Forts Victoria and Williams, as close as two forts in West Africa will get to my parents' names (Victoria and William Hamilton a.k.a. Tony). Cape Coast is a small city, the first British colonial capitol of the Gold Coast. Its streets are filled with short-legged goats, chickens, and uniformed school children, girl and boys with hair cut short. Within an hour in Cape Coast, I had already seen more schools than I had so far during my entire time in Ghana. It is an interesting legacy of colonialism. Slave castles and schools. And architecture crumbling at the edges.

Cape Coast's castle is stately, white with blue trim. Cannons protrude on three sides like porcupine quivers. The tour that come with admision is lackluster. It reminds me of bad history teaching - where the focus is on memorizing a bunch of dates rather than telling and understanding a story. The entrance to the male slave dungeon i flanked on either side by a plaque. The first is powerful. It has six lines on it that place the reponsibility on we, the living, to protect humanity from ever repeating such atrocities. The second is disappointing. It was unveiled in 2009 when President Obama and the First Lady visited. It essentially amount to "Obama wuz here" scrawled on the wall in permanent marker. Yes, it is a marble plaque. But the message only says he came. Nothing more. Surely, it isn't his fault, but the plaque disappoints. Where the tour and Obama plaque lack, the museum makes up. Although nothing groundbreaking, it tells a coherent story from ancient Africa through slavery and the diaspora to the modern day.

I withdraw money fromt he Barclay's ATM, only to find that it gives me half of what I ask for, and half of what the receipt says it gave me. Discovering the discrepancy, I hurry back to find Julius, a friendly security guard. Explaining my problem to see if I can make it his problem too, he listens carefully. Since the bank is closed, all he can do is tell me to bring my passport and receipt and ask for Elizabeth in customer care when the bank opens tomorrow morning.

So, I listen for the birds' chirp and hurry down there at 8:30 a.m. the next morning. Elizabeth is there as promised. And friend and helpful. She seems matter of fact about the whole thing, leading me to believe this happens fairly often. When I ask, she says it has happened before. She says they don't count the money until Monday. But when they do, they will check for my discrepancy and pay me the difference. We will see when that day will come.

Today, rain chases me back to the hotel, making the fifteen minute walk twenty minutes of running and pausing under tin awnings to see if the rain will let up. It doesn't. It clears a half an hour after I put on a dry shirt, just as it had appeared half an hour after I put on my first dry shirt of the day. So we head on to Kakum National Park - a semi-rainforest with a canopy walk between towering trees one hundred feet up. After the treetop walk on suspended bridges, we do a tree bottom walk on sand, stone and slippery soil. The guide shows us plants of all purposes, from furniture to fetal health, perfumed mosquito repellent to rubber and snake bite cures. (The cure is that you chew and swallow a thorn which makes you vomit the poison from the snake). Roots form snakes and walls. Some climb back toward the sky. The roots of the sugar plum tree reach for, but are still a meter short of the ground. They will be there soon. A cricket taps a bottle, or so it sounds, to a distinctively West African rhythm. And butterflies coast through by the dozen. 600 species of butterfly live in Kakum. We probably saw a dozen species.

After two hours of hiking, we pay one cidi for twelve ounces of fresh palm wine. It naturally ferments in the tree an must be drank within 24 hours of when it is tapped from the tree. It tastes like Ms. Annie's corn wine with fewer ingredients, and a touch more sour. Halfway through the bottle, our guide points out a sound in the woods. As one who has been asking her to identify every sound I heard in the woods for the last two hours (and she did readily), this is welcome instruction. "Kakum," is the call. The park is named for it. It is the call of the colobus monkeys native here. Unfortunately for us, it is a warning call that there is danger nearby. Danger, a.k.a., us. So, no monkey sightings today. But we do see crocodiles and goldfinches at the touristy Botel (hotel on a man-made crocodile pond) on the way back to our less touristy hotel.

I return to my room to find two missed calls on the cell phone. It is Elizabeth from Barclay's. "We found your money. I told the woman you were traveling. Can you come pick it up tomorrow?"

"Perfect. Thank you! I will be there at 8:30 when the bank opens, just like this morning."

School children

Canopy walkway

The roots

Random tourist posing with sleeping crocodile

The powerful plaque

Sick and Tired

We went to the doctor yesterday. I called our International SOS health care from Dakar on Wednesday when both Annette and I were having flu-like symptoms. Everybody scares you that it could be malaria. So, I called to be sure. The American doctor on the other end assured me it wasn't and to call him back if I got a fever.

After two days in Accra, things got worse. Annette originally blamed it on sleeping under fans. But we agreed that the air quality there is horrible, mostly ruined by vehicles spouting gray smoke from their exhausts. By Sunday morning, I had no energy, an aching body, a headache and major congestion of my sinuses. And Annette had a soar throat with an unproductive cough that just seemed to be getting worse. So we called SOS again. It was a Sunday. We had two choices. We could go to the Cardiothoracic center at the private hospital, which is basically an ER. Or we could wait until tomorrow and go to a private clinic with an appointment. We opted for the hospital today rather than the clinic tomorrow. We had plans to go to Kokrobite Beach that afternoon for a few days. And we both felt the beach would do as much for our health as a doctor. Allen had sent us an e-mail while we were in Dakar, telling us to head for Kokrobite. “Not too much Accra,” he warned. I understand.

We found our way to the cardiothoracic center in Accra and were pleased to discover the nurse on duty had dealt with SOS before. “Usually they call us to let us know you are coming,” she told us before directing us to have a seat in the small office that doubles as the nurses' station. The place was drab. The building was built fifty years ago or more and not maintained since. A television on the wall was tuned to Emmanuel TV. A Nigerian preacher was healing people with a few words and the power of God. Breached babies were being born safely as a result. “Not a good sign,” I thought to myself. But when somebody came to clean the window of the nurses' station, the nurse directed me outside. “The dust is not good for you,” she said.

So we waited. We paced. Annette fell asleep in a plastic lawn chair out front. We waited in the pharmacy which had air conditioning and six dozen boxes marked “keep under 25 degrees.” I would check with the nurse periodically. She had called the doctor. He should be here soon. We waited for about two hours. Although neither of us were feeling well, we were prepared to wait for up to five hours or so. So, two hours wasn't bad.

The doctor was a young Ghanaian man, maybe 30. He wore blue jeans and a Chelsea Football Club jersey. He called us in separately. He was very clinical. He interviewed me and took notes on a blank piece of paper. The only thing that got a rise out of him was my response to his question, “have you been having any fever.”

“It's hard to tell,” I told him, “since it is so hot.” He laughed and asked if I have been having chills. “No.”

We left without having taken a malaria test, to my surprise. Instead we left with a good supply of drugs, the primary one being Augmentin, a combination of amoxicillin and clavulanic acid. Twice a day with meals for five to seven days.

So, we took one with lunch, checked out of our hotel and caught a taxi to Kokrobite. We soon traded in the smoke-filled roads of Accra with their street vendors hawking bags of plantain chips and water from bowls on their head to washed out dirt roads. Finally, the taxi reached the end of the road. It was Big Milly's – a backpacker's resort laid out along the white sand beaches of Kokrobite. On the beach just outside of the gates, locals sell Bob Marley and Haile Selassie t-shirts, kebabs and skirts around several beached wooden boats. Several guys are refurbishing one of them, chiseling away slowly at the corner. Several other guys are carefully picking through fishing nets.

Annette's spirits and health seems to pick up upon arrival and she walks the beach. I go swimming in the ocean, hoping the air and sea will help dry out my sinuses. I end up sitting on a towel on the beach shivering. It is warm out. It seems I only have the worst symptoms right before and right after I see the doctor. I lie down at 7 p.m., excited for a couple of days of rest to restore my health. I lie under a mosquito net and try to sleep. My head just gets warmer. Soon, I feel like an oven roasting. As I try to sleep, I find myself in a half-awake dreamlike state. My mind thinks about malaria and concludes nobody recommended the test because it was expensive. I decide I will get a room with air conditioning tomorrow.

I descend further into the night. I don't want to be here. I wish I was home. I cannot take Africa. I haven't slept a good night since we went south of the Sahara. This is too rough. I look at the Indikra symbols on the wall. There are the two crocodiles who fight over food but share a stomach, a statement about greediness. They are looking at me. There is the ladder of death that everybody must climb. I decide I will be horrible at dying, given how much of a wimp I am when something is wrong with my health.

I descend further into the night. It is now dark outside our hut. Seems like it has been that way for hours. It all seems to be a complicated quest to get sleep. It is a puzzle I cannot solve. Like a rubix cubic of time and space. I don't understand the construct. But I must in order to sleep. I have to solve this riddle to reach the peaceful sleep that I so need on the other side. I feel desperate, hopeless. The riddle operates outside of space and time. It is like a koan or a chinese finger trap. The harder I try the hotter my fever gets and the more miserable I feel. I feel like I have been at it for hours, trapped in this sweaty sleepless place in the far reaches of my mind and the world. It must be the fever. Or the heat. Or the malaria medication.

Annette gets up to use the bathroom. I think to myself that I will lie here until daylight. The morning always brings some coolness and rest at the end of a hot sleepless night.

“It is only eleven o'clock.”

“That's impossible.” I am sure I have been lying here for six or eight hours. So, I get up to use the bathroom and have a drink of water. I wonder what I will do this night and when my fever will break.

Annette turns up the fan, which provides a hint of a breeze in the room. I lie back down to accept my fate of fever and misery for however long I will need to endure it.

Ten hours. In and out of sleep. In and out of fever. In and out of reality. But the morning brings coolness. And I feel better than I did the night before, which is always a good sign. And the following day I feel almost 100% again, ready to continue the journey.

The American Bubble

It's good to be in Ghana. Accra feels first world after Dakar. Modern buildings everywhere. Western toilets, soap and toilet paper in the bathrooms. Traffic lights abound. And they work. Electricity and water seems reliable. The cars are nicer. Gold makes a difference. So does recently discovered oil. And significant investment from ex-pats and other Westerners.

We find a cheap hotel ($16 U.S. Per night) with a powerful fan and private bathroom and a SIM card in the Asylum Down neighborhood and wander the city until we connect with Mark. Mark was a classmate from Annette's senior year as an undergrad at Ole Miss. He has been here for six months as a manager at an Avis car rental branch owned by an ex-pat black woman from Oklahoma. She has been in Ghana for twenty years.

He sends us back past the airport to East Lagone in search of Chez Afrique. After the taxi driver stops to ask for directions and the headlights go out on the taxi for a few minutes, we eventually find our way there. Like many bars and restaurants in Ghana, it is a series of outdoor tables (in this case, 40-50 of them), some covered, some not. A high life band plays under a cabana with a wood-framed grass roof in the middle. Guinea fowl are splayed on a grill in the corner by the dozen. We sit at the only empty table we find, next to the grill. We order large Star beers and a guinea fowl twice before it comes. Annette and Mark catch up on the last seven years. We drink cold beet and eat guinea fowl. It's tough and peppery but grilled meat is always good. We dance for a half hour or so on a hot, crowded dance floor. There's an art to holding your space on a dance floor. Step one is to always be dancing. But, besides that, it's an art I haven't mastered. A man slowly edges me to the outer perimeter of the dance floor as he tries to handle his big-bootied woman bent over and backing up on him. This is the beginning of the night of dancing Annette has been waiting for.

We catch a taxi to the Nima Police Station and, after some confusion, navigate our way around the corner to the Tropicana to meet a London-educated Ghanaian attorney friend of Mark's – Andrew. It's a jazz club, not crowded. A few folks are finishing meals. The band plays jazz standards, reggae, soul, R&B, and African classics (think Fela Kuti). We talk and dance a bit but the 4:30 a.m. wakeup for our plane in Dakar along with the cold I picked up there are starting to slow me down. And what alwas happens to me on a dance floor when I am not that into it begins. My mind moves faster, my body slower. Soon I find myself perched on a stool in reflection, drinking water, tapping my foot to the music.

“She's got diamonds on the souls of here shoes,” the singer sings. It seems ironic. African band covering a white American's song written after he “discovers” the music of Africa. That being said, I like Paul Simon's Graceland. At the moment, though, it is the boarding of a train of thought that carries me through most of the evening.

When Annette and I left New Orleans, we agreed we were looking in part for a place we would like to live overseas for a while. So with each place, we do some sort of informal evaluation. Do we like it? Could we live there? What has it taught us about where we want to live and where we don't? What we feel like we need and what we don't? It has been helpful to meet ex-pats who are living there and do our best to get a sense of their lives.

“Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes” becomes “You Can Call Me Al” with some sax and trumpet accompaniment.

When I was a student at Tulane, I didn't go on study abroad. Instead, I criticized it, content to invest my time and energy in New Orleans for those four years of college. It seemed to me like study abroad was simply taking the bubble of Tulane University life and floating it overseas. It was still the same bubble. The bar was the Boot in New Orleans. I never caught the name of what it was in Madrid or Paris or Prague, but it was roughly the same. I thought the creation and preservation of the bubble was a result of the students and the program.

But as we have traveled, I am learning the bubble isn't just reserved for college kids. The lives of those connected to the United States military communities exist in a bubble as well. Often, they even use American dollars and buy imported American products at the PX or commissary on base. But the bubble is often preserved without the assistance of the military.

As we travel, time and time again we have found ex-pats congregate together. They frequent the same bars, some of which are run by ex-pats. They socialize among themselves. They speak English, even if it is not the primary language of the country where they live. (But I suppose the same can be said about Chinatown or Little Italy in any American city.) The ex-pats also don't seem to interact socially outside of their class, which may be middle class in the U.S. or Europe, but it is upper class in Africa. They are elite. They rub shoulders with the elite ex-pats from Europe, sometimes wealthy Africa. Sometimes elite locals.

The band is on to a Jame Brown Sex Machine/I'm Black and I'm Proud medley. Two white couples enter and pull up a seat on the edge of the dance floor with cocktails.

But there has been some contrast to the ex-pat life I am describing. There's Molly from the Peace Corps in Morocco. She lives a rural village life that requires deeper interaction with her local community. Perhaps that is one of the advantages of traveling abroad through programs like the Peace Corps, World Teach, etc. Then there's the Belgian ex-pat in Senegal – Johan. He has integrated himself deeply into Senegalese culture. He lives more as many Senegalese do than most. But we barely made it a night sleeping in his bed. And all of it seems like hard living we might have embraced a decade ago, but probably not now as we look to start a family.

The band plays Fela, African Woman.

So, where does that leave us? Is our choice “roughing it” with the locals or luxury living in an isolated ex-pat community, relatively protected from the poverty, difficulty and authentic interaction with the locals? If these are the choices, I'd rather move home where I am closer to family and friends. But perhaps there are many choices between these two extremes, nuances we will discover newly in each place as we travel. We will see...

Tulane University

My Tulane University t-shirt never fails to elicit comment. In Germany, I met the father of one of my former students because of it. In the security line at Leopold Airport in Dakar, an older gentleman asked, “Did you go to Tulane?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“My daughter went there, but I think she is much older than you two. She is 50.”

That puts him and his wife in their 70s. They are flying to Bamako, then on to Burkina, then Ghana. They are from Houston. Their flight got screwed up so they had to spend a night in Dakar en route. Houston – Paris – Dakar – Bamako. They looked sleepy but in good health. They are at the other end of our travels. Perhaps if we waited until after we had kids, we would be traveling in our 70s. Perhaps we still will.