Nathan & Megan’s Blog

Trip to Paga and Bolga

Megan here.

Nathan and I got to practice being tourists this weekend!  I was on call Friday but luckily didn’t get called in overnight.  We got up early on Saturday morning and rounded on all the medicine patients.  Then we piled into a pickup truck with Andy (a medical student from Guernsey, which is actually its own country), Carolyn (a Peace Corps volunteer), and Issahaku (our driver).  Luckily the hospital was nice enough to loan us a truck, and Issahaku was nice enough to agree to drive us up to Bolga and Paga in Northern Ghana.  Unfortunately this meant we had to endure the rough dirt road between Nalerigu and Tamale again.  (Dad, I know you think the Knoxville roads can be bad at night in the rain, but trust me, you ain’t seen nothin’.  At night in the rain here, the roads don’t exist.)

We dropped Carolyn off in Bolga to do a radio show on HIV education.  The rest of us continued on for another 30 kilometers or so to Paga, which is right on the border between Ghana and Burkina Faso.  **DON’T FREAK OUT, PARENTS** but our first stop in Paga was the Crocodile Pond.  For a few Ghana cedi (the local currency), you can buy a wimpy looking chicken and pay to have your picture taken with a crocodile.  They let you hold the crocodile’s tail and squat above it.  Nathan and I figured we should probably NOT tell our families we were making this trip until we came back safe from it, but everything went fine.  The crocodile made one or two kind of quick moves, but otherwise was fine.  We took our picture with the largest crocodile we could find, but there were about 4 others waiting around hoping for a photo-op (and so also a chicken).

Our next stop was Pikworo slave camp, which was actually very interesting.  They gave us a guided history around the camp.  We saw the rock formation where there were bowls carved in the rock for them to eat out of, the large stones they used as tribal drums for entertainment, the slave cemetery, and the punishment rock.  It was almost surreal to see the conditions the slaves endured.  It was also interesting to hear that the camp was originally run by Ghanaians who trapped there own countrymen and other Africans to become slaves.

After sightseeing in Paga, we drove back to Bolga for lunch.  We went to a semi-popular restaurant that is featured in one of the Ghana good books.  Because of this, there was a table of about 20 white people which seemed absolutely bizarre to us.  On a side note:  the Ghanaians (especially the kids) like to yell “saminga” (white person) or “samisi” (white people) when they see you passing by.  This is more of a greeting than any sort of racial thing.  It gets annoying after a while.  I have to confess, though, that when we saw two white people walking down the road in Paga, we all rolled down the windows of the truck and yelled, “Samisi!!”  Even though I know how annoying it is to be on the white person end of it, it was really fun.

After lunch in Bolga we went to the craft market in Bolga and managed to pick up some souvenirs.  They had a lot of beautiful baskets, tribal masks, paintings, metal sculptures, leather purses…  I can’t list what we actually bought, though, because the recipients could be reading this blog. 

After we finished in Bolga we came back to the compound and just spent time enjoying our last days with the other volunteers here.  All in all it was a great weekend!

At 4 am Monday morning (yikes, that’s only 6 hours from now!) we drive to Tamale to catch our plane that leaves for Accra at 7.  We’ll spend tomorrow sightseeing in Accra and stay at the Baptist guest house.  Tuesday we’ll make our way to Capecoast to see the slave castles, the beach, and one of the national parks.  We’ll stay there Tuesday night then head back to Accra to catch our flight that leaves around 11 pm Wednesday night.  We’re excited to have a few more days to explore Ghana, but we’re also looking forward to coming home.  I miss talking to my family and friends live!  Hopefully the  next time we blog will be from American soil….