lobster harmonica

a boxing encounter, and a few words from qaddafi

I am back in the U.S. now, and am finally settled in enough (and rehydrated enough) to log in with the happy news that I did indeed manage to score two more fabulous Afriqiyah Air teacups during the flights from Accra to Tripoli and Tripoli to London. I almost scored a fifth, actually, but turns out the guy across the aisle whose tray I was going to swipe it from only looked like he was napping. Oops.

A few other interesting transit notes: At the Accra airport, while waiting for my plane to board, I spotted a guy that I recognized from the boxing match: a promoter who'd been invited into the ring before the fight, the only white guy among a dozen or so folks welcomed through the ropes for brief acknowledgment. I figured he was with Clint MacNeil, the American fighter, but turns out he's Bazooka's U.S. promoter, the guy who'll strum up fights for him in the States. Thick Brooklyn accent, shaved head, heavy eyelids, flying Alitalia: this guy was straight out of Rocky. He was also highly guarded, which I guess is not surprising given that I had just strolled over and asked him point blank whether the fight had been a setup, still thinking that he was an ally of MacNeil, not Quartey. He stared at me, lids drooping, and said, "Yeah well they're the same weight." Eventually he softened up, and admitted that Bazooka was technically considered an 'A' fighter, while MacNeil was more a 'D' fighter. But he and Bazooka's other handlers had been surprised at how tough MacNeil had turned out to be; they thought he'd be knocked out much earlier. And apparently I'd just missed seeing a very bruised MacNeil at the airport. Promoter guy said that he had visited MacNeil just after the fight; he had a broken nose and black eyes, with a few deep cuts under one of them, and he'd been crying. He'd really thought he could win, which either says great things about his will or something troubling about what happens to a brain when it is knocked against the skull a few too many times.

Also interesting, as always, was the Tripoli airport. I noticed a sign this time that I hadn't spotted before: an anti-drug message posted on an illuminated signboard in the transit lounge. I almost took a picture, then remembered I was in Libya and reconsidered. So I wrote the whole thing down instead:

General Administration for Drugs and Mental Effects Fighting

Wines and drugs are total destruction weapons, Hashish is like the bacteriological and chemical weapons and the atomic bomb. Person who deal there with he seems like he takes a weapon from the enemy and do explode it inside his country. - The Revolution Leader

Dear passenger
Take yourself away from drugs route, it is destructor and killer, it murders any one comes near to or deals with it.

Dear passenger
The people's Congresses in Great Jamahiriya have issued strict laws against all who deals with this lesion to destroy our happy jamahiriyan society considering that a political case.

Dear passenger
Be aware in dealing with strangers who you don't know, and don't volunteer to carry their luggage or any other luggage except yours, and remember always that law do not protect stupidest.

Dear passenger
This call for you to cooperate with us to pluck out the destroying lesion and to protect our chaste society form [sic] its destroying risks, so don't hesitate to contact us to give any information that may help the security agents in tracking the trace of who may his soul entices him to violate the values of our happy jamahiriyan society.

Positioned right next to this sign was a glass display case filled with Marlboros and tidy boxes of cigarillos. While reading the sign, you can see beyond it, on the far wall, a giant 5'x7' or so painting of Qaddafi, just his head. He's wearing the trademark sunglasses and his face is tilted back, as if he's about to sneeze.

All in all, all flights went well, although I'm not sure I would recommend watching the movie 'Wimbledon' three times in one day, no matter how dreamy Paul Bettany might be ... or packing your plentiful pile of gifts and souvenirs in a cheap 99-cent pseudo-reinforced plastic tote that might rip in half when it's been tossed onto the baggage claim carousel in London ... or thinking that the automated voice warning you to hold on to something during the tram ride that shuttles you from terminal to terminal in the Newark airport is just saying that for kicks, because it turns out to be true that you can suddenly find yourself facedown, backpack still attached, in a pile of somebody else's luggage.

I am glad to be home, though primed as always for another adventure.

the triumphant return of ike 'bazooka' quartey, and one hellacious funereal roadtrip

So we got tickets to the boxing match, which turned out to be yet another otherworldly developing-world sporting experience, which is pretty much no surprise since the match, like the soccer game, turned out to be a much grander deal than we'd anticipated. It was the first fight in four years for Ike 'Bazooka' Quartey, a Ghanaian boxer who once held the world welterweight title, sounds like for quite awhile. Before retirement, his record was 32-4-1, with 29 knockouts; his famous right jab knocks the crap out of people, apparently. Two of his losses - one of them to Oscar de la Hoya - came right at the end of his career, and pissed him off enough to cause him to bail on the sport. But now he's run out of money and wants his title back. Thus this fight, and thus the excitement.

We got ringside seats but they were unassigned, so to make sure we could all sit together we left the house around 8:30 - the main fight wouldn't happen until midnight but there were about 6 fights scheduled to preceed it. I don't know what we were expecting the venue to look like - small, indoors, dark, pressed with people. But what we got was really bizarre and strangely exciting: the ring was set up outside in an empty, wide-open field, and circled all around by plastic chairs arranged in neat concentric rows (if a row can be concentric). The lighting: 8 bare but powerful lightbulbs strung above the ring, which blinked out every time someone stepped on the extension cord. There were several levels to the tickets people were holding, and there was a mad crush of people trying to sit ringside; I spent at least 4 weird minutes with my face pressed into the back of this gigantic Ghanaian guy in a Ricky Williams jersey and braids down to his butt who was fighting with the security guards about his preferred seating option, which was to pay to sit way back but move up front. And all of this unfolded in near darkness, since the only lighting was coming from the bulbs.

The fights themselves were pretty sick. I love all sorts of sports, but not boxing; watching two people punch each other repeatedly for a half hour or so is not my idea of fun, and Laura and I spent most of the night in a state of horrified curiosity. The interesting thing was that we could tell within the first 30 seconds of a fight who was going to win - probably a useless sixth sense to have, but we were never wrong. The crowd was tame during the early fights, but as the matchups grew bigger in importance the anticipation started growing. The Ghanaian drums started. People strained in their seats, yelling for one guy or another to knock the other's lights out. It was hard to see the crowd because of the lighting, but we could feel it. By the time the main fight came around, at about 1am, they were rabid. When Ike came out, dressed in shorts sequined in the colors of the Ghanaian flag, they pretty much went nuts. "Bazooooooka!" they yelled.

The Ghanaian's return was no disappointment, and we're both convinced he'd been set up for a win. His opponent was Clint MacNeil, a compact little American guy with blond hair and balloony blue and white shorts and a cross tatooed on the middle of his back. When the match started, we could tell immediately that Clint was toast. Bazooka's jab has lost none of its oomph, and he'd been blessed with long arms; the little American could not hit back without stepping forward, something he was clearly loathe to do. As a result, the match was a bit monotonous: Bazooka jabbing, American's head snapping back ... Bazooka jabbing, American's head snapping back.... Laura covered her eyes, and handled the taunts coming our way from the Ghanaians around us who thought we were there to cheer the American. (I think some of her sentences could be considered technical knockouts.) I just screamed "Dude, hit him back!" something like 100 times. Around us, everyone was up and shouting, more and more as the match progressed and especially when they sensed blood. The American had never in his career been knocked out, but it was looking like he was about to get his first experience in hitting the floor headfirst. Sure enough, down he went, in the fifth round. How he lasted that long I have no idea. He looked a bit delirious, and his face was covered in blood.

We hightailed it out of there before they officially announced Bazooka the winner; judging from the way people were rushing the ring, Kofi and Vivian thought there might be a riot. So we made our way out through another crush of people. I am happy to say that he two guys tag-teaming to get in my bag were nicely deterred by a little strategic slapping and hip-checking on my part. We made it back to the car and to Kofi and Vivian's house safely but tired at about 2:30 in the morning.

And then it was up at 5:30 to throw on some black clothes and get in the truck and drive to Kofi's half-brother's mother's funeral. Or what we thought was the funeral. Kofi and Vivian had thought it would be interesting for us, and so did we, and indeed it was. But what we didn't know was that to get there we were going to have to drive for about four hours, mostly on unpaved roads with giant dips and holes and choked with traffic, and that it would take us even longer to get back, thanks to some innovative cheating maneuvers that a lot of drivers were pulling that were making traffic even worse. In Ghana, there is no such thing as a traffic law and the police are less about the enforcement of anything than they are about taking bribes. That plus the fact that a margarine truck was stuck in the middle of the road had us, at one point, sitting for two hours in the same spot, baking in our black clothes. Kofi and Vivian passed the time by expressing their exasperation with Ghana and its road system pretty much nonstop, flowing between English and Tre. Laura got out of the car and took a roadside walk to see if she could get some life back in her butt. I put a few drops of water on my finger and drew tribal marks on my face, which I could do because my face was covered in road dust.

Roadtrip nightmare aside - we were either stopped or bumping up and down on bad roads for more than 8 hours - the funeral was a culturally intriguing little affair. It was actually more a pre-funeral than a funeral itself. Basically, people from the village and beyond gathered to pay their respects from the family and learn the date of the actual funeral. In this case the funeral isn't until March, so that family from overseas can make it to Ghana for the burial. And so we sat in a little outdoor courtyard filled to the brim with would-be mourners, most of them draped in layers of black cloth, and listened to the tribal chief announce the funeral date. And then ... we sort of just sat there. And then ... sat there. Which is more or less what people had been and would be doing for hours. The only real excitement came when Laura and I found out that the reason we were drawing more than the usual level of attention (so, considerable +) was that Kofi's half brother has children who are half white. All of the handshaking and exclaiming going on around us was happening because they thought we were the grandchildren of the deceased. The other bit of excitement came when I asked where the body was, and Kofi told me "in the refrigerator," by which I thought he meant the refrigerator that the Coke in my hand had come from, right outside the courtyard. Turns out he meant the morgue, which clearly makes more sense. But this is Ghana, and at this point I think I would believe anything, including stuffing grandma in a fridge with the beverages.

My flight leaves Ghana in about 8 hours, and after that I'll be traveling for about 30. Laura's heading back to rasta paradise for a few days of beach-side relaxation, and flies out next week. It's been an incredible trip, a challenging trip. More to follow!

outreach, a funeral, and a featherweight

So Laura and I spent most of yesterday with Sight for Africa's outreach team. Our destination: a wood market in a poor and predominantly Muslim part of Accra. Many of the men filing through to have their eyes checked were laborers, mostly carpenters; there were wood chips in their hair, and sawdust lining the grooves in their ears. The day before we got there, someone had walked around the market announcing an eye clinic the next day, and word had spread. Upwards of 70 or so people showed up, mostly in a trickle, though sometimes there was a surge, and often there were onlookers trying to figure out whether or not to approach (and whether or not to reach through the fence to touch Laura and me). It was a tiring day but super interesting; we got to listen to each person describe their symptoms (often in Tre, so that required some translation) and sometimes look into their eyes to see for ourselves what cataracts and inflammation of the cornea and dead eyes look like. A mechanic came in with blinking eyes turned completely red from hydrochloric acid. Many people complained of itchy eyes and headaches from the dust and dirt that is always carried in the air around here (right now in Accra, the air is opague and filled with dust because of dry winds blowing down from the Sahara; you wouldn't believe the stuff we're blowing out of our noses). Cataracts were plentiful, and so unfortunately was glaucoma: the clinic folks told us that something like 1 out of 10 Ghanaians over 50 develop glaucoma, which left untreated degenerates to blindness. Maybe a dozen people who turned out for the clinic were learning that they had glaucoma for the first time, which made it hard not to think about all the people who didn't show up and what they might have wrong with them, which is probably more or less the thought that drives the entire clinic.

The equipment the team had transported out to the market was pretty basic: about 10 plastic chairs, a plastic table, a glaucoma machine (which shoots a poof of air into the eye to measure pressure), and two basic eyecharts: one with English letters and one with smaller and smaller rows of capital Es, so that people who can't read can look at the E and indicate with their hands which way the spokes are pointing. There was also, oddly enough, a massage chair and a woman running one of those big mutli-bumped vibrating massager gadgets across the backs and shoulders and legs of people whose complaints extended past their eyes. That was kind of a weird sight - Muslim men in traditional dress or women wrapped in kente cloth, sitting and leaning forward with their faces pushed down into the cushy ring thing of the massage chair.

This morning we spent some time hanging out at the main clinic itself, following patients as they ran through various tests. It's a great cause, and the clinic is doing great work - most of their services are free, and people who have the means to pay still pay no more than $10 - but it's also got some strange complexity to it. The clinic is much more Christian-focused than we'd initially though, with glossy posters of Christ featuring slogans like "Jesus never fails" hanging everywhere, even over the eye chart. And a few of the clinic workers hold opinions about Muslims and their "cleanliness" that we both found a bit troubling, but this is certainly not the case with Kofi and the leaders of the clinic. They are as open-minded and all-embracing as people come. So it's a weird mix: a place that's doing great work but has a complicated worldview, perhaps, although for sure there is no question that "eyecare for all" is the top priority. It'll take a few days to process all of this, I think.

So I might blog one more time on Sunday, before I embark on another Afriqiyah Air extravaganza (Laura's sticking around for a few more weeks). But continuing on our trip theme of "the more bizarre, the better," it looks likely that we're going to be attending a Ghanaian funeral tomorrow morning, and tonight we might be sitting ringside at a bigtime boxing match. A former featherweight world champ from Ghana is coming out of retirement, or some such; his manager came into the clinic yesterday in search of new glasses, and offered up some tickets to Kofi. We're not sure he'll follow through, but if so then we're off on another sporting adventure. I loathe boxing, but the offer is sort of hard to resist...

kumasi v. accra: sudden death

(Quick technical note: arrgghhh! Trying to connect to the Internet in Kumasi is some kind of low-tech version of Chinese water torture. Just to get to this page took 20 minutes; please take a moment to truly imagine that brand of torment. Meanwhile, gmail is flaking again. Laura's got Yahoo up right now, and it took her 'only' 10 minutes to get into her account. Opening a new email for her takes about 5 minutes. And of course it doesn't help that this particular Internet place is flooded with prom music. Advice: If you're traveling somewhere with patchy connections, go Yahoo over gmail. I can't even believe I'm saying that. )

And now, to the game!

So the overnight train that we took on Saturday night to Kumasi turned out to be the most comfortable mode of transport we've tried yet. We had our own little 'first class' sleeper box (at $3.50 each) and despite the fact that the beds came out of the wall at weird angles and the train itself was entirely ancient (I would never have thought the term 'shattering metal' made sense, until now; it sounded like we were dragging chains the whole way, and every time we pulled out of a station Laura and I had to brace our feet against the opposite wall to keep from taking flight) it was a pretty sweet deal all around. Laura took some amazing nighttime shots out the window; she's super talented, with a great 10x digital camera. Meanwhile, I got sort of into the strange feeling of rocking head to toe versus side to side on the top bunk.

We pulled in at around 10:30am and headed straight to the hotel - a big, white dorm type of place apparently favored by Indian travelers, since the 'lobby' was filled with Indian men watching a countdown of the top 10 hits from India in 2004 on what may actually be satellite TV, possibly set up by Indians. But the town was already buzzing, gametime fast approaching, so we dropped our bags and beelined for the stadium. Signs of game excitement were everywhere: lots of people streaming down the streets, dressed in red and waving the red and white team flag of Kumasi Kotoko (kotoko = some sort of rainforest porcupine, from the looks of it). Fans of Accra Hearts of Oak were less obvious and wore their flags more demurely, around their wrists and in their pockets. Outside the stadium vendors were pushing all sorts of team gear, and we spent some time picking through the fray for souvenirs and for some Kotoko gear to wear during the game, to signal our allegiance. Laura bought some sort of red and white striped puffy hat that somehow smacked of Sonny and Cher and Dr. Seuss at the same time; I grabbed a baseball hat with a big fat kotoko on the front of it. We headed in.

We didn't get the VIP seats we'd wanted, even though we entered the stadium more than three hours before the start of the game - too many dignitaries and press people were there, sucking up the good seats. But we did manage to get the next level down ($10), which we hoped would prevent us from watching the game under tro-tro-like conditions. As it happened, the stadium was so crowded that it was only by luck that we wrestled into seats that gave us a bit of a view - green plastic chairs of questionable stability, screwed into concrete.

The stadium itself was huge, about the size of your standard massive professional sports arena. Maybe 60,000 to 80,000? The snacks were a bit different, though. Instead of munching on hot dogs, it was grilled plantains. There were peanuts and popcorn, only the peanuts were covered in coconut and both snacks were carried in big bowls perched on top of a big plate that was in turn perched on top of a woman's head. Ice cream too, carried in big rectangular boxes, again perched on heads. The band, which did not stop playing once the whole game, featured the normal brass and horns, but also had a tribal drum section. They set the beat for the whole game, drumming faster and louder every time Kumasi approached Accra's goal. Police in full riot gear were everywhere, and numbered in the hundreds.

When the teams took the field the whole crowd went nuts, and when the entire Accra team arrogantly kneeled in Kumasi's goal the crowd started yelling all sorts of things in Asanti, the local tribal language. The first half of the game started fast, and the referees, who hailed from Tunisia, were light on the calls. The first half went scoreless, though the first time Kumasi almost scored the volume of the crowd surged so loud we could feel reverberations through our plastic seats.

Eight minutes into the second half Kumasi scored, and I'm not sure I could even describe the crowd's excitement. The people behind Laura grabbed her from behind in a full body hug, without even thinking, which was a bit surprising, especially for Laura. I zigzagged my camera around trying to focus on something but everything and everyone was moving way too fast. Dancing, screaming - people were going nuts. Play resumed, the drums beat faster, and Kumasi controlled the ball completely. One Accra fan, a big dude with an Accra-colored flag tied around his head, started walking back and forth in front of us, slapping his chest (literally) and chanting something in Tre, the main language back in Accra. Maybe that worked, because with just 10 minutes left in the game one of Accra's top scorers pulled a flash move and scored. Kumasi fans went silent. Accra fans, mostly hidden before, came out of their seats and started dancing, then ran around yelling and taunting, ecstatic with the sudden turn of luck.

Then the clock ran out, with the game tied 1-1. But because this match was for the Confederacy Cup, someone had to win. And so it came down to penalty kicks. Nine players from each team sat crosslegged in the middle of the field, and one by one the players approached the goal. The crowd was still silent, but the place had the feel of something about to be unleashed. Laura and I quietly ran through our emergency exit plan.

The first four penalty kicks sailed into the goal. The tension was horrible, with the whole crowd leaning forward, us included. When a banana gum vendor suddenly walked in front of us, the guy sitting next to me shoved him aside. Clearly, this was no time for banana gum!

The fifth penalty kick, launched by Kumasi, sailed toward the net ... and was blocked. More stunned silence among Kumasi fans, and more insanity among those rooting for Accra. On their next turn Kumasi missed again, and it seemed the whole stadium realized the game was over even before the final kicks played out. Laura and I didn't need an escape plan after all, because the reaction of the Kumasi fans, when the Accra team ran onto the field in celebration, was ... more stunned silence. They just sat there, staring at the field, looking stoic but seriously sad, while the Accra fans danced and taunted their way out of the stadium. We sat there for about 15 minutes, just taking in the atmosphere of one seriously bummed set of 60,000 people. We were pretty silent too, sitting there and taking it all in. This was truly a once in a lifetime sports experience for both of us.

Since then we've been having a pretty chill time in Kumasi. We spent most of yesterday trying to navigate the labyrinthine market, which is just ridiculously vast. It's more a series of alleyways crammed with stalls than an open-air type of place, and it's also more of a practical market than we were expecting; I can't even count how many times we were offered toothpaste. But somehow we managed to stumble on one of the aisles we were hunting for, which featured stall after stall of beautifully patterned kente cloth, just an endless long view of colors and patterns traditional to the Asanti. A little advanced warning that Laura and I went a little nuts with the fabric, and will likely be sporting some seriously wild patterned skirts once we're back in San Francisco.

This morning we took a long walk through a butterfly sanctuary, where we saw hundreds of butterflies flitting about - orange, blue, yellow, white, black - and these unbelievably immense stands of bamboo - maybe 6 stories tall, and as thick around as two hands. It was an enchanting little place, though the logistics of getting there were yet another story to be filed under 'nothing in Ghana is straightforward.' Tomorrow we're thinking of heading out to see an allegedly beautiful lake about an hour southeast of Kumasi, but we're smart enough now to be prepared for the lake not to exist, and for the tro-tro ride that'll get us there to take seven times as long as expected, and break down mid-trip, and require us to travel with chickens in our laps. Then tomorrow afternoon we'll head back to Accra, to crash with the optometrist and his wife for a few days and travel with their team to various villages to look for people in urgent need of eyecare. Neither of us can imagine how that's not going to be amazing.

Once in Accra (land of the superfast computer) I'm hoping to talk to some more people about the mobile phone situation here, which is perplexing and full of many charming twists and surprises. Look for more on that later.... Meanwhile, we've just got to blow out of this Internet place. The prom music is killing us!

Hellos to everybody. from the both of us!

music man, eco-bitch, and the rastas

So right now we're lingering in Takoradi, a carbon-and-dust-clogged industrial port town with a booming market featuring huge stacks of pineapples, hot peppers, yams, cheap TVs, and every conceivable variation on the flip-flop. We're here just for the day, waiting for an overnight train that will take us tonight to Kumasi, a town that many consider Ghana's true cultural center. The market we're seeing here is apparently nothing compared to the one that awaits us; craftspeople from all over West Africa stream in to sell in Kumasi, and after weeks of purchasing nothing more interesting than a few extra rolls of toilet paper, I for one am ready to shop.

Seth's birthday party was a small but festive affair, with everyone watching us with full attention as we ate, waiting to see if we'd really dig into the Ghanaian food. I am proud to report that we ate everything except the fish heads - and that includes the flamingly hot goat soup and the big scoop of five-alarm pepper sauce (Ghanaians would laugh at what we in the U.S. call spicy). After fending off some pretty vociferous objections to our leaving that night, we headed for the tro-tro, which - surprise! - was another classic shoestring-traveler travail. We got the back row again. Laura was on one side of me; on the other side, an insanely fidgety Ghanaian dude eating chicken from a plastic bag and making a hobby of removing and then putting back on again various layers of shirts despite the fact that doing any of that required at least three people to shift positions entirely. Again, I was locked in another tro-tro battle, this time for arm space, and I was just uncomfortable enough this time to seriously stake some ground.

Our destination was Cape Coast, the former capital of Ghana and home to the most impressive of its dozens of coastal forts, many of which date back four or five centuries; the main fort there was once the hub of Ghana's slave trade. We toured through the fort and then through the dungeons that once held thousands of slaves at a time, for the six or eight weeks it sometimes took before the next ship was ready for them. That was a little intense. The feeling that I got most from those dark, dank rooms was just plain sadness: it was almost like the walls still held some of the energy of the people who passed through there - desperation, resignation, rage, quietness - but were now coated as well by the regrets and the bafflement of the people who have toured through since. Heavy place.

Later that day we met yet another passionate Ghanaian crusader of sorts: Kwame Sarpong, a former Ghanaian naval officer, now musicologist, who is trying to digitize every available recording of Ghanaian highlife music, which, as is often the case with music, I have no idea how to describe: some sort of big band meets moral lyrics mix that was once really popular in the 20s through the 70s but is now dying out fast. "Our intangible culture," Kwame called it. Anyway, the new, more accurate guidebook we're now toting (expect a letter, Rough Guide!) pointed us toward this guy, and we spent a few hours walking through his giant stacks of old vinyl and 78-rpm discs and vintage record covers and massive old record players, then watching as he showed us his meticulous process for cleaning and then converting things into digital files. He held each record as if it were priceless, and clearly feels some understandable desperation in his campaign to save an entire genre of music singlehandedly. Hey, no small task. Anyway, we both admired his passion, and his persistence; for years he has been traveling all over Ghana, village to village, looking for old records, a man in a car with a record player, fueled by his own sense of urgency.

After Cape Coast we headed west again, this time, smartly, by bus, which costs twice as much as the tro-tro (a whole dollar!) and is a hell of a lot more comfortable, though of course I managed to land on a seat next to the biggest man we've seen in Ghana; unfortunately, there is just no use fighting a linebacker for butt room. Once again, we managed to get ourselves into an interesting late-night accomodation mix-up - this is fast becoming our specialty. We sort of took a taxi to the wrong village, and then had to redirect to what we thought would finally be the relaxed budget beach "resort" we'd been looking for. The guidebook described this great place in a village called Dixcove - an eco-lodge that composted and employed locals and was remote enough that we could spend a few days away from the stares and the clusters of kids running up to us demanding money. After an endless bumpy ride down a dirt road in the pitch dark, we arrived at Green Turtle Lodge, only to have our really nice taxi driver verbally assaulted by the British chick who runs the place. Nice to the environment, but not so nice to the locals: nice twist! We couldn't bring ourselves to stay there after her shrewish display, despite the call of the bungalows, which looked kinda cute. So off we bumped to another "resort," oddly named Alaska, where the staff proved surly and the rooms pretty dingy, though they were pretty much straight up on the beach. Amazing sunrise. But the place wasn't exactly relaxing, what with the surliness and the odd number of vultures chilling on the sand, like they were waiting for something.

So we decided to try one more time to find some piece of paradise, if only for a day, and for that our only choice was to turn back to the guidebook (which wisely points out that in Ghana, it doesn't occur to people in the tourist information offices that you might actually be looking for information, which explains a lot so far about our trip). Nearby there was a place called Ellis Hideout, and we were a bit drawn in by the fact that you can only get there by a hollowed-out wood canoe - probably the only conceivable mode of transportation we hadn't yet tried here in Ghana. And so early yesterday morning we packed up our stuff and made our way through several villages on the way to the place where the canoe was supposed to be, and a few canoed minutes later we were standing, finally, in the closest thing to paradise the Ghanaian coast has to offer to two down-market travelers who have been wearing the same pants for three days straight and whose hair is covered in Ghanaian road dust: a rastafarian stronghold in the middle of nowhere, just a bunch of huts and lots of dreds and drums and, at night, a gorgeous bonfire just 10 feet from a long, beautiful stretch of surf. Even with lizards on the wall, the bathrooms were the cleanest we've seen, and even listening to the same Bob Marley songs all day long (as well as a few turns of Phil Collins, oddly) didn't shake our sense of finally experiencing some serious accomodations luck - our first since Winneba.

Rasta beach paradise lasted just one day and night, though, because despite the fact that it is impossible to make and hold any semblance of a plan in Ghana - we don't even try anymore - we have one plan that we both consider non-negotiable: the soccer game tomorrow afternoon in Kumasi. What we though was just a big match-up between two Ghanaian teams turns out to be far, far bigger. Tomorrow is the second game in a two-game series for the title of best team in all of Africa. This is the Confederation of Africa final, as big as it gets over here, and it just happens that the two final teams are Ghanaian. We were walking through Winneba when the first game of the finals was being played over in Accra, and along and down the streets we saw that everyone - women, kids, fishermen mending nets, packs of jerseyed guys - was either watching or listening to the game. We knew when a team had scored because suddenly we'd hear shouting coming from every possible direction, out of restaurants and homes and even alleyways, where crowds bent in toward small transistor radios.

We'l get VIP seats in the roomy VIP area (a splurge at $15!) so that we stay above the fray. But we're both really excited, and have decided to be smart and cheer for Kumasi, the home team. Either way, tomorrow Ghana will claim title to the best team in Africa. And either way, we'll be there! Expect a report on the game on Monday....

the optometrist, and an epic misadventure

Well it's been pretty much a nonstop adventure since the last post. After finally managing to escape the overly generous grip of Tema's police chief, and after heading to the beach for New Year's Eve only to find that the guidebook had steered us to a village known not for its drums but for its thieves (thanks, Rough Guide) we shot further west along the coast to Winneba - a small fishing village with a nice beach, friendly non-thieving residents, and a giant festival ground that played host on New Year's day to a masquerade contest that drew a crowd of thousands. Maskfest, I think it might be called. We got into town just in time to see the last hour or so of the competition, which was rowdy and colorful: men in bright costumes on stilts, stepping through the crowd; hundreds of kids and adults with wigs on their heads and mesh masks on their faces, wearing bright shiny outfits in all sorts of colors with various trinkets - bells, mirrors, pom-poms, ribbons - sown onto every possible surface. Drums booming. Trumpets blaring. Team after team, each representing a different tribe in Ghana's central region, took the field, marching and dancing around in formation. We were a bit of a spectacle ourselves - the only white faces on the field. The end of the festival was a spectacle too. In the past, the losing tribes have not always taken the news very well, and sometimes get a little...heated. This time no one contested the outcome, but the crowd, in knee-jerk fashion, took off in a sprint for the exit anyway. All at once. Laura and I waited for the tide to slow a bit, and made our way back to the hotel.

Our hotel - the Lagoon Lodge - turned out to be a gem. Clean, airy rooms with orange batik curtains and a cross-breeze, an open courtyard looking out over the lagoon, and a sand path to the beach. It was high budget for us at $12 a night (most places we've stayed are far cheaper) so we splurged.

But by far the best feature of the place turned out to be the company. After we got back from the festival we fell into conversation with a Ghanaian couple from Accra, who happened to be sitting in the courtyard. We spent most of the evening and a good chunk of the next day locked in conversation with them and still that wasn't enough. They were just too inspiring. Kofi is an optometrist, and his wife Vivian is a nurse. Together they run an NGO in Ghana called Sight for Africa. The mission: to make sure that every person in Ghana gets the eyecare they need. They run a clinic in Accra, and three times a week travel out through town and nearby villages to seek out and help anyone who has troubled eyes. Right now they provide exams and glasses to those who can pay for roughly $10 - glaucoma test, lenses, contacts, everything. They started the clinic because when Kofi had a dream - three times, the same dream - that he would forego a profitable practice in Canada and return to his native Ghana to help his people. In September, he will open the first optometry school in West Africa. I have now taken reams of notes about his story, and at the end of next week Laura and I will visit the clinic in Accra to spend a day or two traveling with the clinic's mobile team into some of the poorer villages in the central region.

We left Winneba completely inspired, and determined to see some of the interior of Ghana by boat. It sounded sort of idyllic and quaint to take a boat up much of the length of Lake Volta, which is the largest manmade lake in Africa. So we traveled by tro-tro (think small, supremely crowded van, a preacher in a dusty brown suit jacket praising the lord at the top of his lungs for an hour straight, and the wily old woman squeezed up next to me in the back row cleverly trying to steal more butt space everytime we landed on the seat again after a big road bump, of which there were many) for a few hours back to Accra, after waiting for several hours in line to get on (and ultimately bribing the driver to do it). We were running late and worried about missing the boat, so we raced to Akisombo to the lake's main dock in a taxi, flying over roadbumps northward, and got there just in time to...wait for two hours in the heat and the stares only to learn that the boat was broken, and had been for some time. Super! It's late in the day and we're stranded.

We tried to get back to Accra but everyone else was trying to do the same (Monday was a business holiday) and we were having no luck pressing past the yam and pineapple sellers and through the crowds onto a tro-tro. So we took a different route, traveling east of Accra and even Tema on the coast by tro-tro then transferring to another one that could take us back to Accra. In that last one, Laura and I actually got to sit in the front, though that meant removing ourselves and our backpacks everytime we stopped to let someone out. Trust me when I say that together, Laura and I have personally inhaled a considerable percentage of Ghana's carbon emissions: score one for the atmosphere, zero for our lungs.

Anyway, that seemed like 'travel mishap' enough, but we weren't done! It took us at least three hours in Accra - hungry and tired and sweaty and alternately announcing that we were going to completely lose it - to find right combo of taxi driver that knew the city's streets + non-skanky accomodations that could actually accomodate us and did not feature a lobby carpeted by sweaty, napping shirtless men. At around 11 last night - after 15 hours of hapless travel - we finally decided to return to the first place we stayed, on our first night in Ghana; they were so friendly, and we had absolutely enjoyed their company, so we snuck past the guard dogs and knocked on their door. They had just been talking about us, it turned out, and we spent an hour or so manically reenacting everything that had happened to us, to the booming laugh of Seth and the open-armed hugs of Naomi. They're wonderful people, and it was great to see them again despite the circumstances.

As luck would have it, today is Seth's 56th birthday, and we've been invited to his birthday celebration. No doubt the house will be teeming with interesting Ghanaians and excellent food - and after yesterday's mad travel we're seriously ready for a party. We'll have to leave early, though, because we're hopping a bus tonight for Cape Coast, a town about three hours west of here that was once the main port for Ghana's substantial slave trade. We'll plant there for a few days (at least that's the intention) and from there we'll go west, then deek back and head north for, we hope, an epic football match between Kumasi and Accra, the two best teams in Ghana. That's next Sunday. But no doubt we'll check in before that. Looks like we're headed, for the first time, into true tourist country. Believe it or not, neither of us has yet to see a single postcard.

Tech glitch note: for some reason my gmail is not working right now, at least not in Accra. Something about having the wrong version of the browser. So for the moment I'm not getting email. Try me here instead.

'assaulted by generosity'

Attention all parents: Just a quick mention that the second Afriqiyah Air plane we traveled on was virtually new, nearly full, and a model of efficiency! A lovely flight experience was had by all!

Also, might be worth mentioning that we are doing all we can to follow the news from southeast Asia. We've managed to watch the BBC News a few times, and are checking headlines whenever we log on. Horrible story, and hard to digest from here, but probably from where you are as well. From anywhere, really.

Meanwhile, here in Tema, Laura and I are completely engulfed in hospitality. The idea was to make a quick stop out here in Tema to visit Winnie's family, drop off some money and gifts, hang out and spend the night, then make the call on whether or not we'd be nuts enough to drive a new beemer around Ghana. (While no doubt that would have made for a funny story - two women in sarongs trying to do the chill inconspicuous traveler thing, only in a car worth more than any 20 others on the road - we've opted to go native re: transportation.)

As it happens, our arrival was a pretty big deal. Winnie's 14-year-old daughter Georgina, our main hostess, said after 30 seconds of meeting us that she wanted us to stay in Ghana forever. That's pretty much been the vibe ever since, which is flattering I suppose and super-sweet but somehow also exhausting; it's hard to say no to her and her cute little siblings, though, and hard not to want to do what the family expects of us. Which, I suppose, is how we ended up getting stuck most of yesterday sitting on a tile floor in a dark room watching Ghanaian soap operas (apparently, this is a privilege). And how last night we ended up walking about 4 miles in pitch darkness in follow-the-leader fashion behind Georgina's non-English-speaking no-nonsense aunt, Akua (a-qui-a), to a restaurant that actually surprised us with its excellent music and jumping scene. (Unfortunately, Akua et al wanted to eat the meal not at the cool place, but back at the house on the tile floor, while watching Ghanaian soap operas.) And best of all it's how we ended up spending an hour or so this morning playing host to Tema's chief of police. Turns out that Winnie called him to inform him of our arrival, and he now considers himself obligated to ensure our safety while we're in Ghana. Only he wants to ensure it in person, by spending the next few weeks traveling with us. It was a little bit easier for us to say no to the chief, thankfully, though some finesse was required.

But we might take advantage of his offer of a ride to our next stop, which is looking like a town west of here and west of Accra called Kokrobite, home to what is supposed to be an amazing drum and dance center. And from there we'll probably head west to Winneba, where various tribes from the central region compete in some sort of masquerade festival. Since we're leaving the big cities now, there will probably be a lull in the postings.

Happy New Year!

georgina

By the way, Laura and I had a guest with us today at the Internet place in Tema: Winnie's 14-year-old daughter, Georgina. She waited patiently outside for us, but before we went in she'd said, shyly, that she would like it very much if we would "teach her about the computer." And so we did. It turns out she has some good typing skills, and so together we set up a yahoo email account for her. Her email address is georginagoldengirl@yahoo.com. Email her a hello!

coffins, and the quest for a map

Laura and I are now in Tema, about 20 or so km east of Accra. Getting here was quite the adventure. Our hosts at the hostel orchestrated a bit of a wild taxi for us - a taxi decked out in sports trinkets (little soccer balls hanging from the rearview mirror; golf balls suction-cupped to the windshield), two air fresheners (cough) and a weird automatic voice that yelled out in total Alvin the Chipmunk pitch "this car is now backing up" everytime Abraham, the driver, threw it in reverse. It was a fun ride, with lots to see out the windows. I'm becoming obsessed with the signage around here - painted wood planks advertising everything from "Rambo" haircuts to safe sex. Between Laura and me, we must have snapped 100 pictures.

A good third of them were snapped the two times that Abraham stopped - at roadside coffin shops. Yes, coffins. Ghanaians have a real reverence for the dead - ancestor worship is big here - and many pay about $3000 to have these insanely elaborate coffins constructed for them after they die. These are no rectangular boxed; instead, they're shaped like something the dead person really liked or associated with in life. Love bananas? Arrange to get buried in a wooden banana, painted bright yellow. Love computers? How about riding to the afterlife inside a Toshiba? Before we left Accra I asked Seth, the proprietor, to tell us the strangest coffin he'd ever seen. He's a playful guy, and loved the question. "Ah," he said. "It was a mosquito."

The shops were small but amazingly colorful. The first place had about 8 coffins ready to go: a Coke bottle, a lobster, a bottle of local beer, an SLR camera, a sword (for a chief), and a white Cadillac (they were still working on painting the plates). And they were deep in the carving stages of a few others: a cocoa bean, a bus, a pineapple. At the second shop, we arrived just as they were loading a coffin shaped like a giant pink fish (tilapia?) onto the roof of a bus. In the shop: a rooster, a tro-tro (local bus), a snail, an elephant, a cooking pot, and yet another pineapple and cocoa bean (those are popular). Incredibly, it takes them only two weeks to carve and paint a coffin, even though they get really into the details; the beer bottle even had an expiration date painted on its "label."

We didn't spend too much time in Accra - just one afternoon and evening meandering about town - but it was enough to get a sense at just how much the city thrives and bustles on small commerce; nearly all of streets are lined on both sides by endless street stalls selling everything imagineable. It's hard to go 50 feet without coming across someone selling mobile to mobile minutes; it's also hard to go 50 feet without seeing and smelling open, running sewage. Anyway, we spent hours wandering around streets and stalls. We weren't bothered nearly as much as we should have been, given how obviously foreign and thus "moneyed up" we were. The streets were a bit labyrinthine at times, but we managed to finally find our way out of the crowds (air!) and into a small outside bar, where we chilled out and enjoyed our first Ghanaian beers (not bad).

One of the "highlights" of yesterday was our very confusing attempt to visit the tourist office. It was a bit of a "who's on first" sketch, really. The signs from the street and even the guidebook made it look easy to find, but we managed to walk right past the right door, and everyone we asked for help somehow managed to send us further in the wrong direction. We were confused, and we confused everyone else along with us. The last person sent us to the top floor of the only building we hadn't been in yet...and that's how we sort of ended up in the office of the secretariat of Ghana's ministry of information. Talk about overkill. The woman who helped us turned out to be very nice; when we interrupted her, she was typing away on her Dell and listening to Aretha Franklin sing "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman." It was a long way to go for a simple map, but interesting.

Tonight we'll make the decision whether or not to borrow Winnie's car, which turns out, much to our horror and completely unexpectedly, to be a swank new BMW. Forrest green. Leather seats. With chickens wandering underneath it.

afriqiyah air, and lingering in libya

Greetings from Ghana! Right now we're in bustling Accra, where the air is hot, the street stalls are plentiful, and the Internet cafe features no less than 100 stations, all of which are occupied by Ghanaians (except us). There are chickens wandering right outside, but in here: flat screens. No kidding.

So after long flights to London Laura and I met up in the airport to begin our African adventure. I wasn't expecting anything interesting to happen while I was waiting for Laura, who landed about a half hour after me, but sure enough the Gatwick airport was alive with cameras, even at 6:30am. Turns out Richard Branson (sp), Virgin's weird leader, was a first-class passenger on my flight, which was strange because I was flying Continental; the cameras swarmed him when he got through customs. So much for my opportunity to quiz him about his bizarre reality show. And then a plane from the Maldives landed, carrying a few beat-up Londoners who had ridden a tsunami; they were bandaged, but chatty and thankful.

When Laura arrived we headed for the Afriqiyah Air desk, which took some finding; even the folks at information had no idea what airline we were talking about. Super! We'd both been wondering, without actually saying it, if Afriqiyah Air was a legit airline, or whether we'd been victims of some intricate airplane pyramid scheme. We waited two hours on the floor for someone to actually appear at the desk - staff, passengers, anyone. Finally someone showed up; there was some confusion over our tickets (they hadn't sent Laura hers, and mine bore the wrong dates) but in the words of the ticket dude: "no, no, no...problem."

We got our boarding passes and waited for a gate announcement. It came a little fast; the board switched from "wait in lounge" to "gate closing," which launched us on a sprint across Gatwick. It's a good thing we rushed, since they were so busy NOT boarding all the passengers. Total number of seats in the plane: 136. Total number of passengers: 12, including us. The plane, a vintage Airbus 320, was in serious need of some revamping. The carpet was missing in patches, and many of the seats were missing headrests (when she saw that my seat didn't have one, Laura ripped one off the seat next to her and threw it to me across the aisle). But we had plenty of room, and the swag was intriguing - nice barf bags, paper pillow cases, and best of all great plastic tea cups. We took most of it, though whether that's such a great idea, given that Afriqiyah Air is owned by the Libyan government, is probably an interesting question.

Back in Gatwick, we had chatted a bit with a Libyan businessman who was also waiting to check in for our flight: a marketing exec who owns a chain of Body Shops (as in high-priced soap, not car parts) in Tripoli and works on the local ad campaigns for a ton of foreign products (he handed us sample packs of Extra brand mints, his latest campaign, which are really quite tasty). Anyway, he was very friendly, not in a smarmy way but in a way that suggested that he was genuinely..I almost want to say proud...that Americans were traveling through Libya, however briefly. Turns out that all of the people we met in the Tripoli airport, in the transfer lounge where we were stuck for nearly 4 hours, had the same reaction. Their eyebrows shot up upon seeing us and/or our passports, and then: "The U.S.? Very good, very good!" We felt weirdly like ambassadors.

What we saw out the window on the descent into Tripoli: red soil, long rows of greenhouses, square concrete houses sitting squarely inside square concrete compounds, and endless tree farms - oranges and olives. At one end of the runway there was an airplane graveyard.

Inside the tiny transit lounge: well-dressed men, most of them smoking, wearing leather jackets and talking on cellphones; a cafe and store selling an impressive range of foreign brands, and nearly nothing local - Red Bull, Pepsi, Loreal (hair dye of every color, including blonde), Boss, Fossil, Twix. In the store they were also selling a black Barbie in cutoffs, platforms, and a leopart print halter. On the other side of the lounge, in a kiosk, they were selling Korans and glossy 5x7 postcards of Quadafi. Most of the women we saw were in head scarves, but not all of them. The bathrooms sported hoses instead of toilet paper, which was initially pretty confusing. We chatted with a few folks - friendly, wry Libyans - but mostly just waited endlessly for the plane. All of the reservations that we'd had about cutting through Libya pretty much vanished when we got there. I actually wanted to stay longer; if felt a bit like standing on a welcoming frontier.

The plane to Accra had a lot more passengers, mostly Ghanaians and folks from Togo (the plane went to Lome after Accra). Laura and I managed to squirrel a few more plastic teacups (they really are quite fetching). Meanwhile, a few of the fellow passengers gave us our first sense of how technologically savvy many Ghanaians are: a Ghanaian man sitting next to me in the airport was typing away on a super nice big-screened Toshiba laptop, and when our flight landed in Accra, we heard a chorus of beeps - cellphones being turned on.

The view out the window on the descent into Accra: mostly utter blackness, with occasional pockets of light, spread out like so many campfires. After over 24 hours of travel for Laura, and a hair less than 24 for me, we were excited to finally breathe real air again. When we stepped off the plane we took big, satisfying inhales of warm, rich, sweet air. Air that seemed heavy with history, in a way; air carrying years of life in it. Really amazing.

And now here we are: sweaty, excited, and weaving our way slowly amid throngs of Ghanaians through a place that is a maze of contradictions; right before we got to this Internet place, we passed a street stall selling plastic buckets on one side and mobile-to-mobile minutes on the other. That's Ghana.

We'll spend tonight in Accra again, at our out-of-the-way hostel with the barking dogs and friendly proprietors, then probably head to Tema tomorrow. Much more to report about Accra itself, but I'll wait until the next installment. Will try to post again tomorrow...