It’s a Tough Job, but Someone’s Gotta Do It…

As I kind of expected, I had virtually no access to Internet for the last few days of the trip and am now writing this in the U.S. While it’s good to be back, I had some good stories that I thought would be worth sharing.

After returning from Mole, a small group of us caught a 4 a.m. bus to Kumasi and then another few transports to continue south near a city on the Atlantic coast named Takoradi. From there we got a taxi driver to take us to the Green Turtle Lodge, a beachfront hotel that is only accessible on a very bumpy unpaved dirt road about 45 minutes away from town. We arrived late into the night and could not see the ocean (or anything else for that matter), so we went to sleep. We awoke to the morning tide and walked outside to find a very beautiful beach with almost no one on it. Here’s a picture I took that morning.

One really neat aspect of the hotel is its small size. According to the staff, they only have capacity for about 20 people. We also quickly discovered that hammocks were spread along their beach front. Of course, we had to spend ample time in them to ensure they were all safe for others.

Here’s the view from the “driver’s seat”.

We continued these experiments into the evening, stopping only for our daily physical exercise of ocean swimming and beach volleyball. It was strenuous work indeed. Unfortunately, after only two games we managed to destroy the net, so we were forced to return to our hammocks. Here’s a photo taken right the net broke, and clearly you can see the despair in our expressions.

We then found ourselves at the hotel bar, which by happenstance was also during Happy Hour. Time did not allow us to try everything on their menu because we had to walk down to the next hotel over named Oasis; two from our group were staying there and had invited us over for dinner. Fortunately it wasn’t far (~15 minutes there around sunset and roughly 25 back in the dark after a few shared bottles of wine).

One of the best parts about all of this was the price. Three of us shared a room, which brought the cost to about $5 per person. Meals were also served throughout the day and cost anywhere from $2-5. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and we maybe saw five other visitors the entire day. Here’s a video link of the beach I took in the morning; you can see why it was definitely my favorite place in Ghana.