Waterfalls and Monkeys

February 15

Aidan: I fed two monkeys. Three, if you could the baby monkey who was holding on to his mother. At the waterfall, I couldn't believe that people weren't being knocked over by the water. The waterfall was the best part of the trip so far!

Maeve:  Hello, monkey! Monkeys don't wear clothes. People wear clothes, but monkeys don't.

John: We took a bus trip, one organized by the Ghanaian tour operator contracted by Semester at Sea, to the eastern part of the country, with two destinations: the first to a waterfall near the village of Wli, billed as the largest waterfall in West Africa, and then to the nearby village of Mona, where the villagers traditionally held the monkeys in the area to be sacred, which means that they have come to be very tame, and roam freely. 

Both sites turned out to be beautiful and exciting. The waterfall was indeed spectacular; we put on bathing suits and waded into the pool at the bottom, which is shallow and refreshingly cool. Some of the students got under the waterfall, which, from the sounds they were making, was a bracing experience. The big surprise was the bats--they line the hills around the falls and fill the air above--there must have been thousands of them:

The Wli Waterfall

Bats!

Maeve and Vic looking up at the bats

The walk to the waterfall--a 45 minute hike from the tourist station where the bus let us off--was also interesting, as it took us to a totally different natural environment than that around Accra; here, very close to the border of the neighboring country of Togo, is a rainforest, with bananas growing wild. Our third rainforest, on three different continents, in three weeks.

Aidan did indeed get to feed monkeys. They'll come right up and take bananas that you hold out--a transaction too quick to be recorded on camera. There are about 400 monkeys in the village, and while we didn't see that many, we got remarkably close to them.

The bus ride out to these sites was a long one; traffic and the poor state of the roads meant that we didn't return to the ship until after 8 pm (the dining room staff, always incredibly helpful, put on a late dinner for us). But all of the kids on board--and this was a trip that attracted a lot of families--did great. And it was a great opportunity to see some of the countryside of the east of the country, the Volta river, and the villages along the way. Maeve tried her best to make friends with the monkeys:

Hello monkey!