Kamikaze Canuck

After another long, dusty, journey in which the potholes are neverending we arrived in Wli – A lovely, small, sleepy village near the border of Togo in East Ghana.

As a side note:  Children here have a little game where they walk up to you and laughingly say “Give me your water”.  To which my response is “Sure.  Give me your shoes”.  It’s funny how tongue tied this leaves them.

I’ve tried two new meals in Ghana which I feel I should briefly touch on.  One I liked, the other I did not.  The first is Banku.

Banku is similar to Fufu in the regard that it’s a doughy substance that is cut with the fingers and used to scoop up a stew sort of substance.  The dough part is  fermented corn and cassava  mixed proportionally and cooked in hot water into a smooth, whitish, sour paste.  The stew is a spicy mix of finely diced vegetables, palm oil (it’s in everything here), shredded beef, and other unknown spices.

The second meal is Palaver.  To be truthful, I don’t know what it is.  The paste is leaves of some sort, cassava, palm oil, and meat.  This is served with boiled yam and plantain.  When you google “palaver” it says that it is a Portuguese word meaning “to have a lengthy debate or quarrel”.  If I was eating this meal all the time I would want to quarrel too.

For anyone that knows me, I will finish every bite of what’s served to me whether I like it or not – particularily when I’m in a country where people are going hungry.  But with every bite of this meal I grew more defeated.  Each bite seeming to be dryer and less palatable than the last.  Until I eventually slumped over in my chair and put up the white flag of surrender.  This was a surprise as I have generally loved the local foods up until this point.

There was a point when I thought about hiding the food or feeding it to a pet to avoid the embarrassment of handing the waiter an unfinished meal to dispose of.  Much like Mr. Bean did:

The next day we set out on a 45 minute walk to view the largest waterfall in West Africa: Wli Falls.

The walk was a beautiful short trek through the forest, crossing rivers and streams nine times in total.

To give you an idea of the size of the waterfall, spot me in the next picture.

 

We ran into this 6-7 inch millipede on the way back from the falls.  Apparently it’s very poisonous – we had no idea.

Before retiring at our hotel for the night, Megan bought another 2 yards of fabric from a local woman for sewing blankets at home.

Tomorrow is our last day in Ghana and I’ve been purposefully withholding my best pictures from the blog so that I could do a post showing all of our favourite pictures taken by either Meg or I.