If you want to see nature in action (aside from the stock market), take a beer and go and sit on the edge of the cliff here above the waterhole at twilight, just when the German tourists get loud. Sit on the rock on the edge, and stay still for an hour or so. First you notice that all the animals – baboons, other monkeys, warthogs, antelope – are at the water but no one will drink. On the far side, a crocodile grabs an unwary duck and all the birds in the neighbourhood say ‘crocodile, crocodile.’ Then they forget about it and get back into their arguments. Then a team of baboons comes down to the water and spreads the risk a little, and slowly everyone starts to drink.
Then the sun goes down and the scene turns into a radio play. The cicadas and frogs start up, the birds go to sleep, and somewhere across the waterhole someone else is getting eaten. Like a good researcher, I sit at the top of the cliff with my beer listening while below everyone fights it out to the death.
Now I’m back in my dormitory room, waiting to get up at 3am yet again and hopefully actually catch the bus this time. The dormitory is full of mosquitoes, so I sleep covered in deet (I figured one of Ghana’s best hotels would have fewer mosquitoes in the room, so I left my net behind). The deet has just melted the back of my computer onto my leg, and I’m off to try to separate them. Goodnight…
a good place to be stuck
I missed the only bus back to Tamale today. Contrary to popular opinion here, I did not sleep in. It’s a rumour spread by the incompetent bus guy. I was up at 3.30, ready at 3.45, but there was a vast rainstorm that made it impossible to go outside (it rained 6 inches in 4 hours). I poked my head out, and the bus guy was standing there. “Not going yet,” he said with certainty. “you go back, I call you.” So I went inside and lay down, knowing my name and room number were on the list. The rain continued. Then dawn came. I went back outside. No bus. And everyone here smiles pityingly when I explain, and suggests that my phone may have an alarm clock I could set. It’s humiliating given that I’ve travelled at least 300 miles a day for the last week and a half, most of it before dawn.
But after the rain it’s cool and quiet, which makes it hard to be unhappy that one’s stuck for an extra day. Also, all the Ghanaians here are dressed up for the cold (it’s only about 30 degrees today because of the rain).
brrrrrrrrrrrr.
I sat around all day, cleaning the data I’ve collected so far (if you don’t know what that means, suffice it to say that it’s tedious). It was a beautiful day, I felt no need to go anywhere. Nor did the wildlife – the walks were cancelled today because all the animals go deep into the bush when it rains, since no one needs to drink. The elephants, I suspect, like to dry their ears and make sure they look their best before emerging. And the more nervous creatures have evolved not to need water for long periods – the kob can go three months, the other antelopes one. But today everyone drank, and no one got eaten. A good day in the bush.
Went on safari this morning – 3 hours in the bush on foot, looking for whatever was out there with a ranger and a group of about 8 people.
warthog (outside my room)
We saw kob, bushbuck, water buck, warthogs (it’s hard not to see warthogs, there was a family of them trying to get into my bedroom when I came back today), red-throated bee eaters, and red ducks flying up out of a thicket with a noise like a magician shuffling a pack of cards.
And crocodiles, who are always waiting for something.
taking a morning bath
Watching the elephants go about their business was like watching the G8 get together. They’re stately, they take their time, everything stops for them.
You’ve seen them on TV, but they make a huge impression when you meet them.
the Mole G8
Again, the people of Larabanga are less impressed by the elephants, and every now and then will kill one for the ivory.
But apparently the odds of success are slim: there are a phenomenally tough platoon of rangers who work here, who are like special forces when you see them go out after a poacher, sprinting through the bush in formation with their Lee Enfields at the ready. Apparently they are considered much tougher than the Ghanaian army (not hard to believe), who salute them when they meet.
DK, aka clint eastwood of the savannah.
As always, the value of life here is surprising – you get 10 years in prison for killing an elephant, 
8 for an antelope and 6 for a warthog, but experience shows that if you get together and kill a person in the street, very little happens.
Similarly, one of the girls staying here just came down with malaria and went down to the clinic for medication, but somehow managed to annoy or bore the only nurse by trying to figure out how she could get to the hospital two hours away where they could actually test her blood for the disease. The taxi driver the clinic contacted wanted 800% of the standard fare for taking the girl with malaria to hospital, at which point the nurse got bored with the whole affair and decided to go home. Fortunately she was persuaded to come back a while later by one of the other staff, and eventually sold the girl the medicine. So the moral is that compared to a bushbuck, you are not that important and should wait your turn.
Nurses are similar to crocodiles, it turns out: they can bide their time because in the end, you need them more than they need you. Crocodiles are all over the place here, ready to eat anyone who comes along. They are some of the oldest creatures on earth, and they haven’t had to change their strategy in millions of years: everyone needs to drink sooner or later. When you come to the waterhole, they grab you.
Filed under: March, The North | Tags: Ghana, GPRS, internet cafe, Mognori, Mole
Up at 3 to catch the early bus to Wa, which stops at Damongo. In Damongo there is a new internet café run by a guy called Prince, who set it up after winning a business plan competition run by Google.org and Technoserve, two fairly major international organisations. The café is in Damongo’s market square, along with the bus station, so when you get off the bus after two hours of road that’s so bad your entire body continues to vibrate for hours, the first thing you see is a huge sign for an internet café. It all feels a bit postmodern. Then you go inside, and it’s less so. There are huge incentives to start up cafes in remote locations these days, since there are international grants available and the government offers a ten-year tax holiday to anyone doing so.
However, there appear to be three factors involved in starting one – first a sense that it’s a business proposition, i.e. someone will actually be literate enough to use it; second, that it’s a benefit to the community, and third, that you know how to use computers, and have some elementary knowledge of how to network and configure them. I have met a very few people with all three, but mainly it’s the first two. I’ve had a café owner ask me if I knew how to make something appear on the internet, and have had several tell me that they started their businesses with no knowledge of computers at all.
The best story I heard was from Hannah, who attended a college-level computer class when she was living here a few years ago. A student asked the teacher whether computers could catch viruses from people. The teacher’s response was, “I haven’t heard of it happening, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”
Bizarrely, Google and Technoserve didn’t check whether there was any technical knowledge at play when they made this grant, so the poor guy is pretty much on his own. At the beginning a Peace Corps volunteer arrived to use the café, found only one computer was connected to a server, and generously networked the place for them. Since then, no help of any kind. On from Damongo to Mole National Park, where I had heard the Mole Motel, the only hotel in the park, had a new internet café. I arrived to find it had already been shut down, three months after starting up, because the owner was disappointed with the returns. Apparently he had bought 20 computers and a single GPRS modem (which runs at 480kbps, i.e. the speed dial-up was running in England in the early 1990’s, when you had to wait five minutes for your Hotmail account to load), and was attempting to sell internet time to tourists who wanted to upload photos. Needless to say, the customers were not impressed. As I speak, my own GPRS modem has been trying to load my gmail account page for the last 37 minutes, at a speed that I am coming to accept as standard. And this is at 4am, when the signal is strongest. So as a plan for providing a commercial service, this was not the smartest. The place is currently shut, pending the owner’s run for the District Assembly, but the manager, Salisu, is smarter. He’s 18 years old, with less than a high school education, and grew up in a village that gets entirely cut off for three months when it rains, but he has figured out how to use and network computers, and is trying to reform the place and get it a satellite connection so people can use it for other things than an exercise in zen.
(An update: after 45 minutes of asking me whether I’m sure that “google.com” really exists and that I have typed it correctly, my browser has now loaded a blank page and proudly says ‘done’. )
Mole National Park is beautiful. The guesthouse is set on an escarpment above a waterhole where, as I arrived, elephants were drinking. There are eagles, baboons by the pool, (a pool, which is also quite impressive, although the water is so murky you can’t see the bottom, which is good because there are things down there), and families of warthogs wandering around the restaurant. One of the girls staying here and I asked the receptionist if we could do something local in the afternoon, and he and his cousin took us down to Mognori, a village 7 miles away, on their motorbikes. Give a young Ghanaian a dirtbike, he’ll speed.
me and Daniel on the way to Mognori
Give him a girl to sit on the back, he’ll go so fast you convert to Islam. But we got there safely, covered in red dust.
Mognori designs
The village was remarkable – in this part of the Northern region, the living compounds get more Sahelian, with square houses whose walls are intricately decorated by the women who live there. They are also organised as an eco-tourism area, so you can take canoe trips upriver with the local fishermen.
fulani kids in mognori
There are a lot of Fulani living around Northern Ghana – originally from Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, they are cattle herders by trade and when Ghanaian farmers buy cattle, they hire Fulani to look after them. So the Fulani end up living permanently where they are hired. They also know how to make really nice cattle pens from thorn trees.
Charles Kwame Layaman
We went out in a canoe paddled by Charles Kwame Layaman, who gives his name very proudly when asked. I can see why, it sounds impressive. It was very quiet and cool down on the river, the water was high from a recent rain, hiding all the crocodiles.
larabanga mosque
Then we went to Larabanga, where they have the oldest mosque in Ghana (purportedly). Our guide claimed it was built in the 1460’s, but the books say it’s most likely mid-17th century. Larabanga is a tough place – it’s very poor, and very close to tourism because of its mosque and the nearness of the park. There’s a lot of scamming from tourists, a lot of poaching from the park, and the chief isn’t getting his people organised to try the eco-tourism option like Mognori, the other village. It reminded me of Brooklyn, where the proximity of the rich and the poor make for some very bad relationships. But the mosque is really beautiful, especially at sunset when the kids have been throwing balls on the roof and climbing all over it to get them back.
mosque door
