First Day of our trip to the Volta region

 

Big smiles despite the early hour :)

Since we are working steadily all week, it's important for us to leverage the weekends.  We planned to stay overnight in the eastern part of the country so we could see more.  Departure time was crazy early 6am GMT on Saturday. Ghana is on GMT which can mean Greenwich Mean Time or Ghana Maybe Time, since things are pretty loose here.   We actually didn't get going till 6:35, earlier than expected.

What do you think of his back end??

We've yet to see any animals penned up.  Chickens, goats and cows wander freely...

First stop was the Akosombo Dam. It's creation resulted in the largest man-made lake in the world, Lake Volta, and produces most of the electricity for Ghana, as well as some other nearby countries.  We were amazed that they took us right down into the guts of the power plant, a low ceilinged noisy place with enormous shafts twisting the turbines at great speed.  You would never get this close to it in Canada!

After lunch, we drove towards Amedzofe, the highest settlement in West Africa, with Togo just on the other side of the mountain.  On the drive we had to climb up several kilometres of wet clay road that was under construction.  Our little bus struggled with the hills, fish tailed and grunted, but eventually made it up. As we drove, we saw this marvelous looking hotel perched on the edge of a cliff - and I thought how fabulous if we could stay there.   When we stopped for directions, our CFO Bismark told his that that was where we were staying - woo hooo!!

We hiked to the highest point and took a thousand pictures, then wandered through the village on our way to the hotel, children jumping around us yelling "photo, photo!", looking for some dash and a chance to see themselves in the camera window. (more pictures to come when I steal some more from my friends!)

Hundreds of locals out for an exercise walk singing at the top of their lungs at 5am :(

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hotel had fabulous views of course!