The Kindness of Strangers

Kags and I had a great weekend. On Friday we took a Tro-Tro up to Aburi Botanical Gardens. We had a couple bumps initially because our guide book told us to catch the tro-tro at Tema Station, but the cab driver dropped us off there and they told us that they didn't have any tro-tros to Aburi. So we were told to walk to a station about half mile away. Same store, and they told us to go back to Tema. We told them we had just come from that station and so they told us to go to Nkrumah Circle (which is pretty much the transit hub of Accra and would have been very easy to get to from our Hostel if we had known). So once we were on the righttro-tro everything went well. Until the driver went past Aburi. We had told a half dozen people our destination, but apparently the driver didn't here and there was no sign. So when we noticed signs for the next town on the road wespoak up and had to take a cab about ten minutes back the way we came. Since this is Ghana, the cab cost about twice as much as the tro-tro and took us about 1/10th the distance. Also, never trust a cab driver here when they tell you that they know where something is. We said we wanted to go to the Oleander Guesthouse, which he said, sure to. Then when we got to Aburi he tried to take us to a different guesthouse and it was obvious he had no idea where the Oleander one was. So we stayed at the Aburi Botanical Gardens guesthouse and had a nice time. We payed extra for a TV (that was my doing, not Kags') which only worked part of the time because (like the rest of Ghana) Aburi has periodic power outages.

The first night Kags and I wandered around looking for a restaurant that was open during the outage. We eventually stumbled on a roadside grocery stand where the girl working there walked us down the street to a candle lit restaurant (for necessity, not romance) and helped us order food. We offered to buy her dinner, but she refused. It even seemed as if she was going to stay to see that we got our food. Everyone is so nice here. They didn't have Coke, so the guy wentacross the street to buy one for Kags. So, what could have been a terrible, hungry, dark night, ended up being very nice because of the Kindness of Strangers.

Saturday, we went to some waterfalls and then Sunday we explored the park, which was more Arboretum than Botanical Garden. We went mountain biking (more to come later) and took pictures of ourselves inside the random rusted
helicopter in the middle of the garden. Sunday we returned home and
returned to Champs for movie night, where we saw The Freedom
Writers and Death of a President (which, after watching, I felt was in poor taste).