Saturday 17 September 2011

Break Time!!! – Trips to Akosombo and Aburi

Since we ended the vacation classes the end of August and we only reopened for year 2011/2012 on 13th September, during this break we took the opportunity to take a few one-day trips to see more and more of this beautiful country. This is how I got to see Akosombo, a nice town by Ghana`s biggest lake, the Volta Lake, and Aburi, which is located in the Eastern Region`s mountains and is famous for it`s botanic garden.
Alright, starting with the trip to Akosombo – finding a car to take us there was the first adventure of the day. We took a trotro to Accra central, but then there we were sent from station to station, because everybody was only sure about one thing: that at their station you can find no car to Akosombo. Until finally we found one, where somebody pointed to the building in front of us, saying that the car to Akosombo is leaving from there – I was seriously surprised at the answer, since I almost already started thinking that a place like Akosombo doesn`t even exist. :) Well, but it does, we got there finally. The final stop was a market at Akosombo, bust since we realized that the view was way better from the village before Akosombo, we took a car to take us back. Here – after having a huge lunch of fufu with some very spicy light soup (remember, fufu is one of the traditional Ghanaian meals, made of pounded cassava and plantain, and eaten with some soup with your hands) – we found a long and pretty modern-looking bridge crossing Volta Lake. Besides that the bridge itself looks really great, from the bridge you can also have a beautiful view of the lake, the islands on it and sometimes also the small boats going up and down. 










 




















On the shores you can find real Ghanaian villages where the children are very friendly when you go to see the lake by their house and if you are lucky you can even see a cow lying calmly among the simple houses. 


Another day of the vacation period or way lead to Aburi. Here we had no problem with finding the right car, but actually we intentionally got off a few villages after Aburi, just to get an opportunity to walk back on some of the way and get a taste of the mountains of the area. The mountains that look really great: covered with deep forest, where sometimes huge trees break the surface of the bushes. After some walking we decided to actually take a car back to Aburi – just in time, since a few minutes later it already started raining. By the time we got to Aburi, we were already pretty hungry, and also a trip like this wouldn`t be the same without a nice lunch of fufu (yes, I am getting a bit addicted to fufu, which has a pretty bad effect on my shape, though… :)), so as soon as we found a place to eat, we had our fufu – this time not with light soup, but with another soup that`s made of groundnuts and a whole lot of spices, too. It was only after this that we walked to Aburi Botanic Gardens, where walking through the paths you can see a lot of plants of a rainforest – each tagged with their names, too. When we got to the gardens, it was still pretty foggy and rainy, but I guess for getting to know the plants of a rainforest, it wasn`t such a bad timing to come now after all.   

 

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