Thursday, July 27, a full day

I am not sure with all of the flying and driving you are doing if anyone has time to read this or not.  I am sitting outside the Institute of Education Guest House office again tonight where I can get an Internet connection.

Sorry that the flight was delayed from Milwaukee. I hope you, Melissa and Phil, are not too tired to start your trip back.  It is too bad that you had to make the extra trip to the Cities, Marcia.  I hope everything got straightened out after a while.  Sorry I was not there to help.

We had breakfast at 7:30 this morning, or rather I did.  Chuks decided he didn't want to eat breakfast and Jeff and Sue came over about 7:50.  The original plan was for the three of us, Jeff, Sue and me, to meet up with a young woman that Chuks has hired to guide students when he has been here in the past to take us do the coast to watch the fishermen at 8:00 am.  We left about 8:30, but it is a short drive to the coast.  The fishermen take their nets out to sea early in the morning then groups of men spend the morning pulling them in.  I have a quick picture.

This is the line of fisherman pulling in the net.  They wrap the road around the coconut trees to anchor them.  There were a couple of women there and their job seemed to coil up the ropes as the line was pulled in. I pulled for a couple of minutes with them and you could really feel when you could pull the rope in and when the ocean held it back.

The taxi driver brought Jeff and me back on campus at 9:30 so we could meet with the members of the Geography Department at 10:30.  The meeting seemed to go well.  There were several members of the department there and we all talked about our interest in the project and how we saw contributing.  I believe the next step will be to get a Memorandum of Agreement between the two campuses then develop a plan to start the project.  Chuks hopes to receive a major grant to complete the project.

After the meeting the Head of the Geography Dept. let us use a department van and had someone drive us around.  We went to Cape Coast Castle first.  It was a castle started by the Dutch and eventually enlarged and used by the British mainly for the slave trade.  We went to a nearby restaurant and order our lunch first then toured the castle.  The tour took a little over 1 1/2 hours.  I will include a couple of pictures.

Part of the interior of the castle taken from the parade grounds inside.   The structure on the left with the red roof was the church which sits directly on top of the dungeons where the slaves were kept until a ship arrived.  The average wait was 3 months.

Inside the castle with the cannons pointed toward the sea. It is a beautiful setting.

This castle did a better job of telling about the slave trade then the one we visited yesterday.  We got a sense of what life was like.  One estimate I heard was only about 1/5 of the slaves captured actually made it to the Americas.  The rest died on the trip from their villages to Cape Coast or other ports, or died waiting for a ship, or died on board the ships.  President and Mrs. Obama visited here in 2009 and there is a plaque noting the occasion.  Michelle believes that her relatives are from this region and were shipped to America from Cape Coast.  I also learned that most of the slaves were sent to Central and South America, only about 10% went to the US.

Anyway we had lunch around 2:00 pm and headed for a rain forest national park near here.  The driver from the university took us.  We left the restaurant at 3:00 and arrived at the national park about 4:00 pm.  The last entry was posted as 3:30.  Chuks negotiated and for an additional fee we hired a guide to take us into the rain forest.  The attraction is a series of rope bridges that you can walk across.  There are a total of 7 of them.  The total length is 1080 feet and they are about 130 feet above the ground.  We were above the rain forest canopy.  It was hot and humid but a super experience.

One of the rope bridges, taken from another.  We walked across 7 of them in a giant circle.

Jeff and Sue ahead of me on the rope bridge.  As you walked along you kind of balanced/bounced off the ropes on the sides.  The green are the tops of trees below us.

We returned from the national park and the Head of the Geography Department had arranged for us to have dinner at a restaurant.  Actually he picked up the food personally at the market in the morning and took it to a woman to prepare for us.  The food was good, but I am getting a bit tired of African food, it just isn't what I am used to.  However, we had the dessert for the first time, fresh pineapple and mangos.  I have never had better! The pineapple was supper sweet and juicy.  It was almost liquid in your mouth.  Then the Head brought us back to campus, a lot today.