The day before yesterday(whatever day that was) we spent most of the day trying to run down a small airplane for aerial photography. This proved very difficult, but we did finally succeed. Did you know there are only 9 airports in all of Ghana?  Considering Tulsa has at least 4, I guess we are lucky to find an airplane at all; even if it did cost about 4 times what the same would have cost in the US. But anyway, we flew down the coast shooting aerials of the castles, which give a very different view of things. Very interesting.

This is our last day before heading home tomorrow. We’re taking the day off so to speak and are just chilling out at this nice little place on the beach I mentioned in an earlier post. This afternoon Greg went down by the surf and took a nap. The deer that lives here, a “bush buck” came and laid down beside him and took a nap also. The deer’s name is…(you guessed it:) Bambi.

It is incredibly tame and likes to have it’s ears scratched.

You just can’t get an experience like this at Motel 6.

I’m going to get off this lap top and get back to my relaxing.

D.H.

Greg

Three nights ago, at our hotel, we watched the World Cup Soccer match, Ghana vs the US, in a room with maybe 60 hard-core Ghanian fans.  We seemed to be the only two people rooting (quietly) for the American team.  That was a pretty good treat.

We have finished shooting all of the castles and forts from the west of Accra to the border of Ivory Coast. and as of late yesterday, we finished all the forts from Accra East to the border of Togo.  We also shot a light house along the coast that the guide swore to us was the first light house in the world and was built in 1941. Greg, who grew up on the East Coast was pretty sure that many of the light houses on the East Coast were older, by, oh, a hundred years or so, than that; but no, the guide was positive that this light house was the first in the world. The accuracy of guide information seems to be suspect in this part of the world.

We’ve now driven back into Accra for the purpose of attempting to find a small airplane to shoot aerial photography of these sites.  But this has proven difficult; there are no small airplanes in Ghana.  Around Tulsa, at any given time of day you can look up in the sky and will usually see a Cessna or something buzzing around. But in the entire time we have been here one   helicopter is all we’ve seen.  We have spent pretty much all day running down leads, talking to people, calling people and we may finally have one; we will know for certain at 8 0′clock tomorrow morning.  If that’s the case, we’ll fly from Accra down the cost to the west, attempting to shoot aerials of these forts, about 20 of them, before returning to Accra. We will then have a day or so off, before the long flight home.  And the long task of cataloging all these images.

I’ll try to post some of the aerials tomorrow night, but we’ll see how that goes. and maybe even a shot of the first light house in the world.

D.H.

A few days ago we were shooting a castle that had bats in one of the dungeons. Those were little bats. Yesterday, we were shooting a castle that had REAL bats. HUGE bats. They were the size of small cats. Very creepy.

But I guess pretty benign. They would just hang there from the rafters.

Then later we shot a castle with, I kid you not, several hundred tiny bats hanging from the ceiling. The floor of this chamber was covered…covered completely in bat guano. And bat guano, that thick is like walking on rubber; it’s spongy.  Never stepped in any manure before that pushed back.

So today we finished shooting the Cape Coast castle. It’s the biggest most slave-producing factory that ever was, the dungeons are huge and extensive. I’ll try to post more on the dungeons themselves later, but for now, here is a shot out front of Cape Coast. This castle, along with being big, was very heavily armed. Many, many big, canons, small canons, motars, and all sorts of things. Here is a shot of a pile of old canons out in front of this castle. I counted 23 canons in the pile. They’re just laying around everywhere. And everywhere are goats.

Cape Coast castle is also the castle that Barak Obama visited when he came to Africa in July of 2009. Whatever you say about Obama, just him being president, made us a lot of friends in Africa. I don’t know how much good that does us, but we do have a lot of friends here.

We see many posters, billboards t-shirts and other stuff with Barak’s name on it. One night Greg bought a bottle of Obama wine(I’m not making this up). And you can also buy Obama biskets(cookies), each one individually wrapped, each with Obama’s smiling face on it.

From a street vendor today, I bought some candy; it’s ginsing taffey. Which is sort of a hard candy, that is very sweet and very hot, but not the same sort of hot that peppers are. I haven’t eaten hard candy in years. Guess who broke a crown off on his hard candy. RATS.

But I stuck it back on, and everything seems to be fine for the moment. I really don’t want to go to a dentist in Africa.

That’s all the news from here.

D.H.

Our original plan sort of had three legs to it. A western leg, a northern leg and an eastern leg. We shot everything we intended to that lay west of Accra, everything we wanted to North of the coast, and we are now in the last phase of this marathon photography field trip. We are shooting the two largest, most developed castles, Elmina and Cape Coast, then we will go all the way to the east side of the country and shoot three forts there. Then come home.

Accomodations on this trip have really been on both ends of the specturm. We have stay in some are surely among the worst, but also in some of the very nicest places. We’re in the rainy season here, so tourist-wise, it’s the off season. Really nice resort hotels are virtually empty and give us incredible rates, How’s $25 USD for a big bungelow right on the beach sound?

One such night, there was a nearly-full moon out. About midnight, I stood on the endless beach for a long time and listened to the surf, nobody around but the coconut trees. I believe in an afterlife, and I believe in Heaven; but I can’t imagine how it could be any better or more beautiful than this.

I’m not bragging or gloating about this situation; if I won the lottery three days in a row, I couldn’t feel any luckier or more blessed.

One of the forts we wanted to shoot was near a place called Prince’s Town. Prince’s Town is right on the coast, about 15 miles off the highway, down what may have been, at some time in the distant past, a dirt road, Oh, did I mention it’s the rainy season here?

Previously we thought we were splurging when we chose to rent the big, 4-wheel drive diesel Toyota Land-Cruiser; we have come to realize that it was a necessity. We have gone many places that we simply woudn’t have gotten there in any less of a vehicle.

Anyway, after we finally got to this Prince’s Town, finding the castle was easy. It sat, grim and ominously on a hill, overlooking the shanty-town village. This castle is a little unique in that it is the only German-built fort of the whole lot. And boy, do those Germans know how to build a fort. Even the slave-duneon was better engineered.

Most of the dungeons we have seen are just crudely rectangular rooms, some with arched ceilings. But this one was a square room with a center column with five arches making intersecting vaults in the ceiling; very comlex. Most dungeons have no provision for ventilation or light. Some may have one small hole in the ceiling. But this one had three large shafts, allowing a fair amount of light and air to reach the room. No, it wasn’t a nice place; but these were much more survivable than anything else we have seen.

The arches and vaults illuminated by the pools of light coming in from the air shafts made for some very interesting photos.

And guess what else was in the dungeon? Bats. Yep; Bats. About 20 or so of them hanging from the ceiling. I would guess-timate the wingspan of these bats to range from 12-18 inches.

The first time one of them flutters past your head at a high rate of speed it’s pretty un-nerving.. But after a while you sort of get used to them and they are really neat creatures. They fly very fast(not like in the Dracula movies). They are easily spooked, and don’t seem to be aggressive at all. If you move verrrrrrry slowly, not making any quick movements, you can get within about 6 feet of an upside-down hanging bat.

Here’s a shot of Greg in that dungeon; notice the bat flying around the column to the right.

And that’s about all I can think of right now.

D.H.

We have been “out in the bush” as we world travelers like to say, for over 22 days now. We have separated the men from the boys along time ago. We couldn’t get the men to leave the boys alone, but I don’t want to talk about that right now. 

It seems like only yesterday, Greg and I left Tulsa, mild-mannered middle-class middle-aged businessmen.  We are now lean, mean, smelly, grizzled, hardened jungle photographers, capable of almost anything:

• we can live for weeks on end out of a Pelican case.
  
• We can bribe petty-officials, haggling prices down to the last cedi.
  
• We eat unidentifiable food from roadside venders.
  
• When starving, maked children beg for our pocket change we just take their picture then laugh at them.
  
• We drink Coke a Cola luke warm and water from a plastic bag.

Not even third-world latrines phase us. Hell, we don’t even need a latrine;  We can stand on the sholder of busy African highway and piss with the best of them.

Unfortunately, things have taken a turn for the worse.  Last week, one of our porters got surly with me.  I had no choice but to shoot him, lest his bad attitude spread to the others. 

A few days after that, we awoke to find that, during the night,a goat had gotten into Greg’s camera bag and eaten his  new Nikon f.2.8 70-200mm VR zoom lens. Greg was inconsolable. I could not bear to see my friend suffer. I had no choice but to shoot him also.

This morning, I awoke to find that during the night a goat had eaten my cork-screw. I am now forced to live on nothing but food and water.  I am running low on cigars. My situation has become desperate. The end is near. The horror…, the horror.

There was nothing else to do, so I shot myself also. Fortunately my aim was bad and I missed completely.

Maybe tomorrow things will improve.  

So we’ve moved on down the coast. late yesterday afternoon we got to Shama (not as in Shama-lama-ding dong, but as is Sha-ma.). We shot what we could but we were too late in the day to get rally good stuff of the East-facing fort, so we stayed at a hotel not far from there, then early this morning (monday) we were there early with much better light.  But the fort sits up high on a knoll and the foreground is very low, slopping off to the sea, and so we ended up with all of these up-ward looking shots.  We tried getting on top of some roofs, but with limited results. Then I had one of these bright ideas that later on you think…”what the ______ was I thinking!!!!”   At the bottom of the fort was a fire station, with a firetruck with a ladder on top, and several fireman doing nothing.  So I asked(it never hurts to ask, right?) if they could raise the ladder and let me climb up it and shoot the fort from there.  We had to ask the firecheif and he said yes.  But after we got into things it became apparent that the ladder didn’t raise on hydraulics… it was just a very long ladder.  Further more…it became apparent that the fireman had never taken the ladder off of the truck or used it before.  I sware, it took half an hour for these guys to get the ladder off of the truck and extended.  They then leaned it up against the truck and after much fiddling around, much heated discussion managed to sort things out. The lader just stuck up in the air about 20 feet.  Regretting that I had ever said anything, but in too deep to back out now,  I shinnied up the ladder, camera over my shoulder and getting as high as I dared, I shot the fort.  And it was a pretty good shot from the elevatged position. Greg however, had better sense and stayed on the ground. But I got the shot and got back down without mishap.

The fire chief, thanked us, explaining that they were a small community, and didn’t have much occasion to get the ladder out; he appreciated the opportunity to put his men to work. He thought it was a good training exercise.

Next, we got the idea to shoot one of the dark, windowless slave dungeons using a candle.  Which was very fitting.  But in the middle of shooting this, the little guy that is the caretaker of that fort brought out a handlful of human bones and wanted to know if we wanted to shoot that. So we spent most of the morning shooting the remains of executed slaves, in a dungeon, by candle light.

The caretaker also brought us  a piece of chain left over from the slaving years. It was obviously very old, very rusted.  But what stuck me about the chain, was how worn it was. I don’t think I have ever seen a chain with this much wear.  I’ve been around chains and that type of stuff, and chains usually break or are damaged; but they don’t wear.  And this one was. And when you really grasp that this was a chain that had been obviously worn, worn by people pulling against it…it sort of sits you back. We are absorbing a lot of information on this trip.

Later in the day we worked our way down the coast to a place called Fort Batenstien. This fort sits on a hilltop overlooking on a beautiful beach with big crashing surf and a long beach near a fishing village. 

The place is completely abaondoned and destitute. No one has been there or done anything to it in decades.  Maybe centuries. This is very strange. A little bit like walking through a cemetery. You know that at one time there was a great deal of activity here, but now it’s just silence. Silence.

This is a shot of the wall, with the remains of a canon at the base.

We are on day 22 of a 33 day trip. We have fallen into a pattern of shotting in the morning light, driving to the next place, eating a big lunch, driving on to the next place and then shooting in the evening light, crashing where ever we can find, downloading our files, backing things up, recharging batteries, clearing our cards, and going to bed, and doing the whole thing all over again the next day.

Until next time.

D.H.

Things have been going smoothly. Very smoothly for a trip like this, but yesterday we ran into a bit of a hitch.  We had left Tamale and were heading south by a different route than we took to get to there because we wanted to photograph the remains of the Salagado Slave Market. Salagado is just a dusty cross roads now, but during it’s heyday it had seven different markets. One for livestock, one for vegetables…and one for slaves.

The route from Tamale to Salagado was another of these interminable washboard dirt roads which is the only connecting highway to our distination. This one about 40 miles long. We would go for miles and miles without seeing another car, truck, person or goat. We finally got there and shot what was left of the slave market(not much), and went on, planning to catch the ferry boat that crosses part of Volta Lake(the largest man-made body of water in the world). This ferryboat is the only way across and it only runs once a day.

And we just missed it.

The tiny port town at the ferryboat dock has nowhere to stay. We backtracked for about an hour down the same dusty road we came into town on back into Salagado. Along the way we passed a faded sign that said; “Prisons Guest House”.  We laughed that anybody would name a guest house(motel) “Prisons”.

Guess where we ended up staying.

It turns out that Salagado, being in the middle of nowhere, has a jail, which they refer to as a prison. This prison sometimes has correction officers come into town from Accra and there is no where in Salagodo for these officials to stay. So the prison operates a guest house a few blocks from the prison. Four rooms, about $7 a night with a window unit AC!  They also have a resturant(menu; chicken with rice or chicken without rice) and a bar which stays open 24 hours a day, which is staffed by prison employees.

We talked at some length with the prison officer at the guest house. Greg is a sherif’s deputy and so there was some connection there. The prison officer told us that at one time the prison had been used to house slaves. When they had converted the place to a jail they had cemented over the iron rings in the floor and plastered over the stone walls. We asked for a tour of the prison and after some fiddling around, he took us out there and got us in. NO CAMERAS: NO PHONES allowed. (RATS) So all I have for you is a verbal description.

The prison was small; a rectangular open courtyard maybe 75 feet long and 40 feet deep, with a gate and offices along the front, and only six cells all in a row along the back. Each cell was maybe 12 feet by 12 feet.  Each had two or four bunks and a commode in the corner.

Each cell  held 10 men.

We went in most cells, talked to prisoners, saw everything there was to see. One prisoner was shaving another’s head using a double edge razor blade. In the Tulsa jail no prisoner would ever have access to any pointed object, let alone a razor blade.  No showers. A tiny kitchen that cooked rice over open fires. Two men playing checkers in the corner. Dense smells. Sweat. Heat. Drawings on the walls, one of Jesus, another of a large breasted woman. Concertina wire. The prisoners seemed happy to see us and talk to us. They didn’t seem to resent us being there.

I would have given my eye teeth to have taken a camera inside.

You have to maintain perspective at times like this. Yes, the conditions in the prison were horrible… but why weren’t the prisioners any more upset with thier situation?  Because conditions in the prison were about like most of the homes. You can’t expect a prison to be better than the homes can you?

But I’m spending the night in the prison guest house. And I am quiet comfortable. And probably as safe as I could be anywhere. Who would bother anybody staying in a guest house operated by prison officers?

That was yesterday, today, we got up and went back down that same dirt road all the way to the ferry boat dock.  Several hours later it arrived.  The ferry we were on in Gambia was unbelievable…and this one was way beyond that. You can’t believe what they will load on to a ferryboat in this part of the world. And how much they will load. There was one giant British Leyland (brand name) truck that was stacked to the moon with yams. It was so high it wouldn’t fit under the bridge(control tower where the captain sits) of the ferryboat. (Maximum Height: 14 feet) So when the driver backing the truck in realized it was scrunching into the bridge, he climbed out, climbed on top of his load and started jumping up and down until he had squashed the yams down enough his truck would fit. Problem solved.

Oh, did I mention that one of the two drive engines on the ferryboat seems to be out of commission?  It sort of like rowing with only one oar in the water. It took us hours to get across the lake, which is a big lake, but we did get across.

The roads on the south side of the lake are paved, and much better. We beat it on south back to Kumasi, and tonight we’re staying in a very fancy hotel, apparenty  built by the Chinese.

Tomorrow we are back to working our way along the coast, west towards the Ivory Coast.

D.H.

Just the way things have panned out; I was at an internet cafe this morning and had a chance to post, and tonight I’m in a hotel room with wireless…so that’s two posts in one day. But then I probably won’t get back to the blog for several days.

So here’s a shot of Greg and a friend.

Yep; he seems to be friendly. And about 7 feet long.

On the very northern edge of Ghana, next to Burkina Faso is a small town called Paga. In Paga the crocodile is sacred. As the story goes, way back there the people of Paga and the crocodiles that lived in the ponds reached a truce; Neither would eat the other…and they’ve been friends ever since. The pond is large, but they believe there are about 200 crocodiles that live in it. People live near by, and nobody bothers nobody. As a matter of fact the crocodiles co-oporate nicely with the town by giving them a source of income from charging people to see and pet the crocodiles. For an extra Ghanaian dollar you can see the croc eat a live chicken. But don’t blink or you’ll miss it. Truce negotiations between the crocodiles and the chickens haven’t gone well.
Sometimes we find very nice hotels to stay in very cheaply; other times… digs are pretty grim, but that’s travel for you. Here is where I stayed last night.

The room had electricty, but there was no bulb in the socket. An AC that pretty much worked. The bed had one sheet; no bottom sheet or anything else. It had a toilet, but you don’t want to see that(trust me). When we asked if the place had water the answer was; “yes, but it’s not flowing…”. We didn’t really know what that meant. It means that the city water doesn’t work there, but they have a well, which someone had drawn water from to fill up a large plastic trash barrel which set in the corner of the room. You had to dip water from it to shower and to flush the toilet. But at the end of the day… I was able to eat, clean up, and sleep safely. Let’s face it; anything in this life, more than that, is just gravy.

And I was way better off than most of the people I had been seeing and photographing.

Now as to how far out in the boonies we really are…

The houses are made of mud with thatched roofs. No electricity anywhere, no running water. Each village has a chief and you must ask him before any business transpires. Extended families live in a circle or compound of huts. Goats are everywhere. It’s a photographer’s paradise.

This particular village is 7 kilometers down a dirt path off the main road. Just outside of the village is a giant boaba tree which was meeting place for the trade routes of the slave traders.

And for those who have been asking for a wildlife shot from Mole National Park…

Until next time;

D.H.

As sort of a break we went to a place called Mole National Park in Ghana.  Where is it?  Well you go North until you get to Domongo Junction and turn left, then you drive about 50 miles over the worst, washboard, dusty dirt road you can find.  That’s no joke; it took us HOURS of bone rattling bouncing to get there. It’s right at 49 miles.  We were in a 4 wheel drive, and I’m surprised it made it. This park is pretty cool They have 800 elephants there and the park is, about 24,000 square miles( not a missprint) in size.  But we didnt’ see any elephants. Looked everywhere.  But I did open the door one night to find myself looking at a baboon about 10 feet away, maybe 6 or 8 were right around there.   Lots of wildlife.

We did go through the tiny town of Larabanga, which is along the 50 mile dirt road.  This place has what is believed to be the oldest structure in sub-Saharan Africa; a mud and stick mosque build in the 1400s.  Very strange.  I have read of this place for years, but only seen a few photos of it. It’s too much trouble to get there.  And of course as non-Mulims we were not allowed to go in. But I did talk the guy who was showing us around, who is a Muslim, into taking my camera inside the mosque and shooting some pictures for me.

.

And he did just that.  So here may be the only pictures in existance of the inside of one of the oldest buildings in Africa.

Remember folks; you saw it here first.

Don’t worry(in our regard) about the muslim issue; in the northern part of Ghana it’s almost 100% Muslim, and everybody gets along just fine.  There will be a mosque across the street from a Christian church; at least in this part of the world; it’s not something they are fighting over.  Everybody seems friendly enough, and glad to talk to us, and, at least to my knowledge, we have never been in any danger, other than maybe driving up and down the roads.

We are well, tired, dirty, very tanned, and in good spirits. We have left northern Ghana, I am writing this from Bolgatanga(pronounced just like it’s spelled) and are now heading south.  This morning Greg and I got to pet crocidiles; he was about 7 or 8 feet long; (the croc, not Greg).

Till next time.

D.H.

Okay, it’s monday, June 14 and we’ve been out two weeks now. And so far; no horror stories, no diarreah (that’s always good news), and everybody is getting along. Many good pictures.

We’re in Ghana, we have gone west from the capital city of Accra to several minor castles in little towns like Apam, Moree, and others.  We spent a little time in a castle that is now being used as a jail. We were not allowed to photograph, (rats) inside, but it was an experience. 253 people were in jail that day.

Around most of the castles are fishing villages, where fisherman using giant canoes called Pirogues fish is the same way they have for centuries. Here is a guy carving a boat out of a log; the boat will be probably 50 feet long. All by hand. On the hill behind stands one of the castles.

In a castle are several small, vaulted, windowless cells used for holding slaves until ships arrive. Some of the slaves are less coperative than others. For these they chain them to an iron ring in the floor.

They do many things in mud ovens. During the rainey season they make bricks from mud using forms, then stack and mortar(more mud) these into small ovens. On top of these they will sit a large tub for boiling rice, or a rack for smoking fish, or a pan for baking bread. Here’s the remains of mud ovens  in front of the last standing walls of the castle at Moree. 

Africa is just ancient. And still is. The guy carving out the canoe with a adz asked me to send him a picture, he asked for my email address.

We have left the coast now and are traveling north through Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom, we are now in Techiman, and hope to end up tonight at a town called Larabanga