Da weekend

Well our first weekend didn't quite go to plan. The other volunteers came over to see our afternoon training session on friday, we then headed out for a few drinks in Ashaley Botwe(this is where we are staying). First we started at our local, a dimly lit bar, where we had a couple of beers before heading to the to the local petrol station to have a few more (a bit strange..alcohol and petrol fumes)!! All seemed to work though, after 4 or maybe 5 beers we were all feeling it, the heat probably had something to do with it it too. John (our other housemate from essex) suddenly turned into a proper essex boy giving it large and getting all cockney...funny as, considering he was dishing out the old man jokes (he's only 18) he was a proper lightweight, we have a video of his demise..will post later when the pc's will read our memory cards properly, its turing into a bit of a pain to try and get them uploaded but we will persevere :)

anyway saturday morning 4.30-5am we all got into a tro-tro driven by our driver, Lampard, and headed out to the Wli waterfalls, a 4 hour drive into some really picturesque scenery, lush and green which i guess you wouldn't expect in Africa, most of this would be coming from the Volta (the largest manmade reservoir/lake that we will also be visiting).






We arrived about 11am and headed out into the jungle to find the falls. On the way we had to avoid an ant crossing, which dosen't sound too bad until you see the size of them... the jaws are used to stitch wounds put it that way!!



i also encountered the largest spider I have ever seen, unfortunately the pic is a little blurred, it was hard to actually focus on it but hopefully you get the idea.. it was about the size of my hand!


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20 mins later we arrived at the water fall, it was pretty impressive but is even more so in the wet season apparently! To the left of the falls were thousands of bats just hanging around, a few were flying out foraging for food, but never came close enough to get a good look at them. We all stripped off and dived into the pool at the foot of the falls, this was extremely refreshing after the long, baking hot journey.


Getting close to the falls, with the water pelting down it felt like extremely hard hail stones crashing onto our skin. It was hard to stay on your feet fully under the water as there were tons and tons of water flowing at once. After hanging around and chilling for a bit we headed back to the Tro-Tro to get some lunch and head onto a mountain to climb! It was unfortunatley at this point, walking back through the jungle I (Neil) started to feel extremely ill and started to be sick quite violently! (nice I know) so we hung around for a bit before deciding as a group we should probably head back home as I did look and feel like death! The next 5 hours were horrendous, I won't go into detail but put it this way...at the start of our trip our project manager said 'don't just go through Ghana, let Ghana go through you'....It most certainly did that day!!
After what seemed like a lifetime in the heat and traffic jams on the way home we eventualy arrived home. All in all it was a good trip but for the next couple of days my bed was my home!!