Tag Archives: History

Ethiopia Part VI: Lalibela and its Churches built by Angels

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in Africa, Ethiopia

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At St George’s Church – the most famous Lalibela site

Our rest day in Mekele was pretty epic for me.  I luxuriated in our semi-suite, taking the longest of hot showers, sleeping in, writing from our couch, getting a massage and a haircut!  It was a glorious day of what I like to refer to as re-humanization, and I didn’t even feel bad about not having left the hotel once during the day.  Mike went out for a wander around the city and did manage to convince me to head out that evening promising me he’d found a really good pizza joint.  He was not wrong.

Lalibela and its plethora of UNESCO world heritage sites were our next destination of choice and we initially thought we were going to be able to fly there until we realized that any flight from Mekele to Lalibela stopped over in Addis for the night first.  So, we reluctantly booked a shared car with ETT Travel for $30 each for the 9-hour drive over very hilly and sometime rough roads and terrain.  In the am when we left, we discovered that our co-passengers had re-booked for the following day and we ended up getting a car to ourselves.  I happily laid out in the back seat and spent much of the drive nose deep in my kindle.  Knowing how to spend long hours in vehicles without getting antsy was getting to be a vital talent on this trip.

We made a stop for lunch at a very non-descript hotel along the way and I tried, unsuccessfully to connect to Wi-Fi and get some messages from friends.  I swore I would never complain about the speed of Wi-Fi in the States ever again!  This lunch also afforded me yet another example of pure, willful arrogance on the part of an Ethiopian.  Our waitress, when giving us the Wi-Fi password told us that it was all lower case hotal”whateverthenameofthehotelwas”.  When I inquired, due to the strange spelling, whether she meant “hotel” rather than “hotal?” – she confidently asserted it was the latter.  Upon unsuccessfully connecting using “hotal”, but successfully connecting with “hotel” – I let her know, for the benefit of future guests who asked, that it was, indeed, “hotel” and not “hotal” that worked as the correct password.  I was trying to be helpful.  Instead, she got super argumentative and insisted that it was “hotal” – essentially calling my poor, unbiased, unthinking iPhone a liar.

I give up.  Ethiopians cannot, under any circumstances, stand corrected about anything – chicken bone or Wi-Fi password – it matters not.

Men chanting and singing during a church ceremony in Lalibela

By the time the car had started climbing up and up to the altitude of Lalibela (8,202 feet), the heavens had opened and a downpour turned the roads to a muddy torrent.  It gave the winding roads an ever more otherworldly feel since we had so rarely encountered rain on this voyage of discovery.  Once arrived, we had the car drop us at the generically named hotel Lalibela where we were happy to find a very reasonably priced ($20) room available and not so happy to feel the brisk chill in the air.

Deciding to walk into town to find dinner, we soon discovered that Lalibela itself is extremely steep and we certainly walked off our tired car-bound butts as we found ourselves making our way through the southern church complex to our chosen restaurant.

Against my better judgment, I decided I was going to try and order steak one more time, convincing myself, momentarily, that if I just explained in enough detail how not to overcook the meat, that maybe, just maybe I wouldn’t be forced to chew on shoe leather for dinner.

I was mistaken.  And paid for it.

Witnessing an infant baptism ceremony

Mike and I got into a sibling-like quarrel over dinner and he left early taking a tuk tuk back to the room without me.  I found myself in quite the foulest of moods after my disappointing meal, and the realization that I was already over-churched by this country and I wasn’t all that excited about what awaited me the next day.  I kept reminding myself that the guidebooks all claimed that Lalibela was the one place in the country that was “unmissable”.

We would see.

I took the 3rd tuk tuk I found back to the hotel, having just turned and walked away from the first two who tried to quote me a rate that was 3 times the going rate for a 10 minute journey – despite their post-quote protestations that since I’d found them out, they’d be more than happy to take me for the fair price I wanted.  How would they ever learn not to cheat the Faranji if they didn’t lose business as a consequence?

Mike and I didn’t settle our squabble till the morning, but doing so over fried eggs and decent coffee certainly helped.  We set off to the Northern complex of churches and spent the first frustrating 20 minutes trying to find a good English speaking guide.

Walkways between the churches of the northern cluster with our guide

Several claimed to speak English but couldn’t coherently answer any questions.  Some just wanted way too much money.  Finally, we settled on a guy called Mike, ignoring the fact that we only had an hour left before they closed for lunch and he wandered off for fifteen minutes saying he needed five minutes to bid goodbye to his previous group.

I took a deep breath.  It was becoming clear to me that my impatience and tolerance for the hassles of independent travel were growing.  I had one week to go before I’d be on a plane to London.  I tried to keep that in mind and stay present.

When Mike got back he immediately launched into a verbal description of the churches here in Lalibela which were built between the 7th and 13th centuries, and how each complex had been carved out of essentially one large rock.  King Lalibela’s intention with building these churches was to recreate Jerusalem.   Thinking that was, indeed, quite an impressive engineering feat, I wasn’t prepared for his straight faced explanation that the churches, therefore, had been built by the angels and not people.

Amazing architecture – must have been built by Angels

I guffawed into automatic laughter – only to see Mike reprimanding me with his ever-uber-polite face as he nodded in agreement with our guides’ utterly preposterous nonsense.  His look silenced me as I uneasily squished the slew of mockery that wanted to burst out of me and be unleashed on the head of this guide whom I was paying to teach me historically sound facts – not fill my brain with hair-brained ridiculous notions steeped in myth and blind faith.

Sigh.

Steep winding staircases

It didn’t end there.  In roaming around the first set of churches I had to listen to our guide explain:

  1. How I wasn’t going to be allowed entry into the Church of Golgotha because Jesus had told Mary Magdalene not to touch him after he was resurrected, supposedly because she might have been menstruating. Cue my epic eye-roll.
  2. Why science is wrong. Yes- you read that right.  He wanted to have a discussion about how science had lead people astray and that faith in Jesus and the Orthodox church was the only path to enlightenment.
  3. Why a pool of putrid green bacteria-laden filthy water had miraculous properties that cured infertility if the woman agreed to being lowered into it, naked. Of course I wanted to know WHO and HOW she was lowered naked…but I was again, shushed by you-know-who.  (Mike – if you’re reading this, know that I love you.)
  4. How there must be something fundamentally wrong with me if I had chosen not to have babies and how I absolutely should still try to find a husband who could give me some as that was the purpose of a woman.

The green “fertility-cure” pool

I tried to focus on the architecture of these quite magnificent ancient buildings instead, also trying not to think about the all-too-familiar filthy carpet that hadn’t been changed in several decades that we were forced to walk upon shoe-less.

Toward the end of our morning tour, we were told that we would be “lucky enough” to witness a live church ceremony taking place as part of the festivities of Lent.  We entered a church that was jam-packed with old and young tiny turbaned men all draped in massive lengths of white cotton happily clanging away on their little crosses with bells on them as they took it in turns to sing (I use this term very loosely as it connotes with it the sense that there might be melody or musicality of some sort accompanying said “singing”.  In actuality, the sound this group made was reminiscent of a group of urology patients who were simultaneously and unceremoniously having their catheters removed against their will and without the assistance of anesthesia or pain meds.)

St. Georges from the side

The cacophony these discordant laments produced was extremely uncomfortable for me to listen to.  Now, I came across a variety of tourists over the course of our two-day stay in Lalibela who remarked that they enjoyed these dirge-like choruses (Dirge, not to be confused with Derg which was the name given to the ruling communist party in Ethiopia from 1975 for 13 years which resulted in the “Red Terror” and the genocide of over 750,000 citizens.  Mike kept warning me not to say “Dirge” out loud as I might offend people, until I pointed out that the words Derg and Dirge only sound alike and don’t mean the same.)  I can’t say I was one of them.  I had to get away as quickly as possible.

Additionally, I had to get away when I learned how women are not allowed to participate in the actual church ceremonies.

Ugh.

I include a video here so that you can judge for yourselves.  And, as a nice comparative, I also include a tiny excerpt from the choral singing of the York Minster that I visited a few weeks later in the UK – you can be the judge of which style of worship is more musical.

As a comparison, here is a short excerpt from a choir singing during mass at York’s Minster.

Mike and I made our way back to our hotel via St. George’s church – the most famous of the Lalibela landmarks.  I had this notion that perhaps, in the last few moments before closing for lunch, we might find it devoid of crowds and therefore more photo worthy.

I was right – and we happily spent a solid 20 minutes taking an array of pictures of the very thing that adorns countless travel magazines and brochures beckoning folks to experience Ethiopia.

After much needed fruit smoothies and a quick rest, we returned to the Southern circuit of churches, stopping momentarily to take in the museum at the site’s entrance.  There were no signs or explanations, unfortunately, in English – so we spent most of the time there trying to make sense of the numerous pictorial depictions of torture (we were later informed these paintings all signified the 7 deaths by torture and subsequent miraculous return to life of St. George) that involved all manner of horrific ways that humans can produce pain and death in another human.

The afternoon’s complex of churches was actually very interesting – and made further enjoyable by the fact that they are all connected via subterranean dark tunnels that the guide assured us were symbols of the “passages of hell.”  I wondered if, perhaps they just made it easier to get from one underground church to another without needing to climb up and around, but I had learned to keep my mouth shut by this point.

Entering one of the passageways between churches

It is quite difficult for me to comprehend the massive commitment of time, labor and resources that must have gone in to create this many churches and to have made so many, underground, so close to one another and carved out of solid pieces of rock.  It is quite a wonder and a marvel to see.

I hope that the tone of my post doesn’t fail to express how impressive the site itself is.  It certainly earns its reputation as the 8th wonder of the world.  It was beautiful and certainly a historian or archaeologist’s dream to visit.  I simply found I was unable to connect to the place on an emotional level.  I think you need to be a person of faith for that.  And I’m not.

That evening, Mike and I ventured out to the “best restaurant in Ethiopia” and found a restaurant that had an incredible view, and a pretty decent menu.  A storm was brewing and we enjoyed watching the thunderclouds gather and listened to the rumbles as we ate.

Views as the thunderclouds gathered at Mountain View Restaurant

As we walked back up a set of hills in order to find a tuk tuk back to our accommodation, we were passed by a group of kids around 5 or 6 years of age who asked us where we were from.  Upon hearing our response, they all chanted “We Hate Trump!”

We feel you, I thought.  Even here, in the remote holy city of Lalibela, tiny humans knew all about the International disgrace that our President has brought upon our nation.  For that I continue to lament.

On arrival, we got into a discussion with the guy at the front desk about our travel options for getting to our next stop – Bahir Dar.  It turned out that we would pay about $50 USD each for the 6-7 hour drive.  However, he pointed out that there were two flights per week that only cost $40 USD, and it just so happened that there was a flight that next morning.  After a brief chat about the pros and cons of leaving Lalibela sooner than originally planned (we were considering another 2-3 day trek amongst the surrounding villages) Mike and I decided to book 2 seats on the flight leaving the next morning.

Boarding our little plane for the short 40 minute flight from Lalibela to Bahir Dar

I was happy that we were going to essentially end our Northern Historical tour of Ethiopia in a city that we had reluctantly excluded from the start of our journey because of the driving distance from Bahir Dar to Gonder, our first stop.  Adding this city to the end of our clockwise journey solved that problem and eliminated the need to make that connection overland since we’d simply be flying back to Addis in a few days in any case.

My next post will be from this lakeside, palm-fringed tourist destination.

Benin Part III – Time Out in Ouidah and Chillin’ in Grand Popo

22 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Africa, Benin

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The Door of No Return monument on the beach in Ouidah

Ouidah is a significant town on the beautiful Benin coastline because of its historically significant slave trade sites.  Among these is a famous “Tree of Forgetting” that captured slaves would walk around in circles – men nine times and women seven times, in an attempt to forget and leave behind their memories of their West African lives before being forced into slavery.  The tree marks the spot from which there was a well-used path of no return to a strip of beach where ships would forcibly remove chained men and women from their African Homeland.  This path is called the “Route des Esclaves” and is now scattered with monuments, museums, and voodoo fetishes (statues) to commemorate this walk that would have been trodden by thousands of men and women during the 300+ year slave trade.

Mike and I set out to visit these sites, but started at the supposedly famous “Python Temple” which turned out to not be a temple at all – you basically walked into a reddish room that looked like it might be the entryway – and it turned out to be the actual temple, with a handful of pythons laying around looking trapped and without much room to be…snakes. It was the biggest waste of 3,000 CFA each that we had spent.  Cursing ourselves for not having gone inside one at a time (to exit and advise the other not to bother) – we made our way to the tree of forgetting, hoping it might also do the trick for us and the Python Temple.

This is how I felt about the Python Temple

From there, it was about an hour’s walk back to the beach along the “Route Des Esclaves” passing the various monuments and commemorative plaques about slavery along the way.  Luckily, since we had napped, we had skipped the hottest part of the day and were making this longer walk as the sunset approached.

About two-thirds of the way, we came across yet another voodoo ceremony being enjoyed by a rather large crowd of locals, all clapping and dancing to the music being played by men while a group of women danced and “performed” their ceremony to the onlookers.  I loved the fact that a good number of these women were elderly, and it didn’t inhibit them one bit in owning their movement to the music.

One of the fetishes along the “Route des Esclaves”

At one point, one of the oldest ladies feigned (whether “real” or not is ultimately in the eye of the beholder) possession and ran out into the crowd to grab someone, and the whole audience shrieked and took off in the opposite direction.  It appeared to be lighthearted, but again, it was a little difficult to tell.

Again, we were the only white people present and we got a mixed reception, some folks smiling and inviting us to take photos, while others appeared to be deeply suspicious and instructing us to put our cameras away.  It was a real shame that the folks from the truck, staying at a different hotel on the other side of the “Door of No Return” monument on the beach hadn’t known about this voodoo ceremony.  Mike and I were grateful to have yet again stumbled across one that tourists have to typically pre-arrange and then doubt its authenticity.

Monument to Benin Independence

It was almost dark when we got back to the beach, and we decided it might be nice to visit the truck’s hotel for a beer or two.  As it turned out, the hotel served pizza which was too good of an idea for us to pass.  We got to our hotel finally much later than planned, but bellies full of cheesy goodness.

The following day we took advantage of our nice digs for a relaxing morning by the pool.  Since leaving Accra, we had been going at quite a pace, and I for one was desperate for a few days to slow down.  Since it had been closed the day before, we headed back out along the beach that afternoon to visit the “Museum of Return” which honored the heritage of those who had been forcibly removed from Africa who were now being given an open invitation to return.

Ironically, the museum’s “Door of Return” remained locked and unattended even after we had waited and taken beers on the beach until the signposted re-opening hour.  Like sarcasm, I think irony is also lost on West Africans – as I received zero reaction from our hotel receptionist when I related this funny story to her.  Then again, it might have been my French.

Trying to get in through the Door of Return

Sigh.

Of note that afternoon was the fact that a local Benin man bought us a round of beers when we sat down at the beach bar waiting for the museum to re-open.  That was a first, and it was a most welcome sign of hospitality.

Being too lazy at this juncture to take public transport, we arranged a pretty decent cab fare to be driven the hour or so to our next point of interest – Grand Popo – a lovely beachside hotel called Auberge de Grand Popo, that would also house Dragoman for the next two nights.  Not only did Mike and I crave some more respite from our formerly chaotic pace of travel, but we also had a lot to discuss/arrange in regards to whether we were ending the trip in Lome/Accra – or whether we would continue traveling and visit Ethiopia together.

Our lovely room at the Auberge de Grand Popo

It was Jan 30th and we’d been traveling together for two weeks.  Originally, I was supposed to fly home on the 5th of February, so a decision had to be made soon and I was hoping for fast internet in order to accomplish all the research I would need to do.

The Auberge was gorgeous, historic, and beautifully kept with a location that I would gladly fly to just for a week’s vacation – if I lived in Europe.  The highlight was the restaurant, and though the food was a little expensive compared to what we had grown used to spending – it was still very affordable by western standards and boasted utterly delicious food.  On the first night, we ordered a shrimp cocktail followed by grilled prawns with rice and vegetables, topping it off with a raspberry sorbet for dessert.  It was phenomenal and paired with a couple of cocktails, I felt like I was home again.

Me, Mike and Liz enjoying our lovely meal in Grand Popo

We hung out that night deep in conversation with Liz and Sinead from the truck and it was really nice to be social with our friends again.  The whole next day I edited photos, wrote my blog, researched Ethiopia/flights, and took breaks to swim in the pool and walk along the beach.  I was feeling much restored especially with the lovely surroundings, good company, and delicious food.  I didn’t even want to leave the next day – but we needed to make our way to Togo and then on to Accra, having decided that we would fly to Addis Ababa from Accra and join the truck for their final goodbye party on a Saturday night in the Ghanaian capital.  Since we had missed so many of Accra’s main attractions during our first stay – it only made sense to go back – even if we had to finagle and pay for a transit visa for Mike – who opted to get a single entry visa for Ghana when first making his travel plans.

On the first of February, we left Grand Popo in a cab headed for the Togolese border.

Ghana Part III: Cape Coast and Sleeping in Tree Houses

31 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Africa, Ghana

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At the Cape Coast Slave Castle

The next morning I said goodbye to my lovely hut and outdoor toilet to get back on the truck and head east to Cape Coast. I did love my room, however, I had to employ a technique there that I hadn’t used since 2009 when I was in Nicaragua during a particularly hot and muggy spell of weather. Without a fan, which is really essential in the heat of the night, the only way one could fall asleep would be to get in the shower and get completely soaked with cold water, and then lie back down on the bed still wet and try to fall asleep before you dry off.

That technique helped me to fall asleep the prior two nights in Elmina.

Morning in Elmina at the market

Baby asleep with head all the way back while carried by mama

Woman carrying massive ice blocks on her head…Because, Africa.

Our journey out of town had us passing the exact same busy thoroughfare that me and the boys had walked the night prior – though being morning, it was even busier than what it had been. From our unique vantage point aboard the truck, it was super easy to get great photos of people passing by carrying massive baskets of fish, produce and other wares to sell in the market. The boats were heavily laden and still bearing their colorful paints and biblical names – headed out to sea as we drove by.

One of the amusing things about Ghana, given its dominant Christian makeup in the south, is that so many small businesses name their storefronts with a religious title. Here are a few examples of the names we saw along our journey:

“Thy Will Be Done Licensed Chemical Shop”

“Life in Christ Radiator Specialist”

“Merciful God Vulcanizing”

“God is My Provider Aluminium Works”

“If Jesus says yes, no one can say no market”

“God is Alive Curtains Internal”

“Charity begins at home drinking spot”

This defies belief. Hence, photo.

Special thanks go out to Mike for keeping a log of these gems.

Soon we got to Cape Coast Castle and unloaded for our tour of this castle – different to Elmina in that it was built specifically for the slave trade in 1610 and opened in 1653. On entering, we immediately saw the plaque commemorating the visit that Barack and Michelle Obama made here back in 2009.

Cape Coast Castle courtyard

Female Dungeon

View from other side of Door of No Return…where the ship would pick up the slaves passing through it.

The visit was just as haunting as my visit to Elmina, so I won’t recount my reactions here except to say that we were given a lot more free time to explore once the tour was over and I chose to go back into the dungeons alone and stand quietly in the darkness.

Even just in comparison to being down there with the group, the forboding and eeriness was far more palatable when I was alone and it was difficult to imagine the untold stories of suffering that were contained in those walls.

One item I failed to describe in my last post was the treatment of women in the female dungeons as sex slaves.  This was true in both Elmina and Cape Coast.  The governor, or any soldier residing in the castle could choose a woman to rape whenever he wanted.  The women would be marched out of the dungeon and selected from a balcony overlooking the courtyard.  She would then be washed thoroughly and brought to her captor to be violated.

On the one hand, if chosen, you’d be raped.  On the other, you finally got to bathe.

I know, not funny, and I don’t mean it to sound trite.

Many of these women became pregnant and would be taken from the dungeon to a separate building to give birth and then wean the infant, only to have it taken away from her once it could eat solid food.  She would then be returned to the dungeons or put on a slaver ship.  Later on, these “Mulatto” (their word, not mine) would be given an education in specially built schools and many went on to be leaders in the slave industry – seen as more elite and superior than their darker countrymen.

With Wayne and our guide

In comparison with Elmina, Cape Coast did house a well-curated museum regarding the slave trade and it’s impact on the New World and African American culture today. There was even displays of the branding irons that owners would use to be able to identify their “property” and visual representations of the inside of the slave ships with gut wrenching diagrams of how people were stacked.

I especially liked the room that chose to honor those African Americans who’s roots can be traced to those once in bondage and give credence to their accomplishments and continuing fight for equality. I will include a few of the pics I took here below.

Branding iron used on Slaves to mark as property…this one of the ATI company

After the visit we had only a short journey north to Kakum National park where we would be dividing into groups and hiking into the jungle for a night up in the tree canopy in the treehouses that offered a pretty unique place to sleep.

While waiting for dinner, Mike had the misfortune to step onto a wooden platform that completely gave way causing him to puncture his foot with something metallic, perhaps a nail. Watching him go down was initially quite funny until we realized that he was hurt – but after getting some alcohol to clean the wound and a bandaid…he still managed to power through and do the hike with us.

Sinead hiking to our Treehouse in Kakum National park

Treehouse in Kakum National Park

Kakum is home to a number of species including the pygmy forest elephant – but we were advised to keep our expectations very low for what wildlife we might be able to spot in the short time we were visiting.

The hike in was very easy and took just over an hour. It’s funny to me how much hikes are always made to seem so difficult and that they require such physical stamina by the hosts in countries where I am visiting – I guess it must mean that their average tourist is simply very out of shape because I find them to be generally quite tame despite their arduous descriptions.

There were around 14 of us staying at the treehouse that was a little bit of a further trek away – and in looking up at the structure, I did wonder just how safe it was for that many people to make it home for the night. Several people just brought their tent with them, but the rest of us made it up the eighty or so steps, trying not to think about how difficult it was going to be to have to come back down in the night to pee.

View from the forest canopy walk in the early morning

We formed sleeping mats in a circular fashion on the floor around the hut and tried to get set up for what was going to be an early night. After a well deserved Smirnoff Ice (Mike and I packed a few in that managed to stay cold) we headed out for a Night Walk with our guide, Sammy.

The night walk was mostly about hearing the sounds of the jungle and animals around you. It’s funny how without a headlamp, you can easily just be convinced that every creature is out to “get you”, when in reality, it is very difficult to spot wildlife with headlamps. We did get to hear the Hyrax – a rodent that is actually a genetic relative of the elephant make extremely high pitched sounds as they came down from the forest canopy to forage for food. We also managed to spot several bush babies, millipedes and an errant moth who wanted to fly into my bra for some reason – to which I emitted a rather loud shriek which in turn was received with various forms of mocking.

Overall, the experience in Kakum was fun and unique – if not exactly for its wildlife encounters then for its atmosphere.

Walking the canopy just after sunrise

In the morning, we did a walk through the upper tree canopy by walking along hanging bridges that were built from platforms to platforms. It was an early start at 0530, but how often do you get to see the sun rise from a tree canopy in a National Park in Ghana?

Ghana Part II: Slave Castles and Photogenic Elmina Harbor

28 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in Africa, Ghana

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Elmina had not really been touted as a destination in and of itself by the Dragoman Itinerary or trip description. In fact, almost nothing was mentioned of its stunning harbor that dramatically juxtaposed alongside its famed Slave Castle that I had read about when I was a teenager in high school.

It turned out to be the highlight of the trip so far.

That morning, all that had been organized for the group was a visit to 3 schools that had been built by a charity that Dragoman supports. The visit left me with very mixed feelings – in the first school, the conditions were ideal and the school’s facilities were superior to what I was lucky enough to experience in primary school in the UK. The kids were all clean, healthy, well-dressed with new shoes and new backpacks. When asked what the criteria was for kids to be able to come to this school, we were told that it was purely based on geography and whether parents could bring their kids to school. To me, just looking at the children told me that this wasn’t the case and that this was a group of kids from the elite upper-class persons of Elmina – who obviously deserved a good education – but why was a western supported charity helping kids who came from families that could already afford to support themselves?

The next school was far more moderate and struggled with class sizes of over 70 or 80 kids. It felt like we were diverting the children’s attention from their classwork, and so the visit didn’t sit well with me at all. In addition, these kids were some of the most aggressively “friendly” of any crowds of kids I’ve come across on this continent. When trying to leave, they practically clawed, scratched and grabbed at me to get physical hold of me, along with pulling off my hat and grabbing my hair. I didn’t appreciate that at all.

One highlight of the visit, however, was that this school itself sat on Elmina beach where a local team of fishermen just happened to be pulling in the day’s catch when we were there. It was a spectacle to witness as the men sang songs and clapped in time to create the unity and coordination necessary to pull in the thousands of tiny fish in their nets ashore. I managed to get a good video of the event which I will include here.

https://youtu.be/gFqBfDRylis

Once the visits were over (and they’d gone way overtime) we were hungry for some food and were dropped off downtown to get lunch and take a walk around Elmina.

Once we’d eaten, it became quickly obvious that there was so much here to see and do and the photographic opportunities in Elmina’s gloriously colorful harbor full of life, locals, and fishing boats coming in and out of the harbor demanded that the rest of the day be spent here.

I was also very keen to visit Elmina castle despite the fact that we were visiting the Slave Castle at Cape Coast the next day. Elmina castle is additionally historic because it wasn’t built specifically for the slave trade, but rather as a trading post for other goods’/commodities by the Portuguese in 1482 – 10 years before Columbus supposedly “found” Hispaniola.

I managed to convince Mike and “Precise” Peter (aka Pipi Lou Lou) to come along with me for the $9 tour of the castle and we further planned to make our own way walking all the way back to the beach that housed Stumble Inn and our accommodation for the night.

I could write a book about what visiting Elmina castle was like, but I will attempt to summarize my feelings/thoughts for you here in a more concise manner.   Much like visiting Aushwitz/Birkenau, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, or the Genocide Museum in Kigali – you cannot quite prepare yourself for the horror you feel when you can actually see a place that housed such a shocking testament to the cruelty, sadism and torture of living humans that other humans are capable of inflicting upon another group of people. And doing so without a sense of remorse or conscience. For me, it stirred up a lot of very heavy emotions and made me look at the history of my own nation with a new set of eyes.

Our guide was incredible, thorough and managed to infuse just the right amount of humor when it was needed so as to not detract from the serious nature of our visit. He did a wonderful job of giving us the preliminary world history that set the stage for the slave trade to begin in the first place – namely the decimation of Native Populations in the Americas due to European-introduced diseases, the noteworthy observation of the physical strength and working characteristics of the African people and a backdrop of inter-tribal warfare that set the stage for the creation of the slave trade, which was, in large part started by Africans enslaving other Africans in exchange for weapons to fight.

The Americas needed to build infrastructure and gather resources from their newly acquired lands. The Africans were warring with one another over land and resources in West Africa. The Europeans saw the opportunity for obtaining vast quantities of cheap, and subsequently “free” labor, by rewarding tribal leaders with weapons, and goods in exchange for their “enslaving” their enemy tribal members and bringing them, in chains, to Elmina and other slave castles along the West African coast to be shipped by the thousands to Brazil, South America, the Caribbean and only about 1/3 going to the continental United States.

For almost 400 years – men, women, and children were brought here against their will, separated, thrown in dungeons where a process of elimination would begin and only those “surviving” these harshest of environments would then be subjected to the grueling and inconceivably inhumane Atlantic crossing to their eternal servitude.

We visited both the male and the female dungeons at Elmina where up to a 1000 persons would be crammed, chained to another person at the wrist, feet, or neck for up to 3 months with little to no food, water, or chance to toilet/menstruate or wash. The ventilation was next to nothing with only tiny windows built into the rock, and these people were forced to live like this in almost total darkness.

What really hit me the most is when our guide showed us a section of the “floor” in the male dungeon that had actually been “cleaned/excavated” to show the original brick flooring. It was a good ½ foot lower than the rest of the floor, and he explained that we were literally standing on compressed faeces, urine, and human flesh.

A drainage system had been built into the floor but it was obviously not adequate to eliminate all waste. The stench must have been beyond imagining. In addition, the guide explained that if you wanted to sit or lie down, you would have to get the agreement of whomever you were chained to – and often this person didn’t speak the same language as you and moreover – he might have been from an enemy tribe. Sometimes, your chained partner would die and they would have to wait for a guard to find that person dead before removing him and throwing him into the ocean.

Once a ship was in the harbor ready to set sail for the “New World” – the slaves would be marched through dark tunnels to the “Door of No Return” where they would be stockpiled and chained like sardines end to end until the ship was full, totally unaware of the horrors that awaited them, and still separated from their families.

Our guide explained that it was sometimes during the rush and panic of getting the men and women onto the ships from these passages that families might be reunited for mere moments before being separated again on female or male only decks.

Even more chilling, if you didn’t see or meet up with your loved ones in the tunnels leading to the beach, then you would know that he/she didn’t make it out alive.

The Portuguese were replaced by the Dutch who were then replaced by the British who did the heavy lifting during the slave trade at Elmina. It made me sick to my stomach when after visiting the dungeons we visited the floor directly above the dungeons where the British soldiers had built a church directly over the heads of the persons they were enslaving and torturing. How a person could sing a hymn in praise of Christ with that misery below is beyond my comprehension and it filled me with rage.

If not more upsetting, above the church was the stunning floor that was the Governor’s quarters – palatial and airy with an incredible 365 degree view over Elmina harbor, the beach and the blue ocean – the color of which most of the slaves marched here never even set eyes upon.

The visit left me somber, but as I always feel when visiting important historical sites such as this – it is our duty as human beings on this planet to be informed of our bloody and barbaric history if only in order that it not be repeated. Unfortunately, given what is going on in Libya and in the global sex trade at this moment in time, it appears that slavery has not had its end, making such a site an even bigger duty to visit and ponder.

Once we left the castle – we were literally blown away by further exploration of the bustling life that was to be observed and photographed in the harbor and along the busy main street that marked our path back to the Inn.

Re-caffeinated albeit with slightly warm soft drinks, we three happily walked along smiling and chatting with the locals, high-fiving with the countless little children, and photographing the busy markets overflowing with fish and produce.

As the sun started to glow a little lower on the horizon, we took a daring early turn to the beach hoping against hope that we might be able to take advantage of the beach “wall” that had been created that year to help prevent shore erosion, but that also happened to provide a rather unique way to walk along the beach back to our accommodation.

The bet paid off and I had what turned out to be an incredibly memorable walk back along the beach as the sun turned a golden red and we got back to camp just as it set below the horizon.

I felt especially full and joyous from the day’s learning, and experiences. I would highly recommend Elmina to anyone visiting Ghana – just make sure you have longer than the one day we had!