Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana April, 26, 2010

Lome, Togo Sunday, April 25th 2010

An independence square so to speak, in the city made a good photo backdrop.



Look at these beaches. Very white sandy welcoming beaches. People playing soccer, praying, spending family time. These are the beaches where tens to hundreds of people were taken into slavery and shipped to Europe, the Americas and some were enslaved and kept right here in Africa. The horrible vision that stimulates when you think about it is quite unbelievable really. To think that SO many people were taken and SO many died before they even reached where they were going. Not a few hundred people died but hundreds of thousands died before they reached their final destination. Unless you come to this part of the world or go to lectures given by authorities on the subject of slavery, or have managed to study up yourself on the history of slavery, you can't fully comprehend what happened here. The business of selling slaves were people turning on their own people. In most cases, European nations (particularly England, Spain, France and Holland)had established colonies in the Americas and were growing sugar, cotton and tobacco. The demand for help and slave trade began to increase. In most cases, European traders encouraged Africans on the coast to attack neighboring tribes and take captives. These captives were brought to these beaches and exchanged for European goods like guns and clothing. A big triangle route developed. The slaves were loaded onto ships to the Americas, the raw material they produced was sent back to Europe and the finished goods were sold in Europe and sent back to Africa in trade for more slaves. The whole system kept moving from the end of the 15th century until 1870 when slavery was abolished. As many as 20 million slaves were captured and up to half of those, 10 million died before they ever reached their final destination due to the overcrowding on the ships and poor unclean living conditions they were held subject to. Sadly, slavery still exists in Africa today. In Mauritania, in 2007, 3 million people lived in slavery, 18% of their population. Slavery there was criminalised in August of 2007.




Trying again:

Lome, Togo Sunday, April 25th 2010

Togo is a tiny country. It is 365 miles from south to north from the coast and at it's widest point is only 90 miles wide. It is bordered by Benin to the east and Ghana to the west and Burkina Faso to the north.
Internet reception and telephone reception is extremely poor here, as are the people for that matter. Voodoo is the largest "religion" here, so says our guide. They believe that when a baby is born, he/she is coming back as a former family member and it is not unusual to have a little baby with the name grandpa! The voodoo ceremonies here they say are "the real thing". We went to one. What was real was, they buried a live chicken, they cut their arms until they bled, they put their hands in boiling hot oil and rubbed it on themselves and they put a baby boy in a basket out in the sun while he screamed his head off until his mom came out and got him. People were spinning around in grass skirts and had some sort of dirt smeared all over themselves.
We were in a village, off the beaten path so to speak and to say that it was a hot day...well, it felt like it was 1,000 degrees. It was comforting to know that we are all on Malaria pills! The internet is not strong enough to post photos tonight.
The photos of the school children singing to us and the villages and the voodoo ceremony will have to wait until we have better service. You won't believe it!

Togo and Ghana April, 26th 2010

We were able to get to both of these countries. Pictures and stories to come. We are currently still in the port at Ghana.

Cotonou, Benin never got there (really)

We arrived in the port of Cotonou and there was a ship in our berth, so we had to wait. It had engine failure and had to be towed out of the space. By the time all this happened, a huge storm came up and the wind was too high for us to port! We could see Cotonou fro distance and have some pictures of the coastline, but we never got there!

Walvis Bay, Namibia

Sand dunes that are 7 stories high. Would you sandboard down them?

Cape Town, South Africa

Hello Table Mountain and new Wrld Cup stadium! Good-bye to sweet friends that we have had fun traveling the world! Goodbye to David and English and Bob and Barbara! We hope that the volcanic ash did not hold you up too much on getting home!

The Ngorongoro Crater

This place is beyond belief.
When you stop at the very edge of the crater and get your first glimpse of the crater, it looks like something out of a movie, really not real but it is. After crossing the Serengeti (which in Maasai means "endless plain") and is about the size of Connecticut, it was quite a change to be looking down into this BOWL of life. The crater is home to all animals of Africa except giraffe becasue they eat from high branches of trees and those are limited in the forest in the crater and there are no crocs. It seems that elephants get 6 sets of teeth. When they lose their last set of teeth they "know" they need to walk over the mountain and go down into the crater, as there is a huge marsh there and they will be able to live out their days eating that wonderful mushy food. Kathleen described it as one giant nursing home for bull elephants. Elephants are crazy smart. Once a year, a grand daughter elephant (of course) shows up at the crater to visit her old grandfather. They interlock their tusks and somehow communicate what has been happening over the past year and she might stay a day or two and then climb back out of the crater and head back to her herd! Just like the nursing homes in the USA!