Jane in the Jungle

Finally we got out of the city and into the jungle! After a friday night of staying up until 5am studying really hard in my room, we woke up at 9am packed up and headed out to the road to catch a tro tro to go to Boti Falls. We met up with the two boys traveling with us, we all assumed the others would know where to go, ha false. We asked around and after two easy tro tro trips through green hills, jungle, and cocoa farms arrived at the entrance to Boti Falls around 4pm. We walked down to the water falls which we could hear from the entrance and it makes sense why. When we got down there we were all blasted by intense wind and mist from the falls, and the pool the falls emptied into actually had waves. We explored around a bit, took some nerdy tourist photos and then headed back up to the main entrance and asked an old lady where "umbrella rock" was, a place some of our friends had hiked to a couple weeks earlier. She pointed in a few directions so we just picked one and started hiking. We went up, down, over ravines through a cool cavern type thing, and finally up a steep gorge to where we could see the rock. Mushroom Rock would be more appropriate. We were all in heaven, we climbed up the wooden ladders to the top threw our stuff down and soaked in the green valley surrounding us. That night, we slept up on the rock with lightning and thunder storms surrounding us but somehow we didn't get rained on. In the morning we cooked okra stew that one of the boys brought the fixings for. Some little kids from a nearby village came over to us and hopped up on a rock nearby and started singing and dancing "Who let the dogs out? whooo whooo whooo whoo," one of the cutest things I've ever seen. They brought us tomatoes (which we forgot) for our stew and then invited us to their village which was just a short walk away. We shared some stew and they laughed at us and invited us back anytime. We hiked back to the main entrance and just as it started raining got onto a tro tro heading in the right direction and made it back to campus in great time. It was by far the best trip I have taken yet here, peaceful, outside, and cheap! This week I was supposed to have a midterm on Monday. On my way to class a girl in the class stopped me and told me that there were no classes because the lecturers were on strike. Two days later and I still haven't had a class this week and don't know when I will again next (no Mama that doesn't mean I can come home early). This Sunday we are going to Kumasi to watch the Ghana national soccer team play against Sudan, should be very exciting. Especially considering the only sports games I've seen here are intramural baseball, soccer, and people swimming in the pool. Now I understand why it's rare to find an African in the MLB or a pro swimmer, these sports aren't emphasized much here. Soccer is another story altogether, it's rare to walk by a field and not find a game happening. Until Sunday I'll continue to hang out and wait out the strike. In the meantime, we found a place that sells bootlegged America TV shows, so Friends has been keeping us busy.