Monkeys and Waterfalls!

We were back in Tamale on Friday, where we met up with Kathryn, who graduated from Georgetown last year. She’s now in Tamale working with a clean water NGO, and offered to let us stay with her for the weekend. It was lovely, she had 4 extra (clean) beds and a kitten, which is really all we ever wanted. On Saturday, a cab driver named Small Boy showed up at the house at 5 am, and we were off for a full day of monkeys and waterfalls. [Sidenote: When Small Boy gets a girlfriend, he’s going to change his name to Big Boy. I couldn’t write this entry without including that tidbit.]

We rolled into the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary around 9:30, having spent fully half of the driving time navigating the 30 km dirt road into the jungle. It was more of a dried up riverbed than a road, and would have been entirely impassable during the rainy season. It’s a shame the road is so bad, too, because the Sanctuary is really well kept and makes for a lovely tourist destination once you get there. Like the crocodile pond at Paga, the Sanctuary was first protected for spiritual, not tourism or conservation, reasons. The legend goes that the chief was walking through the jungle and found a bunch of monkeys playing around a coffin, which he took and brought to the local fetish priest. The priest told him he could give the coffin back to the monkeys and they would go away, or if he liked the monkeys he could keep the coffin and they’d stay near the village forever. Weird, I guess, but whatever. Point is the monkeys have been really closely intertwined with the villagers ever since. Supposedly, the monkeys will always seek out one of the fetish priests before they die, so that they can be buried in the monkey cemetery. The fetish priests are buried there, as well. Historically, one fetish priest was always a virgin woman, but that rule has become pretty lax recently “because a virgin is too hard to find nowadays,” according to our tour guide. Who was a German schoolteacher. Anyway, the Sanctuary has two types of monkeys: black and white colobus and mona monkeys. The colobus are a little more shy and stay in the taller trees, but the monas are really friendly and will come really close. They like to raid the villages for food, and will steal shiny things from tourists if you’re not careful. They came right up to us, like within two feet at times. 

After the monkeys, we packed into the cab and Small Boy took us to the Kintampo Waterfalls. They’re the second largest in Ghana, but the biggest are too far away for us to reasonably travel to so we settled. The waterfall was packed. It was a Saturday, and there’s a Muslim holiday this week on top of it, so entire busses of students emptied out into the park. It seems like a great place to go on weekends, there were lots of gazebos for picnics and a guy grilling meatsticks (kabobs... we just call them meatsticks). Plus, when we headed down the trail to the largest waterfall, there were huge speakers set up by the waterside blasting Ghana’s greatest hits. Very few girls actually went in the water, but Mary and I didn’t let that stop us. Some of the guys even helped us climb up behind the waterfall, which I really appreciated because I was going nowhere but face-first into a rock without their help. It was pretty high up, and Mary and I didn’t know how we were going to get down safely... until someone pushed us and we slid down the slippery rocks into a gaggle of kids at the end. It was so much fun, but we didn’t spend too long in the water. Ghana’s freshwater is notoriously swimming with parasites, and we’re almost definitely infected with schistosomiasis now. It’s nothing a thorough deworming back in the States can’t fix, though, and it was so worth it.

With the Muslim holiday tomorrow, we’re not going to be able to resubmit to IRB until Tuesday at the earliest. Troublesome, because we’re quickly running out of time to get everything done. Oh, and the water is out.