Back to the Present in a Canoe

This tree is insane.

I had planned to write three posts in my time-travel series but the overwhelming demand has been for some information about what we’re doing right now.  The customer is always right!  Let’s talk about the present.  (Yes, for anyone snarky out there, technically everything I write about is in the past.  Dork.)

After a series of hearings, filibusters, and votes, we’ve firmly decided that Saturdays are to be free of microfinancin’ and shall be used to kick back a little bit.  Recently we decided to take advantage of this lazy day by renting a canoe and touring the lagoon a little bit.  Siva told us that we should be able to find a rental by talking to anyone adjacent to a boat.  This wasn’t quite the case.

We went to his recommended spot at the back of the Anloga market.  This was a pretty cool experience anyway because the market was utterly empty except for a few kids playing soccer with some wadded up plastic bags for a ball.  We really got a sense for the size of the market without anyone in it.  Somehow on market days the grounds feel both bigger and smaller at the same time.  Maybe it’s just that you don’t spend much time gauging size when you’re squeezing between people or tro-tros or ducking under a large bowl on someone’s head.

We found a couple guys hanging out at the water’s edge and asked about renting a boat in broken Ewe.  The best we could get was a ‘guided tour’ by our captain, who pushed us around the lagoon using a large stick.  When I asked them how much it would be – “Nenie?” – he responded that we should just go for the ride and come back – “Ne yi na va”.  I had mixed feelings about this response but went along with it anyway.  My Ewe skills being what they are, I generally take every opportunity to come to an understanding with someone.  It’s just a lot riskier to try and clarify things.  Odds are I’ll just pineapple the whole situation.

As another aside, the word for “to confuse” in Ewe is the same as the word for Pineapple. Moreover, it seems that it isn’t like a lot of words in Ewe where people consider them different words despite sounding identical. They are simply the same word. Pineapple is both a noun and a verb. In noun form, it is a delicious fruit. In verb form, it is befuddling. As a result, people will use pineapple as a verb when speaking in English, such as my usage up above. I find this to make sense in a Sponge-Bob kind of way.

Asides aside, we took a pleasant trip around the lagoon that lasted about 45 minutes.  We didn’t go too far from the market grounds but it was nice to see Anloga from the water and also just to get out and dink around.

We returned to shore and prepared to continue our tomfoolery, and it was at this point that our driver informed us that he would be charging 10 cedi for our trip.  That’s about $7, and though it might not seem like much, it is! 10 cedis for 45 minutes in a canoe is highway robbery!  For a sense of scale: a 45 minute ride in a taxi is less than 1 cedi, a delicious and filling lunch is 0.30-0.70 cedi, and maybe most illustratively, his proposed 10 cedi rate would have been more expensive/hr than hiring an armed guide to take us on safari in Mole Park.  Guides charge a rate of 3 cedis/hr/person.  Anyway, it was an outrage!

It wasn’t actually much of an outrage, but more one of those yevu-price moments where someone (usually a guy) tries to charge you a ridiculous amount because you’re white.  At least by now I have some sense of scale so I can recognize when this is happening.  We paid him three cedi and continued on our merry way.

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The rest of our way wasn’t all that merry though.  Duffy went back to the house and Abbey and I went to the beach, where her backpack was promptly stolen.  This was a bit of a downer as the bag held a little money and a lot of sentimental value to her, not to mention one of the smart-phones on loan to us from the University of Washington.  It was a sobering reminder that, despite the fact that Ghana is incredibly friendly and inviting, Ghanaians are still humans and humans make mistakes.

That’s all for now.  I hope you enjoyed this departure from the retrospective. Also take note! I’ve switched to using Flickr for my image handling. When you click to see the larger sizes, you’ll be taken to the Flickr site. There is also a sidebar widget now that shows photos that I’ve put up on flickr. Right now it is pretty labor intensive for me to maintain it in this way, but it will make it easier for me to post photos that don’t have to do with any blog posts, so even if I don’t have time for a blog post, I can put up a picture on Flickr and you can see it at my photostream! I’ll even prove its value by uploading some pictures that I’m not featuring in this post.