About to leave the hotel for the Volta Region (and monkeys and rainforests, yay!), so I'm writing as long as I can.

A few notes first -

Lauren and I got up at 5am yesterday to watch the sunrise. There wasn't much actual visible sun-rising action, but the darkened sky and the palms and the sound of the waves... gah.

The Ewe chief didn't speak English. He had a translator.

Ghanaian chocolate - it doesn't really melt, and it's not particularly sweet. It's still good, but not in the luxurious way of Western chocolate.

The contrast here is fantastic. The sky is a hazy blue, but the vegetation is almost kelly green, and most residential buildings are cream with bright balconies and entryways and trim - green, blue, magenta.

A secondary school teacher makes about ¢700,000/month. I changed $100 last night and got ¢840,000.

Postcards. What are those? I've seen them at the National Museum and Elmina Castle, and that's it; didn't have time to buy at the Museum, didn't have money at Elmina. We're stopping at the Cape Coast post office in a few, the only time on the trip, and I've nothing to send to my promised postcard people. *sigh*

And yeah... Elmina. It was terrific for me as a photographer - white and black with scattered plants, direct sun and shadow. The ubiquity of photos caused me to lag behind a la Zhouzhang, and I missed most of the spoken tour. It was still harrowing, still shocking - the functions of rooms can still be apparent without narration.

There was a crowd of teenage boys at the entrance, some selling, some soliciting addresses. I seemed to be the only person who ignored them and was left alone. Got back to the bus first with a grin from our driver, Solomon, and had enough time to buy some fabric - beautiful cotton embossed with flowers and dyed blue, burgundy, and purple in a geometric design. Four yards for ¢60,000. I didn't bargain for it - it was $7.50. Yay yay - duvet. :-)

After lunch, we had a bus tour of Cape Coast with a university professor, then went back to our hotel just before sunset.

Sunset in the ocean - that's what we had. Changed into bathing suits and ran to the beach for the last of the daylight. We stood just below the tide line, catching waves past our knees, as the sky over the westerly palm stand went greypinklilaccobaltnavyblack. Sound of waves, feel of sand, smell of haze, taste of salt, sight of sky. Joyous. Content. Saturated.

I love Elmina. The weather on the coast is more humid, maybe even hotter, than it is inland, but I could live feet from the ocean forever. Even with an undercurrent too strong and waves too fierce to swim - I could spend hours just staring at the place where water and sky mingle, join, and disappear.

Driving past salt ponds, dazzling bare rock faces that shimmer with some unknown mineral, away from the coast, to the Volta region. We're passing through the urban sprawl that is Accra now - shops and factories and people.

So we stop for lunch at this fast food place, and it's filled with white people. Feels weird.

(There are also MLK scholars here. An entire country, and we're eating at the same restaurant?)