Parenthetical

So now that the project is done, I’m being a tourist for my last week. I only have 15 minutes left at this internet cafe, so I will tell you quickly that this morning I got up at 5 a.m. to do a dawn walk through Kakum National Park, featuring the only canopy walk in Africa! I climbed up 40 feet and walked along swaying rope bridges between the tops of trees and watched the sun rise through the mist and the rainforest wake up below me. It was incredible. No animals, sadly, besides some giant squirrels (where “giant” means “the size of a very small monkey”) and some monkeys and birds in audio only. There are forest elephants in there somewhere, but no one ever sees them.

And now I’m in Cape Coast, the nearest city to Kakum. It was the colonial capital until the late 19th century, when the Brits moved it to Accra, so unlike Ho (which was irrelevant to the colonial powers), it’s full of crumbling European-style buildings. And, of course, it’s right on the beach. It is both as beautiful and as squalid as you can imagine. The high-tide line is a trash heap, but the lower beach is smooth and gorgeous: that’s Cape Coast in a nutshell.

I visited Cape Coast Castle this afternoon, which was the site of the governor’s palace as well as housing the dungeons where slaves were kept before being shipped off to the Americas. The whole thing has been well preserved, and there’s a very nice museum and knowledgeable guides. There’s also a traditional shrine as well as wreaths from people all over the world commemorating the horrors of the slave trade. All I could think was how much it was like visiting Dachau – except that Dachau was all sanitized and museum-ified, unlike this place, which hasn’t been adapted for tourists much at all except to add the museum in a side room of the castle. “Never again,” indeed.

There are white people all over this town, so I get much less attention here. It’s kind of a relief. On to Accra tomorrow morning to meet back up with my guys, and then flying out Saturday night! I can’t even imagine how strange the Western world is going to feel.