Shai Hills Adventure

Ah the fine art of wanting to get away for a weekend, picking a spot and seeing what happens. If you haven't noticed, I do that a lot...

So this time around it was myself joining the Carleton girls (Adrienne, Hannah, Lisa and Meghan) in going about 30km North of Tema (the Mississauga of Accra) to the Shai Hills Wildlife Reserve. We left Saturday morning via tro-tro and got there in a few hours.

(Above: On the road with Meghan, Hannah, Lisa and Adrienne)

We stayed at the Shai Hills Resort Hotel, a young and ambitious complex in the middle of nowhere and the priciest place I've stayed at so far. ($20 for a room? Outrageous!) Parentheses aside, it's pretty decent, with nice rooms, showers and TV - although the beds are pretty tough. After a Bollywood movie of the week, we had some lunch and kicked around for a while. Hannah and I walked to the nearest village and were mistaken as:
1. Husband and wife
2. Peace Corps workers
3. Members of the Jesus Christ Church of Latter Day Saints.

Awoken at 6AM, we headed out to the reserve for some early-morning game viewing. Unfortunately on the way there, it started to rain. A lot. Then the thunder and lightning started...

No matter, it cleared up a bit and we got a guide to take us out (ask for the student rate when you do). We saw a troop of baboons near the entrance (Meghan had her Jane Goodall clothes on, which made it even funnier) and a crocodile poking its eyes and nose out of a watering hole. We even saw cattle on the horizon... which meant that they were grazing on protected land, so our intrepid guide Suleyman left us in the wilderness for "small-small" (a bit), which after 45 minutes, we got sick of and went home. Brunch at the hotel was awesome - omlettes, oatmeal, tea, toast and jam. I totally recommend the resort for food and service, if not for their crappy beds.



Now, considering we came out for wildlife and spent all of an hour and a half seeing it, it seemed to be a bust. But hark, Hannah was told that the Bat Cave was a sight to be seen! So in the afternoon we hopped on back, got another guide and made our way down to the cave. The savannah was beautiful and it seemed like we could be anywhere in Africa. On the way, we saw a herd of Cobb's antelope on the horizon! They got spooked and all ran away, but it was something to see, regardless. A fair hike later, we got to the base of the hill and climbed our way into the bat cave, also the former palace for the Shai Hills people. Now there are bats all over Accra, but it was really awesome to be in a real bat cave... the sounds and sights of thousands of bats buzzing around, the funky guano.


And the icing on the cake: the name of our guide for the bat cave was Alfred. Get it?

Anyways, we tried to get a tro-tro back to the city at sunset and ended up piling in the cab of a guy's pickup truck. His picking us up saved us probably two hours of travelling and he took us all the way back to campus! All in all, it was a nice weekend trip and was like seeing a mini-Mole National Park for very few cedi.