Riverboat Fantasy pt. 1

Cocaine kisses and moonshine Misses
That's the life for me
I'm sailing away from my heartache
On a riverboat fantasy
-David Wilcox

By chance I ran into a fellow traveler in Yeji - a Mexican named Daniel. We made our way to the ferry and found spaces on the ridge to sleep on on the deck. ("You come where the white people sleep," the man said. I didn't know they did that on boats anymore...) It being almost a full moon, we sat out on the roof, casting blue shadows on the aluminum. We had a nice, long talk as we stared at the sky (and Daniel enjoyed a joint). Everything looks different in the sky from the equator. I didn't know that there was a rabbit in the moon...

I woke up the next morning to a German who plays the blues on a tiny guitar. Strange. The day was spent mostly lying in my sleeping bag and reading. I finished Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness, about a girl growing up in a Mennonite town in Saskatchewan, kinda like New Waterford Girl for the Praries. I traded with Daniel for Carl Sagan's Contact. The rest of the day was spent staring at the scenery. I was in quite the comfortable zone.

Lake Volta is an infant of a body of water, historically speaking. It's only 40 years old. It was created as a result of Kwame Nkrumah's damming of the Volta River at Akosombo and the resultant flooding has made it the world's largest artificial body of water.

It's so young that in the shallow Northern end, the skeletons of dead trees that haven't decomposed stretch out of the water like hands, forever trying to grasp on to something that will save them. The haze created by the Harmattan gives it a particularly sinister feel, like a neitherworldy fog.

That day we stopped at a few ports and eventually the deck started getting crowded with crazy Ghanaian women trying to take our mats. Then some angry soldiers came and rudely took our mats. (Actually, they were theirs, but they sure were jerks about it) I felt like a kid getting my ice cream cone getting taken away from me. Except when you lose an ice cream cone, you still get to have a comfortable sleep.