Kakum Forest Treetop Walkway, Ghana
On the third foot bridge I begin to feel slightly scared. 40 metres up, over the canopy of the rainforest, the flat wooden bottom of the bridge dips slightly to the right as I take a step. It feels unstable, and the clanking that our guide, Cynthia, warned me about – the metal on metal – adds to my unease. Cynthia also said that no more than one person should walk on a bridge at a time, and her resolute refusal to take her own advice, bouncing along merrily several metres behind me, disrupting the rhythm of the bridge so that each step feels unbalanced, compounds it.
There are seven bridges in all, and I think that it may be because the Macbeth-like knowledge that going back is almost as far as continuing contributes to my sudden and unaccustomed attack of vertigo. But the lush and diverse beauty of the jungle, stretched out below me, distracts me, and by the seventh bridge I am able to let go of the ropes as I walk, just for a few steps.
Internet Café, Cape Coast, Ghana
To steal Grumpy’s comment in a text message about Nairobi at Christmas, Ghana is a dirty chunk of chaos.
The internet café is just next door to ‘The Blue Cheeze café’, and down the road from ‘Before before car wash and communications centre.’ Computer screens are side to side, no space between them. I am squashed between two people whose screens I can’t help seeing as I wait for the twelfth time for my email page to try (and fail) to load. The first has finished writing an email to ‘Mama Becky’ in America, asking her for money so he can study, with the help of his friend who is dictating to him from a piece of paper, words they have clearly composed earlier, and is now typing a new email: ‘Almightily praise and blessings to God. Dorcas, how is your mother?’ The second has been reading an IMDB page about Eric Bana for the last twenty minutes.
On the wall outside the internet café
Robbed of my opportunity to read emails, I turn to the Guardian online while I wait for my brother to finish writing his message. Richard Whitely has died. I read the obituaries, and while I agree with much of what is being said, find it trite and obvious. All I want to know is: Will Countdown continue without him? It can’t, can it? And does Carol have to go into mourning now?
Lunch, Cape Coast Castle Restaurant, Ghana
We had a look around the slave fort. It was strange, to stand in the rooms where up to 850 slaves were held for weeks until they were sent on ships to be sold in the Americas. Where many of them died, from malaria or from general ill health due to the conditions they are kept in – cramped rooms where their food was tipped from a window 12 feet up into the room, and their bodily waste ran across the floor of the room in a small open gutter. Where the women were spied on by the castle’s owners (at times Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, and British) from another raised window, and the pretty ones were taken into the next room for a bath, then upstairs to where the men would rape them. Where these women would return, afterwards, some of them much later, after they had given birth to the children which had been the result of their assaults – the child taken away to be raised elsewhere, the woman returned to slavery. Everywhere there were reminders of the sub-human treatment of these people.
In pensive mood, we go to the restaurant next door. I order a pineapple shake, which tastes as though it was made with rancid, warm milk. And lobster thermidor, which is covered with a strange white sauce which turns the chips surrounding it into mashed potato.
I smoke a cigarette, and as there is no ashtray, my brother and I have a long discussion about its disposal. I don’t want to throw it over the side, down onto the beach, despite the existence already of a pile of litter there. He doesn’t want me to ‘skank up’ his empty coke bottle by putting it out in there. We finally knock the cherry out, and put the stub on the table, to dispose of later. The waiter comes to take my plate, sees the stub, and picks it up, throwing it over railings onto the beach. My brother and I look at each other.