Cape Coast Day 1

A week ago Diana and I got up and left by about 6:15am to ride into downtown Accra with her dad on his way to work.  It took us about 2 hours to get there because of the sheer volume of traffic and the condition of some of the roads. He dropped us off at a gas station where we bought some snacks for breakfast and got a taxi to the bus station.  We took an air conditioned bus to Cape Coast, I think it took about 2 hours.  Buses here, you buy a ticket, get on, and wait for the bus to fill.  It will only leave when it is full, so sometimes there is quite a wait.  Luckily on a Monday morning it only took about 1/2 hour.
When we got to Cape Coast, we got a taxi to Diana's old boarding school and walked around for a few hours, taking pictures (they are doing some building and renovations), talking to students, and talking to some of the staff she knew when she was a student there. The school was pretty big and apparently one of the best in Ghana.  The dorms looked small to me- I think they were smaller than the ones I stayed in at summer camp, and the girls weren't allowed to have a lot of personal items.  But that's apparently how boarding school works here; Diana loved the school and the girls seemed very happy, so it was a neat place to see :)

 Most places don't have city plumbing, so they buy large tanks of water, which are sometimes connected have running water, and sometimes you just go fill up a bucket for whatever you need to do.

 Some of the kitchen staff Diana knew when she was a student.

After 3 hours at the school we decided the next order of business was getting something to eat.  So we took a cab to Cape Coast Castle and picked a seafood restaurant right next to the castle and preceded to not order seafood.  I'm just not that bold with my GI system yet.  As tourists (and me being white) we had children flock to us when we got out of the bus trying to sell us things and asking our names to write on seashells. One kid entertained us as we ate, turning cartwheels on the beach, and constantly forgetting Diana's name, which she told him was Cecilia.
After eating it was late in the afternoon, so we took a tour of the Castle but didn't have time to see the museum- we caught that later in the week.

Cape Coast Castle is enormous, grand, and horrifying at the same time.  It's surreal to walk around in a place that is so old (1500s) and where you know so much suffering occurred and so many people died.  It seems impossible the amount of people that were crammed into the dungeons, and then made to live in their own filth for months without a bath or being allowed to leave the dungeons.  They have excavated some of the dungeons all the way to the stone, and left others with several inches of sediment on top that is blood, vomit, feces, bones, etc from the slaves that lived and died there.  We walked on it.  It was disgusting to think about. The indentures are canals for all of the above to run out of the dungeons.
 

This is out tour group looking into what used to be a dungeon, and is now a well.

We saw the door of no return, where slaves were led to the small boats taking them to the slave ships, never to return to their homes again

After seeing the castle we walked down the street to a resort called Oasis that obviously catered to foreigners since the first thing we saw at the bar was a pool table.  They told us the only room they had was an expensive one, about 48 cedes a night (32 American dollars, I know it sounds cheap but its expensive for here).  It was a little hut with a fan, a double bed, and a mosquito net.

The bathroom at least had running water though.  We ate at the bar and tried to sleep in the small bed- minimal success on my part since my body was still mostly on East Coast time. 

This is the view from the resort- that's Cape Coast Castle down the beach.