23 April 2007 - 17:22

From the Monkey Church, Cailin and I headed to Ghana’s second largest city and the center of the Ashante culture, Kumasi. Amazingly, every hotel we checked with in the city only had one room, and it just so happened to be the most expensive room in the place. After returning to the first hotel we stopped at, we managed to convince them to stop lying, and they gave us a cheaper room. Then the power went out, and it was incredibly hot. It rained that night, but that didn’t help much. We spent the entire next day running around town trying, and mostly failing, to see interesting sites, museums, and exhibits, all while being financially raped by every taxi we got into. We finally gave up, packed up our bags, and headed to the bus station, only to find that the only bus from Kumasi to Cape Coast had left four hours earlier. Another taxi ride later, we ended up at the tro-tro station, where we managed to buy our way into the oldest, most decrepit van in all of Ghana for a trip that took us an hour longer than the four hours it was supposed to take to get us into Cape Coast.

The one interesting thing we saw in Kumasi was a bronze workshop where guys craft figures out of bronze by using the lost wax method. First, they carve a figure out of wax, then cover it with a couple layers of mud. After the mud is dry and solid, they bake it, melting the wax out of a hole in the top, and leaving a mould. After the wax is gone, they melt bronze and pour it into the mould. After it has cooled and hardened, they break the mould and have a bronze figurine left. The whole process takes about two weeks, but the workshop we were in had figures in every stage of the production process, so we got a pretty good look at how it’s done. This process has been used all over West Africa for hundreds of years, so it was interesting to finally see how it was done.

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