Cailin and I started off our last day by heading to the misnamed National Cultural Center, which turned out to be just a giant tourist market full of people selling the same drums, kente cloth, carved wooden animals, bronze figurines, masks, and jewelry. The prices were, as expected in such a large-scale tourist trap, highly inflated, but Cailin and I, being well-versed in the art of bargaining, got a few pieces of tourist crap for a decent price.

 

Another tourist-volunteer who was going to work with Dave’s wife had arrived the night before, and since she didn’t have anything to do for the day, we invited her to join us on our day outing to Aburi Botanical Gardens, half an hour north of Accra. We headed up there despite the looming rain clouds, and ended up getting lucky. The botanical gardens had been set up by the British during the colonial period, and despite the poor maintenance by the Ghanaian government after independence, they remain relatively intact. We saw a spice section with cinnamon, Ethiopian pepper, and nutmeg trees, a lot of palms, a hollow tree like the ones in the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary, neglected nurseries, a giant cactus, and several young ficus trees growing over their host trees en route to making more hollow trees.

 

Back in Accra, we had our last meal at a sushi restaurant, where I got my first taste of sushi, which was pretty and tasted good, but left me with the impression that I was paying too much for pretty food – I guess I’ll probably never get over the notion that food is for eating, and not for looking at…

 

That night, Dave’s wife, their Great Dane, and another tourist-volunteer showed up, which meant that six people and a person-sized dog would be sharing Dave’s three-room, one-toilet apartment that is about the size of my living room for the night. We slept soundly anyways, and, not having any other plans, headed to the airport early the next afternoon. Right before we left, I set my cell phone down on a table by the door as I locked up, reminding myself to pick it up after I locked the door, which I did not. I realized this while we waited in the check-in line, and, knowing we were early and only ten minutes from the airport, sprinted back outside to a taxi, leaving Cailin to hold our place in line. The taxi driver got lost, then I straightened him out, I got my phone, and then the driver busted something around his axel as he tried to make a sharp U-turn to head back to the airport. I paid him, ran down the street, managed to hail a taxi from a block away (not the first time knowing African hand signals has come in handy here), hopped in after he drove backwards around a corner and down half a block to get to me, and then made it to the airport and back into line just as Cailin got up to the counter. Score!

 

The flight back to Dakar via Freetown and Monrovia was uneventful until we approached Dakar on the last leg of the flight, where the captain announced that something was obstructing the runway at the Dakar airport, and so we would be stopping in Banjul, Gambia, to wait for them to clear the runway. A lot of the people on the plane were going to Banjul after Dakar anyways, so they got off the plane. As they were getting their luggage out of the hold, some of them decided to help themselves to the other passengers’ luggage as well.

 

When we had almost given up hope for arriving in Dakar that night, the captain announced that the runway had been cleared in Dakar, and we took off to arrive half an hour later. Cailin and I made it through customs in a record amount of time and headed to the baggage claim, where we found the top part of Cailin’s bag unexplicably opened, various toiletries strewn on the luggage belt behind it. After arriving at the house we were staying at in Dakar, I found that someone had opened one of the sections of my backpack, taken out my camera case, removed my camera, connector cable, extra batteries, and two memory disks, and then put the empty case back in my backpack and closed it (Maybe they thought I would think that I hadn’t put the camera back in the case? Why not just keep the case?).

 

But I wasn’t mad. Actually, I was only slightly irritated at losing the memory disks, but mostly amused that the thieves had stolen a totally useless camera. My three-year-old camera had suffered greatly at the rigors of life in Mauritania – the cover to the memory disk holder on it had broken off, two of the buttons didn’t work, I couldn’t use the LED display, and you could hear sand in the lens cover as it slid from in front of the lens when the camera was turned on. Actually, even turning the camera on was a feat that I could barely perform (and was impossible for anyone else who has tried it in the last three months), as it required a rapid dexterous combination of sliding a button to turn it on while simultaneously pulling the lens cover back and holding it in position with a long fingernail or toothpick as the lens shaft came out of the body of the camera. I hadn’t used the camera at all during my trip to Ghana because it was so difficult to turn it on and off, and Cailin’s camera took better photos anyways, so I had no pictures of Ghana on it. And maybe it was a sense of foreboding, but for no apparent reason, I downloaded all the pictures on the camera onto my laptop just before we left, so I didn’t lose any photos. The only reason I hadn’t thrown the thing away was that, well, it was a digital camera, and maybe I could get it fixed (not likely), and I paid good money for it (no I didn’t – it was cheap), and I wanted it to last so I felt like I was getting my money’s worth, even though I hadn’t used it in months.

 

So, there, criminals. Ha. You can have my sorry camera. In fact, thanks for taking it off my hands so that I am forced to upgrade.

 

Then we came back to Mauritania, blah blah blah.

 

Home sweet home.