We continued our tour of Ghana today and moved on to yet another city and hotel. We woke up and packed a light suitcase for a two day stay farther up north and left the rest of our luggage at the hotel in Kumasi for us to pick up on our return. This allowed us to load up the bus much more quickly and we were able to be off on the road by around 8 in the morning. We then looked to various books, naps, conversations, and the constantly interesting sites of the villages that we drove through to stay entertained on our trip to Techiman.
Today we were accompanied by a local soil scientist. Our first stop of the day was at a cassava test plot were they were doing their first experiments with a variety of fertilizer application rates. Cassava was an extremely interesting crop to learn about because none of us knew much about it and we have been seeing small fields of it throughout the countryside quite often. Cassava is a large, quick growing plant that looks like a small tropical tree after only a year of growth when it is ready to be harvested. It can be eaten by people and used for biofuels. The varieties we looked at were mostly used by textile facilities because of their high starch content.
We ate launch at a nice hotel under a gazebo. We eat most meals outside and take every chance we can to enjoy the amazing weather. Everyone enjoyed joking about how surprised we were to see chicken and rice, which is what we have for the majority of our meals.
We then got back on the bus and continued north. As we moved from the deciduous forest that we had been staying in, we entered into a transitional zone and the environment and vegetation around us began to reflect the guinea savanna ecological zone of the north. We took this opportunity to do another soil evaluation of the red Alfisols. We used a machete to get back into the forest to visit a site that was thickly overgrown with weeds and already had a pit dug for us to examine the soil profile. We were all assigned specific evaluations to complete such as measuring soil respiration and water infiltration. I had the pleasure of digging a one foot square pit and counting the number of earthworms present in the soil. By the time we had all listened to the soil scientist talk about everything we were seeing and helping us with our various roles we were all very hot and ready to get back on the bus and away from the bugs.
Next we went to a monkey sanctuary located on the side of a small village. There were two different kinds of monkeys living there, the Mona and Columbus. The Mona monkeys were very friendly and came right up to us once they saw we had bananas. They would grab food right out of our hands. Then we took a guided tour of the jungle that the monkeys live in and saw some of the most impressive trees that we had seen since the botanical garden.
On the drive to our hotel in Techiman we went through a village where there were hundreds of people dancing in the street, many of them with their bodies panted white, and they were having a large celebration that we later found out was the ceremony for a priest. Our guide told us not to open our windows as many people came up to the bus and knocked on our windows. We ate at our hotel when we got there and had plenty of time to sit around and talk with each other before we went to bed early to get ready for an early morning tomorrow.
Click Here to view a map of our travels today.
