Lunch in Togo and the Wli Waterfalls

31/10/10

With Friday negotiated off, I went with eight other PA volunteers to spend a 3-day weekend in a village called Wli (pronounced Vlee). Wli is around a 5 hour tro-tro ride north of Accra and borders Togo. The two countries are divided by mountains. It is home to the largest waterfall in the region and so a popular tourist spot.

The ride up was hot, scary and a small part fun. Tro-tros making the journey between towns go very fast. The roads have numerous pot holes, drivers narrowly dodge each other and pedestrians and the vehicles themselves are ancient, with cracked windscreens, parts missing and very squishy seating. The best thing to do is to put your faith in your driver, sit back and enjoy the view.

Our accommodation in Wli was nice and on Friday afternoon, we visited a lower area of the Waterfall. This was about a two-hour trek through rain forest, along a well-trodden path. It was a pleasant first walk through an African rainforest. It wasn’t too hot, as there was a lot of cover and I didn't see any lions - Thank God. The Waterfall itself was stunning. Thousands of bats hovered around the top and the force from the water created a powerful chill, so it felt very refreshing.

At the entrance to the park, several women run stalls catering for the stream of tourists who venture onto the mountain. They are very competitive with each other and each time we passed through, they worked extremely hard at getting us to shop with them and would make arguments like "You can’t buy from her, you bought from her yesterday". They mostly sold cold drinks and biscuits, and I assume it was their main source of income.

On the way back from this first walk, I bought a small packet of choc-chip biscuits from one of them. There were twelve biscuits inside and it cost 1 Cedi, or about AU$0.70c. As I walked back to our accommodation, I opened it up and some local kids surrounded me, eager for one each. So I gave a young girl a stack of them – counting out 9 – and told her to share them around. As I moved on, I noticed two women standing nearby and they approached me, looking a little stern. I started to apologise, thinking that maybe I wasn't supposed to give the kids junk food. They stared at me for a moment, before asking if they could have one too.

That night, we made our plan for the next day. Our group of nine would leave early in the morning and set out on an all-day hike up the mountain, to see both a higher area of the Wli Waterfalls and cross the border into Togo, where we would visit a small village and have lunch. We arranged to go with the same guide we’d used for our trip to the Lower Waterfall, a man named Anthony. We went to bed quite early, as Saturday would be an early start.

We set off at around 7.30am, taking with us a backpack each, swimming gear (we'd heard you could swim in the waterfall) and bottles of water. The first hour or two was the same trek as the day before: wide, flat and easy. After that, however, the path became very, very steep. Very quickly, it grew tiring. We climbed the mountain single file, with Anthony leading the way. Every now and then, he used his machete to cut away areas of the path that were overgrown. After close to two hours of the exhausting ascent, we reached the upper area of the Waterfall.

It was okay. Waterfalls don’t differ a whole lot in appearance and we didn’t swim in it (it was too powerful and not deep enough to be enjoyable), so it didn’t feel that much different to the one the day before. We rested there for a while, cooling down under the powerful winds created by the water's force, before setting off again, back up the mountain to follow the trek to Togo.

The mountain continued in its steepness and intensity. We continued climbing as before, in single fire and following Anthony’s lead and it took a lot longer than any of us expected. We had many pauses, as Anthony wanted to always ensure that we were all still there but this caused a fair bit of frustration among the group, as it took energy to stand still against the steepness.

A couple of hours later, the ground began to flatten. Around half of the group were Football volunteers with Projects-Abroad, but otherwise we were all fit enough that we coped with the climb. Anthony told us that it would be another 25 minutes to Togo, making lunch feel very close.

The border was a small river with two wooden planks laid out across it. The crossing wasn’t an official one, so there was no need for passports or visas. We crossed, one by one, and kept on walking.

Anthony, at this stage, made a habit of telling us that we were closer than we really were. His brief way of communicating with us meant that he would just answer that it wasn’t far, or say something like “20 minutes”. From the border to the village itself, we walked for what felt like ages, along a few different roads and around 2 o clock, we reached Tsadome.

Tsadome is a village of several hundred Togolese, all of whom come from only four families. In the town, there is a school of six classrooms that teaches around two hundred students, including many from surrounding villages.

As it was a Saturday, none of the children were in school and so they swarmed us on our arrival. They found us really fascinating and took a lot of joy in simply watching us, and especially playing with our cameras. A few were shy and watched us from around corners or from behind others. It felt as though we could’ve been the first foreigners to visit the town in a very long time, but Anthony said that the most recent trip had been around two months ago.

A few of the townspeople started cooking lunch for us when we arrived. We were insistent that it had to be fast as we had to get back down the mountain before nightfall, and despite their offer, it wasn’t practical for us to stay the night.

Very suddenly, as we sat on the porch of a small shop with the children, it started raining. Like the few times it's rained in Africa while I've been here, the downpour was very intense. It started to get very wet and we all went for cover inside the tiny shop. The rain was on and off again and it became very cold, and so there was uncertainty in the group about what we were doing.

While lunch was being prepared and in between the rain, we were given a brief tour of the town. The centre of Tsadome is mostly housing built from clay and dutch roofing and the outskirts is farmland. It is about 10km away from a larger city, which is where a lot of the townspeople travel to sell their produce.

Lunch took a long time to make and we all grew more impatient, as we had worked out already that we couldn’t stay the night and Anthony was continually elusive, so it was difficult to hurry things up. Eventually, at around 3 o clock, they served us lunch. It was one the nicest meals I've had in Africa and the one with the most vegetables.

We ate very fast, paid and found Anthony, insisting that we had to leave right away. He got the drift, but it still took him a while to organise himself. At around 3.30pm, we paid for our lunch and some drinks and left very promptly. We had a couple of hours to make it back down, or we risked facing the mountain in the dark.

Energized by the food and the threat of darkness, we walked very quickly, not stopping once. The mountain was wet in parts and so there was plenty of slipping on the way down. Anthony cut us all long sticks with his machete and insisted we all use them to help with the descent. They helped a lot.

The return trip was much faster than the journey up and we hit the flat trail again by around 6pm, as it got dark. We made it back by around 6.30pm, ending a long, exhausting but rewarding day.

On Sunday, we left Wli and on the way back to Accra stopped by a seaside village to go sailing in the Lake Volta. At first, they couldn't accommodate all nine of us on one boat but after a while of officials running around and negotiation on our part, they found a large boat and took us for a 45 minute ride. For some reason, two navy guys were on board, both armed and it wasn't the most captivating ride.

We returned to shore, had a quick look around the coastal township, the highlight of which was the sight of three men loading a large cow into the back of a taxi. Granted, the car was a station wagon but then, the cow was alive. Tired, we caught a tro-tro back to Accra for the bumpy ride home.