Our days on the road continued to start in the dark as we raced the rising sun. We passed through villages where they displayed fresh butchered meat, lathered in fresh bright red blood. Thought it would be funny if people followed us the way they did Forest Gump when he decided to run across the country. Next moment, we had a group of kids cycling directly behind and beside us. They were pretty much silent which made it even funnier. They stopped to take breaks with us every so often while they just stared at us. We parted ways before the next town.
We passed by numerous patches of red hot chili peppers drying out in the sun on the asphalt. Pale purple petunias were scattered in bushes between tall green grasses. Dragonflies circled around us consistently. We crossed a small outlet of the Volta River where women collected water by filling up tiny buckets, spilling it into large metal bowls that they carried on top of their heads as they balanced the weight.
We rode through wind tunnels and dust devils, the leaves circling around us and dancing up into the sky as we basked into the feeling of any slight breeze. We stopped in a small town to rehydrate and eat some snacks. There, women carried their babies in kanga scarves wrapped tightly around their backs.
I thought back to my close friend who was Nigerian. I remembered she was very self conscious of her dark skin and often did things to make herself appear lighter. I never understood why, especially now seeing these very dark women again and finding so much beauty in them. They appeared sleek/powerful and the colors they wore accented their skin even more. Funny how we often found beauty in the things in which we apparently did not possess.
We arrived at Yeji—the end of the road where we planned to take a ferry the following morning. We were met with confusion as to where to go, so we pulled out our map and a crowd of people surrounded us. We felt suffocated by everyone asking us where we were going and where we had come from. We simply needed to know if there was a ferry or boat we could take that would get us to Kpango in one straight shot.
We met a very exuberant local man who led us to the commander in charge of getting people on the correct ferry. He explained that there was no way of making it in a straight shot and that we would have to take two ferries to get there. We planned on meeting him in the morning.
The rest of the day we sat on the balcony at the hotel we were staying in. We watched the rumble and bustle of the town, in awe of how fast people moved. They had an underlying calmness within their motions, not this anxiety ridden epidemic that Americans experienced over the slightest difficulty.