Today I went to the Kakum National Park (basically a tropical forest) for an awesome canopy walk and bamboo orchestra performance. It was a 4 hr bus ride to get to the national park, but once we got there it was definitely worth it. It was quite muggy and I was wearing long pants and long sleeves because I was sure mosquitoes would attack me. Fortunately, I wasn’t bitten by any bugs. I There were many animals that live in the forest, such as snakes, monkeys, leopards, and elephants but we didn’t see any (I saw a monkey far away in a tree but that doesn’t really count). We trekked through the forest for a little bit, saw this really cool ant “highway”, and eventually ended up at the canopy tour. This was by far the coolest thing ever. Imagine 2x4s attached by metal pins going through them horizontally as a walkway with a mesh net encircling it for you to walk through about 30 feet above the tree tops. From that view, it looked like the ground was only 30 feet below because the treetops just looked like bushes, but it was actually probably 100 feet high. This contraption was pretty shaky, especially when several people were on it at the same time; nevertheless, it was so cool to look over the trees and see more trees on the mountains in the distance. After we finished the canopy tour, we went to a bamboo lodge for lunch. What I thought was an oddly shaped piece of fried chicken turned out to be a fish head, so I tried to eat some of that. None of us were sure how to get at the meat, so we kind of just pulled some of it out from the neck. The only problem was that there really isn’t much meat there and it had many little bones. Most of the meals here seem to center around rice and plantains, so I stuck to those because I was afraid the other meat was spicy (it was a bright red color).
After lunch, they had a group of performers play bamboo pieces and dance. It was pretty cool because the bamboo pieces were cut at one end so that the horizontal piece at each knot made the bottom while the top was hollow. They used these pieces, each a different size, to bang on a wooden block and either close or open the opening to change the tone. They also banged some together as well to add some variety, but most of the beat came from the different rhythms like it did at the other performance. The dancers were young teens who weren’t professional like the first day, but they were still very good. The first dance was very funny, telling a story of three women out washing clothes while three boys tried to woo them. They kept turning down the boys who kept switching which girl they wooed to improve their luck until the girls decided which boy they wanted. Then they danced together until it finished. As is tradition, they grabbed everyone to go dance and we basically made a conga line doing some African moves. It was pretty fun and even the lifelong learners joined in so that cool to see. After, they taught us how to do some of the rhythms on the bamboo pieces which is harder than it looks, especially when everyone else is doing different rhythms.
We had a 5 hr bus ride back, sometimes switching into oncoming traffic to skip slow people, attempting to meet our police escort (he went to the wrong place unfortunately) and got stuck in traffic for an hour. It was certainly a fun day!
No comments:
Post a Comment