Poverty

 

Village welcome

 

Two interpreters religious ceremony pour out gin into the sand. 

Jug of palm wine (sweet) and bottles of 90 proof gin called Kill Me   All home made.  King seated in white robe in back. 

Ghana

 So very hot since we just came off the equator. Terribly impoverished and hardly any infrastructure. Several mines all owned by foreign companies hiring foreign workers. We drove 2 hours inland to a village that harvests several acres of coca trees (for chocolate). They harvest 3 times a year as a community under the direction of a government appointed farmer. 

The village has a king and 2 interpreters plus a village council. No one can speak directly to the king, everything is filtered through the interpreter. 

Ghana is 70% Christian and yet a husband can take multiple wives  There are 2 government parties….one socialist and one capitalist!  Corruption is a given  

Reaching the pods up high. 

Sun dried coca seeds already smell like chocolate 

Seeds are dried out and so are the pods.  The pods are burned to ash and then used to make fine soaps. 

Coca seeds in the pods. 

Coca pods 

Lunch in the desert

 Holland America sent along a champagne lunch for us. Raw oysters on the half shell were the centerpiece with many other finger foods. The leftover finger foods were packed up and given to the villagers. The disparity between the villagers and the tourists is very significant and did not escape me. 

Village life

 Their transportation is by donkey and cart and their source of income is from the desert melon called NARA and tourist visits. 

Cooking down the melon

Donkeys get the left over rinds of the melons

The melons are well protected as they grow in the prickly vines.  

Village in the desert

 We took bags of goods to the villagers that we had purchased or brought from home. We met several of them   Their houses built out of whatever cardboard, plywood or dirt bricks. 

Walvis Bay

 Namibia is pretty much all desert. We got into air conditioned jeeps and traversed the desert for a few hours until we reached a village. We started out on paved roads which turned into dirt roads and finally ended up only very bumpy trails. No traffic at all. Lots of sand dunes. On the other side of the dunes is the Atlantic Ocean.  The wind or lack of wind changes the landscape constantly. The only moisture is from the dew of the fog. 

Luderwitz, Namibia

 I don’t know why we made a stop here. It is virtually a ghost town. We saw very few people other than tourists like us. All the buildings were empty, but very well maintained. 

All tourists. 

Cape Town continued

 Bishop Desmond Tutu preached in the Anglican Church here. 

Fog everywhere. 

Muslim district painted so colorfully but the area had been torn apart during apartheid and the government everyone was forced to flee the area even though so many cultures and nationalities had lived there for decades very peacefully and happy. 

Cape Town

 Cape Town is a modern town with many different cultural features and a history of apartheid that was incredibly cruel creating more hatred among cultures and it occurred in 1966!  The scenery is beautiful. Cape of Good Hope, Table Mountain, Hout Bay. Watching the African Boulder Penguins was a highlight. Very dense fog in the mornings, so dense that the ship couldn’t dock on schedule and had to make a quick getaway to avoid being stuck in dock overnight. 

Sea food lunch. Muscles, prawns, calamari, white fish. 

More troubled waters.

 The port pilot couldn’t get on the ship in the normal way via a tug boat because the water was so choppy. He arrived via helicopter instead.  The helicopter couldn’t land because it was too windy so they lowered a harness and pulled him up. It was a very noisy process. 

Durban, South Africa

 We traveled to the Nelson Mandala Capture Site. The memorial is an engineering and mathematical marvel. Completely created with metal posts that you can walk through. The image of N M is only clear from a distance. 

Maputo, Mozambique

 We sampled street food for 6 hours. No illness ensued. 

A major crop. Cashews with a multitude of different flavors added

Slimy fruit tasted like banana with large seeds

Sugar cane juice

Bean paste, fried and eaten in a bun like a sandwich 

Chicken lunch prepared and cooked in the colorful cargo containers 

And a second lunch at an art and craft market. Baked beans with prawns, rice and cassava paste. All delicious.