Ghana: Recording Sessions

1.26-28.11: Accra

from the top . . .

I spend the first two days’ worth of recording sessions leading the band through Nat’s arrangements. O.Kyerima and Frank, having ridden with us from Cape Coast, are first. We record “Every Stone We Lay” with a new feel, suggested by the master drummer himself, and lay ground tracks for “Swing and Sway” and “Waterpocket Fold.” The following day, with Aaron and Nii (from Local Dimension), we lay down “Bells Under Waves,” “What to Do” and “Limbs Akimbo.” The sessions, not surprisingly, have much the same feel as sessions do anywhere. The studio is a bubble, free from time, space and natural light. Only the Ghanaian heat intrudes to remind us where we are: the control room has AC, the live room does not. The tracks will forever bear the sweat of Accra.

 

cooling off by the board

 

no takeout Chinese in sight, Kobina Frank makes lunch

Our last night is a long one. We start at the ‘Big House,’ our local chop bar, and work our way through one last plate of chicken and rice. Nii, Local Dimension’s drummer, sits next to me at dinner and we hit it off. He’s a big, gregarious fellow who, although he’s traveled to nearly every country in Africa as a musician, says he still thinks of himself as a footballer first. We speak about family and traveling and the hustle of being a musician. Life’s so short, but we still gotta hustle. Without it, we’re goners. With it, we’re goners anyhow, but at least we get a few things done while we’re here.

The next day brings me one of the trip’s personal highlights – recording with ten-year-old seperewah virtuoso Angela and her father. She sings a traditional tune:

Friday night, I give you a penny / Saturday night, I give you a dollar

When I come, you say you sick / When I go you say you well

Now it’s time for me and you / To find out who’s the champion

I percolate alongside and try to hit the lines her father, a true virtuoso, lays down as best I can. Frank holds down the percussion and the sound is a perfect morning raga, all strings and bells and voices. The tones of the instruments become indistinguishable, the gulf of culture narrows and music is made. We’re not the first or the last group of people to do this, but it is new for each of us. In fact, it’s Angela’s first session ever. It clearly will not be the last. She is one of the most composed people I have ever met, as confident as she is playful. She holds her future in her hands without fear. She could tour the world. I ask her what she wants to do in the future and she replies, without hesitation, that she will be a doctor. Smart kid.

a bright future in the works

I am sad to leave my new musical collaborators just as I’m getting to know them. Images of Nii, Angela and Frank people my thoughts in the airport later that day as I drink my last Star beer at the boarding gate. Will I be back? I hope so, but I know too well that nothing is for certain. For now, I am grateful for my time here. This trip has brought me beauty, adversity, camaraderie, and something else, too, something deep and soulful that’s tough to put my fingers on. It’s sticking to my ribs, this place, like fufu on a hot afternoon. I start dreaming of coming back, of making more music here with my fellow players from the States. Nothing could thrill me more than marrying my lust for travel with my need for song. Wanderlust has got ahold of me; I start dreaming of new places to explore with them. Cuba? Java? Ireland? The world seems small and possibilities endless.

See you in Dublin?

I snap back to the present. There will be plenty of time for dreaming back in Oakland. For now, I am in Africa, and not for much longer. I walk around to see if I can get a last glance. The northern end of the terminal looks out through a hazy night towards the city beyond. Outside, Ghana is booming, and sleeping, changing and staying the same. Men and women are dancing and struggling and laughing and praying and shopping at malls and sweeping concrete floors. I’m sorry to leave them, sad that there are so many more songs I will never hear here, but there’s one more leg of my journey to run before I head home: Italy.

Cape Coast

1.21-25.11: Cape Coast
Morning finds us wedged into an air-conditioned tro-tro, inching through a traffic jam as we leave the city. The world outside is an inch away, but it’s a long inch. Inside, we’re singing Dylan and quietly recording our thoughts; outside, life is a slow, grinding hustle. Everything is hot, dusty and for sale. The wares are good, but the storefronts selling them are almost non-existent. Everything sits on cinder blocks, a few meters from the road; itinerant billy-goats rest in the shade of hand-finished bed frames, upholstered sofas and even flat-screen televisions. Where does all this stuff go in the rainy season?

entering Cape Coast

Meanwhile, this tro-tro’s rolling on. This is the way things are here, and it’ll be the way things are when we go. We’re here to learn and to give whatever music we can this week. Californians studying African drumming and dancing is, of course, one of the world’s enduring cliches. There’s a reason why we do it though, and it’s not just to impress our friends at potlucks. The reason Americans study this country’s rhythm is the same reason an Ghanaian might study Italian violin playing, or an Australian might obsess over Javanese dance: it’s achingly beautiful. Through it you can sense every emotional aspect of the human experience – joy, longing, power, love, the whole business. Like all good art, it breaks you down and builds you up in one fluid motion.

work it out

Our drumming and dance teacher in Cape Coast is O.Kyerema (o-cher-e-ma), short for Odomankoma Kyerema Kwamena Pra, and, once we get there and get settled in, he breaks us down for four consecutive mornings. He’s not only a master drummer, but a master teacher as well. We start each day with stretching and some calisthenics, then head straight into dance. Once we have danced the day’s rhythm, we learn to play it. It’s brilliant – by the time we get around to putting our hands on drums or bells, we’ve already been listening to how they should sound for an hour. To boot, we’re also physically warmed-up, awareness humming through our bodies like oil through so many well-tuned engines.

O.Kyerema teaches with an understanding of both African and western ways of learning. The African way, from what I’ve gathered thus far, is to simply repeat the dance or drumming rhythm and have the student follow alongside until they have it. This is what our dance teachers in Accra did with us (often to their frustration), and it’s the way I’ve learned rhythms and melodies here from many musicians. Everything’s cyclical, and if the first time doesn’t click, rest assured that the hundred-and-twenty-second will. O.Kyerema does some of this – it works pretty well with the more experienced drummers – but he also reaches out to the way most of us obrunis learn by slowing down and breaking the movements into smaller chunks, some of which don’t make sense until they combine to make larger ones. I’ve used this Daniel-san method with banjo students – separate the hands, wax on and off and on and off without knowing why until, a-ha!, things come together. Small movements calm the mind and yield an encouraging rush when it realizes suddenly what it’s now capable of. Over the course of  our four mornings, we learn akbaijah this way, a 6/8 feel, and panlogo, a 4/4. Both are masterworks, full of rhythms cross-hatched atop one another. Each footstep, each supporting drum part, is a perfect strand. Together, they weave a net that holds us fast.

We split into three groups to give everyone’s playing individual attention. One of the groups includes Nat, Murph, Lucas and myself, so that we can alternate between learning traditional rhythms and collaborating with O.Kyerima and his son, Kobina Frank, on some of the things we’ll be recording next week in Accra. (A linguistic aside: Frank, like most Ghanaians, has two names, one given by his parents and one dictated by the day of the week on which he was born. Each day has a set of assigned personality traits, a bit like the Greek sun signs. Ghanaians believe that the unborn child chooses the day of the week on which s/he is born to best inform the world of their nature. Frank is a Tuesday, or Kwabina in Twee, Accra’s lingua franca. In Cape Coast, home to the Fanti language, Frank’s day name is pronounced Kobina. I, born on Wednesday, am a Kwaku, the same in both tongues.) Both our master drummer and his son are full of ideas for song arrangements; Frank, a DJ and sound engineer, has a keen ear for melody and can sing hooks or bass lines for any chord progression we’re working with. By the time we finish our work on the fourth day, we are ready to take things to the studio in Accra.

the temple of rhythm - O.Kyerima's workshop

On our last night in town, we are invited by O.Kyerima’s son, Kobina Frank, to a fetish priest initiation. (Another linguistic note: the term fetish priest has nothing to do with shoes or safe words. As far as I’ve been able to gather, it’s either the transliteration of a Fanti term or a term given by missionaries or both. It denotes a leader of Ghana’s ancestral faith.) It is a tremendous honor; after three years of intensive study, Frank’s cousin will tonight be admitted to the cadre of Fanti holy men, and we will be there with him to watch. Little do we know, we’ll end up doing more than that.

We snake our way through town and hear the drums and bells from a kilometer off. They are as loud and fast as any in creation and our heartbeats accelerate to match their tempo. I come ready to crane my neck over a crowd; instead, Frank ushers us towards a cluster of chairs in the front row. I’m petrified. Taking our seats has the awful slowness of a dream sequence. I’m in math class, stark naked, with no idea  what to write on the board. What are we doing up here? This is clearly a mistake; Frank’s having some fun with us. He asks us if we have our cameras. Eager not to show disrespect, we shake our heads vigorously from side to side.  “Why not?” he asks, pointing out a Ghanaian videographer. “You should make so many pictures.” OK, not only are we being sat down inside a circle of 500 West Africans to watch a sacred rite of passage, but we’re being asked to record it? I’m jarred, but ease my flip camera out sheepishly. One of the women seated near us strides over and I hustle it back into my pocket. I could care less about filming any of this; some things should be left unrecorded. But she doesn’t look at the camera. She grasps my hand, warmly, and smiles. “Akwaaba.” Welcome. I smile back awkwardly, gratefully. “Meda se.” Thank you. There’s so much else I want to say, like “um, sorry for taking up the prime real estate up here. I was just going to pop out to the back, I’m tall, and . . .” “Please, be at ease,” she insists. “Soon, you will dance, yes?”

We will glean later how, for the people of Cape Coast, this place is a meeting of the sacred and the everyday. Frank will tell us that the ceremonies last for nearly a full day, and that few stay for the entire affair. He will tell us that the dancing is not scripted, that all who know how or are invited by those who do are welcome to rise at nearly any time and dance as the spirit moves them to. For the moment, though, we know none of this. We are all frozen with disbelief, stupefied by the notion that we are here at all, let alone being placed in the front row and being called upon to dance; all of us, that is, except one.

By the time the spirit moves Simon towards the circle’s center, the crowd is chattering nearly loudly enough to drown out the master drummer. My shaky video footage fails to capture the swell of five-hundred Ghanaians’ curiosity, fails to render the sound of their clapping, their cries and whoops and then their seismic laughter coming all at once. What it does capture, though, in shaky, frenzied cinematography, is the spirit moving Simon Kurth do the worm.

It’s a very pure thing, the worm, when done well. It’s a thing of beauty, breakdancing at its best. Even with the grit of Cape Coast digging into his forearms and stomach at every turn, Simon pulls off a full seven serpentine snaps before jumping back to his feet to avoid slithering into the drummers. It is given as a gift, and taken as such. All tension is shattered. We stay on through another hour of dancing and, near midnight, follow the initiate’s parade down to the ocean where he casts a burning urn of his former possessions into the waves. As the smoke clears, we make our way back to our lodgings and prepare for tomorrow’s journey to Accra, pinching ourselves all the while, not really sure if any of the evening’s events had in fact occurred.

Accra, Day 4

It’s barely nine o’clock, and I’ve already got a pick-axe in my hand. We’re planting a hedge at a school in the Boi village, north of the capital. Ian, Lucas, Murph and I take turns using the solitary tool to dig holes for the plants that will soon become the schoolyard boundary. It’s slow going until recess, when we are mobbed by would-be laborers. New tools arrive just in time, and we make an easy transition from worker bees to foremen. Our crew soon grows to about three dozen fourth-graders, all wielding machetes and mattocks as comfortably as any sandbox toys. We mark the dig spots, and they do the rest, planting, digging, watering and fussing over who did the best job. The hedge is planted in fifteen minutes. We expand our operation, twice, to encircle nearly half the school, and the boys have to be physically pulled away to their lessons. No one enjoys digging holes as much as ten-year-old boys, especially when there’s a math class to miss.

a foreman at work

Meanwhile, others in our group are busying themselves with painting the outline of Africa on the school’s side wall. (The school had wanted a map of the world, but we only had time for one continent.) They use a grid, each person zeroing in on their square of coastline, and, lo and behold, it comes out actually looking like Africa. The kids will fill in the countries next month.

With the art done, it’s time for music. We gather the kids together and get them ready to sing. Nat has sent a recording of “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life” to one of the teachers, who’s taught it all the kids. We do two versions: one with a group of twenty older kids, who give a relatively tight performance, and one with the entire school of around 150, many of whom are so inspired by the song that they start banging one another in the head. “Hang on,” Nat declares, stopping the second take, “there are no sucker-punches on the sunny side.” We brush the dust off & belt out a third take.

how sunny it is

Our educational requirements fulfilled, we trundle off through the village to Steve and Saiwah’s house. It’s a beautiful little place, a middle-class dwelling in a land that has few, favoring either shipping containers or mansions with razor-wire walls. Saiwah has a garden with pineapple bushes and mango trees. She makes us lunch with chicken, brown-nut (peanut) soup, rice balls, fresh fruit and fufu the local starch I had yesterday which, I find, is far better fresh at home than out on the town. Still, it’s not my cup of tea. I double up on rice balls and dig in.

After lunch, Angela, a young seperewah virtuoso whose father is a renowned player and who teaches Aaron Bebe, among others, plays a few songs with her sister. Their instruments are somewhere just slightly north of B major, so it takes me a moment to tune my banjo, but when I do I am rewarded. Her voice bobs and weaves like a hummingbird, and the open tonal construction of the tune leaves me with some space to stretch out.

 

We hop in another tro-tro to get back to the hostel for a little r&r before the evening’s activities. From there, we hit the university, where Aaron is warming up his xylopohone. He gives us a brief history of the instrument, and talks about its tunings. While, in days past, each village used to use its own, modern players have been tuning to the notes of the piano. To my ears, this is a loss – the field recordings I’ve heard of this instrument have a shimmering, uncommon quality which I think is lost once they all start sounding the same. On the other hand, this modern tuning allows them to be played with other instruments; Aaron uses his in Local Dimension. The keys are suspended above gourds, each with a unique shape and sound. Builders poke holes in the gourds and cover the holes with a paste made from spiderwebs that vibrates with each impact so that, along with the xylophone’s note, one hears a buzz, oddly reminiscent of the sound of a web-caught fly. Aaron plays three traditional pieces, then a medley of his own songs. The first is about his mother telling him to go to bed as a child after being up all night with the instrument, the second, the political situation in west Africa. The third tune is wholly instrumental, and flings its limbs wildly in all directions. Midway through, Aaron starts humming, like Keith Jarrett, working on his soul. We whoop and holler, give thanks, and make our way to another room in the performing arts complex for our Bamaya dance class.

The teacher, Professor Akua Abloso, is warm, intelligent and fierce. Her first lesson is not to be slow in catching on. It is taught in the form of a Bamaya child’s game. She sits everyone in a circle and puts a rock in front of them. She sings a song, and everyone moves their rock towards the person on the right on the downbeats. The tempo increases, the passing increases until, eventually, someone ends up with two rocks in front of them. That person is out.

As it turns out, that’s the way they teach dance. They don’t wait for us to catch up – they just keep dancing the right way until someone catches on. If you don’t catch it, sit out until you do. It’s not a bad way to teach; it gets a lot of information across quickly. It does leave some of us behind, though. Most of the traditional moves they show us are doable for obrunis, but there are a few that we’d need months to get. It’s the hip-shaking that brings me down. A stitch the size of Death Valley opens up in my side and I’m out for a few. I’m not alone. It’s pretty entertaining to see all us foreigners doubled over in pain from thirty seconds of dancing, and word has clearly gotten out around campus. Both doors to the studio accumulate passers-by, and we give ‘em a good show. Still, we pick up enough to do the dance ourselves by the end, and get some pats on the back from the drummers.

get loose

Afterwards, we’re off to the student cafe, a row of spots and chop bars with a few places to buy laundry detergent to make moms happy. More chicken and more rice and more Star beer. Star is the big lager over here, and competes for our attention only with Castle Milk Stout, which is, ironically, much more like the Guinness I know than the Guinness served everywhere here. The Irish giant makes three or four brews in Ghana, one of which is a hideous ‘nutritional malt’ (imagine fermented breakfast cereal) and none of which taste anything at all like the shamrock-topped pints you’ll get in Dublin. We stick to our usual, say our goodbyes and head back to the hostel to rest up. Tomorrow, we head for the coast.

Accra, Day 3

Finally, everyone is here: Em & I, Jessie & Lucas, Bonnie, Kate, Murph, Ian, Simon, Nat, Armando and Jeff. Between the twelve of us, we have enough cameras and instruments to set any pawn shop up for the year. The program begins with an introduction to Steve and Saiwah, a Ghanaian power couple who will be our guides for much of the next week. They begin with a short lesson in Twee (pronounced, roughly, ‘chree’), the principal language spoken in Accra & vicinity. It kicks our butts, but hey, we’ll get here by alright. Nearly everyone here speaks English; learning our P’s and Q’s in Twee is as least as much for their entertainment as it is for ours.

Professor Collins lays it down

Next comes a lecture by John Collins: musician, producer and professor at the University of Ghana. His understanding of West African musical history is exhaustive. So is his direct involvement with it, first as a guitarist and then as the head of a recording studio where he recorded some of the greats in Nigerian and Ghanaian music. He toured in milk vans, played guitar with Fela Kuti and drank with Daddy Lumba, all while managing to be tear-gassed only three times. The photos he has of West African string and swing bands rock my notions of this place’s musical history. He throws up a diagram of the way music moves from West Africa to the Americas and back again, a current circling the lower Atlantic. Bell patterns came to Brazil on slave ships, then back to Ghana where they morphed a second time. American swing caught on like wildfire over here soon after it became big in the States. (Incidentally, the first female Ghanaian musicians to appear on stage did so as a result of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn doing so with big bands in the U.S.) The exchange was constant on all three continents, and its frequency has only increased with time. Highlife, Ghana’s biggest sound in the 70’s, has since given birth to ‘hiplife,’ Ghanaian hip-hop.

from West Virginia to West Africa, and back

Our minds full of history, we jump into the present and finish our afternoon with the trip’s first musical collaboration. Collins’ friend and partner in crime, Aaron Bebe, brings in his highlife band, Local Dimension. The palm wine starts flowing. None of us obruni (foreigners) have ever tried this stuff before. It’s so powerful there’s a musical style named after it. It comes borne by magic, fully fermented, from within the trunks of palm trees. Every batch has a different taste. Some batches are stronger, some weaker; ours falls somewhere in the middle. Reactions are mixed, from “it tastes like bacon” to “round three over here.” We drink and dance to highlife music, led by Aaron’s seperewah, a small West African harp that he plays in a style that reminds me at certain times of a classical guitarist and at others of Jerry Lee Lewis. Holding down the rhythm behind him is his partner, Nii Okai Aryeetey. Both of these guys are going to be with us in the studio next week, and I’m eager to pick a tune with them.

When it comes time to collaborate, we start off ‘Limbs Akimbo’ with Aaron’s band backing Nat and I up. Over the course of the song, the obruni gradually switch out with the locals and do our best to keep the palm wine feeling flowing. Trading banjo/seperewah fours with Aaron is the best part of the day.

all together now

We’re exhilarated afterwards. The palm wine is gone, so we head out to the local ‘spot.’ Places with beer are always called spots here; food comes from ‘chop bars.’ The spot is simple, like an Oakland backyard with some tables and cold beer. We sing late into the night, accompanied by both the house system, playing American hip hop and auto-tuned Ghanaian pop, and a prayer meeting a stone’s throw away. There’s music of every kind in our corner of Accra tonight, and we’re glad to be making a little piece of it.

Accra, Days 1&2

Tuesday is a recovery day. We hang out in the hostel and walk around the surrounding area, a strange melange of dusty, brick-strewn road and shiny new development. A fellow working for the gold industry tells me that, since they hit oil off the coast last March, commercial properties have been going up faster than clay pigeons at a birdshot range. The best example of this lies across the street from our hostel. It’s called the G.S. Plaza, and it’s not only six stories higher than every building nearby, but it’s green, illuminated throughout the night by fluorescent lime flood lights. Oh, and let’s not forget the Eiffel Tower reproduction on the roof, also garishly lit and tall enough to serve as a landmark for kilometers in every direction. It’s five months old, Chinese built (much of the new devo here is) and nothing at all like any of the older buildings in its vicinity. But, then, that’s the idea. The dirt and broken concrete stop abruptly at its gates, as does the value of the local currency. Rooms here start at $200, American. A stone’s throw away, we’re paying around $9.

Nat, Simon, Em and I walk down to the Accra mall to change money and use the internet. We step over piles of trash and open sewage crossing the new freeway (they didn’t bother with a pedestrian walkway) and step into the no-place / every-place world of the American shopping mall, picked up whole by the almighty invisible hand and plopped down in Ghana like an extra-terrestrial being. We hit the ATMs, the food court and the Mac store. The juxtaposition of Ghanaians buying $500 iPads a goalie-kick away from where they can buy $2 cloth belts laid out on a blanket is striking. They’re taking in American rom-coms and donning ironic T-shirts, as is their right to do. It’s their country, their mall. I have no doubt that, had I grown up here and had I gotten my hands on a bit of money, I would’ve done the same. But, for the time being, I can’t get out of here fast enough.

The next day, we venture into the city center. We start at the National Museum. Many of the exhibits are underwhelming: there are a lot of plaster copies and poster-board dioramas. Still, I’m drawn to the wood, old or new, to the masks and the drums and the stories behind them.

We have a quick lunch (about 90 minutes) of fish and fufu, a Ghanaian staple. It’s made of cassava and plantain mashed up into bowl-filling balls that look for all the world like raw pizza dough. It’s a good foil to the fish and pepper sauce, but when that runs out, the bulk of it goes untouched on our plates. We are quickly learning that, whether it’s rice, bread or fufu, there will always be a huge plate of starch with every meal. Add to this the double-size beers, and you’ve got the makings of a pretty good equatorial pooch. With our body’s fluid reserves emptying from or pores every half hour, though, things will probably even out.

We walk the two kilometers to the Cultural Center, taking in a few sights along the way. There are monuments and memorials and stadiums and such, but none of this compares in fascination to the life swirling everywhere around us on the streets. Its stentorian street preachers and half-awake biscuit-sellers and punch-drunk cab drivers have no interest in us. Like any big city, this one is full of people with somewhere else to be, even if that’s just the other side of the street.

Our inconspicuousness vanishes once we enter the Cultural Center, a huge outdoor market for everything an obruni might want to pack home in their roller bag. Immediately, we are beset by new friends, all who know us personally. It’s the usual hustle, but magnified to extreme proportions by the lack of potential clients; amidst a small city block of densely packed stores, we seem to be the only ones not selling anything. Within three minutes, things have reached a boiling point, with people pulling our arms in opposing directions towards their respective drum shops. Something must be done. Simon breaks the chaos but pushing it over the edge. “This guy’s gotta go,” he yells over the din, “he needs some tapestries, immediately.” The shove into the nearest fabric stall is gentle, but catches me unaware. I stumble in, apologize, slowly extricate myself, and return the favor. “We need a shirt for this guy!” “I run for cover and see Simon pointing me out – “I’ll take all three, but he’s got my money.” Things escalate until everyone nearby is either laughing or scowling. To our credit, we do buy a few things – a dress for Em, some postcards and even one of the tapestries (the power of suggestion at work) – before we’re forced to flee the scene. We count our spoils, lick our wounds and head home to rest up for tomorrow’s first day of group sessions.

Amsterdam > Accra

The sun is out when we wake, lighting our sleepless hands as they assemble our bags.
It catches us off guard. Amsterdam, having been bathed in a close layer of fog for the
past four days, is cast now in a resplendent but unfamiliar light. As beautiful as it is, Em
& I agree weʼd liked the city better in the fog, with itʼs ancient buildings looming and its
spirits roaming willy-nilly among the canals. But, then, thatʼs just how we go to know it.
Itʼs sort of like getting to know someone with a beard, and then meeting them for coffee
and seeing a clean-shaven chin peeking over their mug. The new way doesnʼt look bad,
just wrong.

We return our bikes, a little glumly, and ride the streetcar to the train to the plane to,
well, to Africa. Em & I notice that our boarding passes indicate a 12:55 boarding call for
a 2 oʼclock flight. Iʼve never before seen this long an interval. ʻAre they fueling the plane
with us on it?ʼ I ask the woman checking our bags. ʻNo,ʼ she says, then, lowering her
voice conspiratorially, ʻitʼs just that, well, weʼve found that with our African flights, we
need to give ourselves a little more leeway.ʼ If you want people there at 1:30, in other
words, and you know they have a different sense of time than you do, donʼt expect that
to change as they go through security. Tell them 12:55 (the ʼ12ʼ is key). Simple. Nonconfrontational. Brilliant. The Dutch are brilliant. First Rembrandt, then the coffeeshops, now this. They call calmly for peopleʼs boarding passes by group number, even after the entire waiting area stands as one when the boarding doors opens and stampedes down the gateway, but they donʼt yell. They donʼt bat an eye when businessmen show up
seconds before the doors close. Why? Theyʼve planned for it all.

I like getting off of planes and right onto the tarmac. It feels real. Let me touch the ground
here, smell the air and feel it thick and heavy on my skin before I shuffle back into the air
conditioning. I want to sweat a little, and the sooner the better.
“Time is not money here” is the first sentence I heard as I enter the terminal, uttered by
an Israeli businessman whom I find works in the maritime industry. Heʼs a cordial fellow,
but impatient, used to shipping schedules and bullet points. Heʼs losing money, after all.
ʻLook, do you see? She has left her position to go and talk to that other agent. She has
left her position.ʼ I shrug my shoulders empathetically and do what I can to assuage his
nerves with a Hot Buttered Rum sampler CD. I think of the Dutch approach

to Ghanaian
time: budget for it, sigh and regret it if you must, but never resist it. Your flight didnʼt land
at 8 PM. It landed at 9. Just pretend we didnʼt gain that hour on the way down from
Amsterdam. I pictured our friend soothing his nerves with a cocktail in his room and
ʻLoose Cannonsʼ blaring from his laptop.

Nat has two bottles of water and a cheshire grin awaiting us when we arrive at theGhanaian Registered Nursesʼ Hostel. We check into our clean, simple room and catch up with him & Simon on their last few days in the country, spent running around with a local cell phone blazing (everyone here has at least one) and making as sure as anyone can conceivably be that the group will have a smooth itinerary. Nat shows me his day-by-day & I start catching the buzz. Xylophone workshops, bluegrass / highlife sessions, history lectures, national park visits, swimming . . . when was the last time I swam in the ocean? I canʼt remember.

Dinner is chicken and rice. It’s a dish we’ll see a lot of over the next eleven days . . .

Amsterdam, Day 6

We awake this morning completely unaware of the suffering and the beauty that awaits us. Luke, our friend from the south of Holland, arrives in the morning and we pedal out to Volendam, on the Eastern Coast. We pass, as promised, bucolic landscapes dotted with sheep, windmills and pubs. (They call ‘em cafes here, but we know their game . . .) Volendam ever is the lovely Dutch town, more Platonic ideal than brick-and-herring reality. We lunch on fish sandwiches and Heineken. It’s been a magnificent day for a 20K trek – cool, with the wind at our back all the way out. We’re so glad we did it, so proud of ourselves, and so happy that we’re, err, 20K from Amsterdam. As it’s getting dark. This prospect fails to dim our spirits as our Luke brings a fourth round of hefeweizens to the table. We chuckle as the cafe sign is blown over outside.

A half and hour later I am screaming at the top of my lungs. I am pleading with my legs. I am apologizing to them, reasoning with them, begging them, and, finally, yelling at them. I am doing so straight into the wind, which is now blowing hard enough to make
riding almost impossible. I am calling on my Celtic ancestors to turn these wheels. No good. A short burst forward, all William Wallace, then a wobbly front tire and a quivering lip. Dear Lord. We rest at a bus stop at the edge of Volendam and Luke decides to try a last-ditch effort. There are no van cabs available that can carry the bikes, and we can’t leave them here with our flight out tomorrow. It’s illegal to put a bike on the bus, but the buses are empty and it’s a blustery night, and, hey, Luke is Dutch, so maybe he can work something out. No dice. Driver says he’ll lose his job, that he’s already got two strikes against him for being a recent immigrant. This stinks for everybody.

Back on the bikes and ride into the wind. Every kilometer is a new level of pain. We find, eventually, that by punctuating bouts of ridiculous physical activity with espresso and Belgian ale, we can inch back towards the city. After the second cafe stop, my ancestors take pity and the wind abates with 8K to go. We make it back to Amsterdam only ten minutes late for dinner.

Hunger being the best sauce, we could eat shoe leather and been happy. As it happens, though, we are treated to one of the best meals of our lives. The place, Balthazaar’s, is a ten-table, two-dish spot recommended by Luke’s sister. It delivers on every possible level. There is some warm goat cheese with honey among the five
appetizers, some pork medallions surrounded by tender little beans and sausages for the centerpiece and a caramelized pear in custard to finish off. Damn, Holland. You got me again.

After a little more riding (much to the chagrin of my bum) we get to a sort of an arts center-bar hybrid in an old building on the north edge of town for some dancing. The band is Meters-era funk, with three horns and a full rhythm section. We jostle around a bit, but Em and I are exhausted and, besides, we’re bringing down Luke’s game. We peel out at set break and make it to our hotel one last time without getting too terribly lost. Tonight will be packing and preparing, emotionally and physically, for Africa.