Boabeng Fiema Monkey Sanctuary

After the beach we made our way to the monkey sanctuary where I came for field school a few years ago. This involved a 5 am bus ride to Kumasi, which meant a 345am departure from KoSa. Yuck...


We got to Kumasi so early that we decided to keep on going all the way to Boabeng after a quick coffee. The Bradt guide has recommended this coffee place that was in the same building as the hotel I had booked for us, and was very close to the bus station. We decided to re-fuel there, and were thoroughly disappointed with the "coffee shop" that we found. The place had a very odd and gross smell, and served the predictable nescafe,rice and noodles, not the promised pastry, sandwiches and brewed coffee. Pam went to the washroom and found mass amounts of rat poison and moth balls-we quickly went to a different place for breakfast-the overly expensive and very nice Golden Tulip Hotel!

The luxury of the hotel stood in major contrast to the tro tro station where we waited for almost 2 hours for the tro tro to fill. There we saw: what Pam called the "Goth Ghanaian," plenty of live and dead animals of all sorts, men stuffing unthinkable quantities of goods into cars, a taxi full of loaves of bread (unwrapped), questionable food, a lady breastfeeding while walking, and much more. Needless to say, the 2 hour wait was not boring at all!












When the tro tro finally left, it predictably broke down, although it was a fairly quick tire change that did the trick. the 2 hour trip to Nkoranza became nearly 3 and a half, but it was quite an interesting trip! Along the way we passed a bus in the ditch, and drove right by the crane picking it up. In Canada, the road would have surely been closed!




We finally got to Boabeng and were happily greeted by Alfred and Bee, the couple that run the guesthouse. We spent the next full day there, enjoying the monkeys and walking in the towns. Ama got a little too much attention from the Boabeng kids-they were very interested and a bit too aggressive for my liking! Robert, who was my groups research assistant for the field school, showed us around and arranged for our taxi hire to Mole for the next day. In the evening we went to Fiema, another village, where we were happily greeted by Constance, another research assistant.

We walked around Fiema in search of a beer, but there had been a funeral in town so we were out of luck. Along the way our entourage grew, and we saw many interesting things, including a captive Patas monkey in someones house. Hmmmm....Unfortunately I was too stunned to take a picture. Constance was nice enough to escort us back to the guesthouse, and even packed Ama most of the way! We were glad, since it was VERY dark.