Ghana is impressive

Ghana was impressive! Within a few hours we'll fly home again and now we are waiting for diner and our flight, with a cool beer at the swimming pool of the hotel (how bad...). Today we visited the capital Accra, with massive government buildings and statues and people living in terribly poor conditions beside them, which really shocked me again after my experiences in Indonesia and South America. At about 30 degrees C and moist weather, it really feels tropic and sweaty. Fortunately Accra is sited at the Atlantic Ocean so we had a bit of sea winds blowing, and more fortunately the hotel's pool was great to cool down after our city trip. Below you'll find some pics, made by Jan-Frans because I could not empty my camera yet.

Degraded tropical forest: all the way from Accra up north we only saw these pictures instead of dense forests with ancient trees! Here you see illegaly planted pepper plants.

Overloaded transport on bad roads cause many accidents and break downs...

Visiting world heritage near Kumasi
Accra beach - the white building is Osu castle, from which once slaves were transported all over the world. Nowadays the Ghana parliament is settled there.
The harbour with wooden fishing boats. In the harbour we saw shocking poor slums
Jeroen passing an ancient British fort and fish drying on the pavement

Greetz from Ghana!

It's been many months since I wrote my last blog. Lots of things have happened since, but the most important thing is that I'm very much in love with Loes! This feels great. We went on holiday to the Loire region in France and to Luzern and the Swiss Alps last summer. Just before, I had some trouble with my leg so we took it easy with hiking in the mountains. But it was great and we visited Naín and all Freiburg forestry master friends in Luzern and Torsten, Ulli and Libby in Freiburg. We also did some motorbike trips and visited the Dutch beach a few times, which was great and relaxing!


Furtheron, I'm busy as usual with work, scout's chairmanship and cook on a summer camp, big band, motorbiking (some nice trips with the scouts, my dad and Loes to Belgium and Germany this summer) and forestry society. And for my job, my colleague Jan-Frans and I hopped on to an airplane at 6.15 this morning in order to fly to Ghana! So I got up at 2.50 am this morning and now I'm blogging from my hotel room in Accra at 23.45 (which is 21.45 Central African Time), so it's been quite a day! But we drove to Amsterdam, flew to Frankfurt and then to Accra. We could walk to the Airport View Hotel, but many taxidrivers tried to talk us into their cabs. This evening, we had a nice lokal Ghana meal with two forestry experts, which was very interesting. We could end the evening in the hotel bar watching soccer with some hotel employees and now I'm blogging... And I'm very excited for actually being in AFRICA, where we will be for the rest of this week!

A nice beer at the hotel pool after a long journey View from my hotel room


I don't think I will continue blogging that frequent as I used to do a few years ago, because of my busy days at the moment, but I might write someting special if something nice occurs, like this great trip. But don't hesitate to mail or skype, cause I really like to stay in contact with all my good friends in Europe, the America's, Indonesia and Africa.


So for now greetz from Ghana, time to catch some sleep...