Tag: Travel

Better Belize It!

by Cindy Fri 04 Dec 2015 Comments2

I’ve now come to the conclusion that every new place I visit must always be prime punbait:

Ghana: #neverghanagiveyouup
Ecuador: #ecuadorable
Belize: #betterbelizeit

I mean, I had to keep up the trend, right? For this Thanksgiving, I didn’t want to be stuck in the USA. Like, what kind of pun can you make out of that?

I kid, I kid. My main motivation was not getting cabin fever due to being stuck in the ghost town that was San-Francisco-during-the-holidays, and I’m not me unless I impulsively embark on some trip to some place I’ve never been before. Enter Belize.

If you’re looking for something short and sweet, Belize does the trick. (And if you’re not, I’m sure Belize’s laid-back atmosphere might be up your alley anyway.) Case in point: I spent the first three days in the jungle and the last leg of the trip on an island, where I was swimming with sharks. Part of me is so horrifically cheesy and wants to say, “UNBELIZEABLE!!!”, except — yeah, no. However, Belize was a delightful Thanksgiving trip, especially considering that:

The cost of going to Belize was just as much as most domestic (US) flights during the plane ticket clusterfuck that is Thanksgiving.
Instead of eating turkey (which I frankly find abhorrently dry as a standalone meat¹), I found turkeys running around like free elves on the side of the street².
Did I mention: I swam with sharks?

Infrequently asked questions:

WAIT BUT WHERE HAVE ALL THE CAVING PHOTOS GONE, U LIAR. Uhhhh, I was preoccupied with grabbing a cave ledge, not hitting my head, and swimming chest-deep in cool cave water? Plus it was dark, which I’m fairly sure doesn’t translate into a good photo.

WHERE ARE THE SHARKS THAT YOU SWAM WITH. No GoPro. #notsorry

OKAY SO WHAT DID U EVEN DO See below.

Cool shit I did in Belize:

Caving: Listen, caving’s great. I hate wet socks and wet shoes like the next human being, but caving in Actun Tunichil Muknal (aptly abbreviated as ATM) might be the one exception where I can tolerate soaked shoes. It’s worth it. You spend the first 45 minutes hiking to the cave entrance, where you traverse a couple creeks (yes, you’ll get wet) before leaving all of your belongings and entering the cave. There’s a wee bit of swimming involved, a whole lotta darkness, and really, really sick skeletons, ceramics, and stoneware. If you want to go full-on Indy Jones and explore some Mayan sacrificial chambers, this is it.

Mayan ruins: The area has a lot of great Mayan sites. There’s Caracol, the largest one in Belize (and the one I hit up during my trip), Tikal — if you want to venture over to Guatemala, and Xunantunich (Hanna Stables — the place where I stayed — offers horseback rides into the ruins), for starters. Caracol was a sprawling site of ruins; I’m sure the area gets enough tourists, but there’s a distinct difference between the amount of traffic Caracol gets versus that of Chichen Itza. You can even climb on the ruins in Caracol! The views are spectacular: not just the downward view (which is daunting in its own right) of the complex, but also the howler monkeys, which chill out at the very treetops.

Wildlife: Superstars include the toucan, the jaguar, the howler monkey, the Baird’s tapir, and the scarlet macaw — all of which you can find at the Belize Zoo.

Not even kidding — editing all the toucan pics suddenly gave me intense cravings for Froot Loops, which I swear I haven’t experienced since I was in middle school, what?

Swimming: I swam with nurse sharks and stingrays and sea turtles in Hol Chan and Shark Ray Alley (yes, the name is accurately descriptive). The snorkeling/diving opportunities here are fantastic; just don’t be like me and not bring an underwater camera. (However, you can be like me and go with Island Divers, which was a solidly-run diving establishiment on Ambergris Caye.)

A couple tips:

Belize is one of those places where microplanning isn’t entirely necessary. Once you’ve locked down your flights and figured out some vague general area you want to stay at (I divided my time between Ambergris Caye and the west in Cayo), it’s super easy to book all the stuff in-between, such as any flights or car rides within the country.

I did one activity per day, and that was a good enough pace. Could I have done more? Probs. I still want to check out Tikal and Caye Caulker one of these days. But when you’re going for a breadth of activities, you don’t want to bloat yourself by jam-packing your schedule. That’s not really the thing you’d want to stress over.

One of the things I realized that I was thankful for this Thanksgiving was the abundance of paved roads at home, and I do not take this lightly, now knowing how bumpy Belizean roads are. In addition to the constant bump-and-grind that is driving in Belize, get prepared for enough speed bumps to turn any car ride into a lowkey two-hour rollercoaster.

When in San Pedro (Ambergris Caye), rent a golf cart. It’s not just a vehicle for rich old white men from the suburbs to drive around — it’s actually the main form of transportation. You just need a driver’s license, it’s fairly easy to operate one, and the town is small enough that you’ll familiarize with San Pedro’s streets in little time.

…but when it comes to San Pedro geography, GOOGLE MAPS SITS ON A THRONE OF LIES. I should probably feel awful for throwing capslocked shade at a product that I normally love, but man, when you’re trudging around in the rain with nothing but a flimsy golf cart cover to shield you, because Google Maps told you that a restaurant was five blocks away from its actual location, something’s gotta give.

Head to the Belize Zoo either after your arrival or before your departure from Belize. Driving-wise, it’s fairly close to the Belize City International Airport, and it’s the one place where you can witness all the great wildlife Belize has to offer.

Pile on that bug repellent like it’s going out of style. Mosquitoes and sandflies here are abundant and evil. Actually, who am I even kidding. All mosquitoes and sandflies are evil incarnate.

Of course, no travel post of mine is complete without at least one food photo, so have some shots of my lunch at Elvi’s Kitchen in San Pedro:

Plantain chips!

Two words: fish tacos. The cilantro really makes it.

¹ I’m still scarred by a past Thanksgiving, where my relatives prepped a big honkin’ turkey (as per tradition) prior to the actual feast, as any responsible household would. My grandmother was unfortunately not as, ah — well-versed in American Thanksgiving traditions, found a fully-cooked turkey sitting pretty in the oven, and thought, Wow, wouldn’t this make really good meat for the Chinese steamed buns tonight!. Next thing you know, the turkey that had been prepared for the stuffing became stuffing, as my grandmother mercilessly cut up the entire bird and baked it all in a series of steamed buns.

The steamed buns, by the way, were characteristically disappointing, not just because they were cooked with the shame of The Thanksgiving Dinner That Could Have Been™, but because baking an already-cooked turkey (which is dry enough) into a bun gives it the juiciness and tastiness of used sandpaper.

² Turkeys and I have a very contentious relationship, not just because of footnote 1, but also because my kayaking group might have accidentally run over a turkey during a 2009 kayaking trip in Massachusetts. That poor thing left a pretty hefty dent in the van and a couple souvenirs in the form of feathers and smeared blood.

Filed under Belize 2015 Travel

Togo to-go!

by Cindy Fri 14 Nov 2014 Comments2

During our stay in Ghana, we had three weekends to take whatever trips we wanted. The first weekend was spent exploring Ada Foah and our (temporary) home turf of Accra, and the second was at Cape Coast. The third weekend — well, the subject of Togo cropped up quite a bit. Togo, a sliver of a country nestled between Ghana and Benin (the birthplace of voodoo), was within reasonable driving distance from Ghana, and a good number of us had multi-entry Ghanaian visas, so why not?

Saturday was spent at Ho, the major city of Ghana’s Volta region. Drained and pretty darn sleep-deprived that day as we had to leave Accra at 6am and Halloween had been the night before, I didn’t quite have the energy to climb nearby Mt. Adaklu, especially not under the blistering sun at noon, or much else, so I chilled out at the hotel and managed to live on the edge by falling asleep at an impressive time of 8pm that day.

The base of Mt. Adaklu — gotta love the generic sign

The hiking centre of Mt. Adaklu

A view of Ho from the hotel; the peak in the distance is Adaklu!

Which was probably a good thing, because we left for Togo bright and early the next day. This was my first land border crossing, excluding European train rides because Schengen eliminates all that hassle, since the time I crossed the Seattle-Vancouver border when I was like, 9. But lucky for you, I’ve compiled a quick and easy guide of my own experience crossing the Togo border so that if you ever have the desire to go from Accra to Lomé, this might make things a bit easier. 🙂

Les douanes togolaises: for the non-Francophones, that’s the Togolese customs

Ghana Go to Togo: The 9-Step Program

1. Get passport photos, because the visa application says they’re required.
If you’re that type of prepared traveler who carries these by the dozen, skip this step (and probably this entire guide, because you likely won’t need it anyway). Otherwise, HAHAHAHAHA good luck finding a photo studio that’s open on a weekend morning, let alone a morning on Sunday in a heavily religious part of a predominantly Christian country where you have no business not being in church at that time. In the meantime, drive around to find a functional ATM to withdraw cash to buy your passport photos. An hour later, go to the one photo studio in Ho that offers instant passport photos (thanks Sinbad!).

2. Drive to the Ghana-Togo border.
You’ll have the van door opened by a border guard with a fever gun ready to examine your temperature. As you wonder how effective those things really are, you’re suddenly whisked outside the van, where you’re supposed to present your yellow fever immunization card. Breathe a sigh of relief that you were smart (and lucky) enough to bring it with you to the trip. Fill out embarkation forms.

3. Drive between no-man’s land.
Don’t take pictures, even if they’ll make a good Facebook profile photo for later. Border guards hate that shit.

4. Arrive at the Togo border.
Realize that nobody here, not even the border guards who live only a few meters away from an English-speaking country and are pretty much responsible for communicating with people who are 97% likely to speak English, speaks a lick of English. Use the last remnants of your French skills, which have rapidly deteriorated since you left high school. Attempt to communicate with the border guard’s Togolese French using your basic-ass French and get deets on how to get a visa. Fill out visa forms.

5. Pay for the visa.
Fair enough, right? The details of how much you need to pay for a visa seem particularly hazy when a border guard is telling you this in Not-English, but you manage to communicate to the rest of your group that Americans need to pay slightly more CFAs (the Togolese currency) than the non-Americans. Sounds like every other passport control pricing, but then you run into the snag: nobody here has CFAs.

6. Exchange your cedis for CFAs.
Arithmetic is difficult. Arithmetic in French is fucking difficult. Arithmetic in French and then back in English and then back in French is a nonstop round trip to hell and back again. You have 7 people, 3 of them non-American, who need visas, and all 7 of these people apparently need to exchange their cedis for CFAs, because the Togo border refuses to take anything else. Convince the border guard to exchange everybody’s cedis (6 cedis = 1,000 CFAs, because this new currency is unthinkably hyperinflated), but realize exactly how difficult arithmetic is in a foreign language. Get all 7 people to chip in their cedis. Receive CFAs, only to give them back to the border guard almost immediately to pay for your visas. Realize that last step was incredibly superfluous and made approximately zero sense (because why couldn’t the border guard just take your cedis and be done with it???), but roll with it anyway because of all the things that have a place on the Ghana-Togo border, logic is not one of them.

7. Wait in your van.
Get ordered by the border guard (in French) to wait in the van, which is aptly parked near the middle of the road. Stare at the border guard through your van window as he completes a stack of 7 passports. Continue staring for 45 minutes.

8. Receive visas.
Scratch head and wonder why it took so long. Think about what it would be like if you had to wait 45 minutes at the US border and shudder instinctively. Open your passport. Find a wet speck on top of your Togo stamps that you suspect might be somebody’s saliva, and that somebody is not you. Count the number of components that make up a Togolese passport stamp (eight). Stare at the handwritten part (congratulations, you are the 599th person to cross this Togo border! DING DING DING.), at the two old-school stamps that require you to manually lick them (and also realize where that saliva came from), at the fact that this whole thing took up an entire page of your passport. Realize why it took so long, even thought you’re Very Confused about the absurdity of it all. Realize that you never used your passport photos from Step #1.

9. Félicitations, bienvenue à Togo.

Check out our 70,200 CFA lunch bill — oof.

If there was one thing that really made the Togo trip what it was, it was this. Togo itself is a low-key country, made even more low-key by the fact that it was Sunday and nothing was open. Everything, from the writing on the storefronts and billboards to the street signs to the overheard conversations, is French. Lomé (the capital) lacks the hustle and bustle that I had gotten used to in Accra, and the only foreigners we had even seen were the ones we saw at Alt München, the German restaurant where we had gotten lunch. Palm trees are a dime a dozen here, and the entire coast is all beach, with nobody actually swimming and everybody chilling out drinking Club beers on plastic chairs at the roadside beach bars. We could have browsed the Fetish Market (the voodoo market that Lomé is particularly known for) or stuck around for the last day of Togo’s Bierfest, but sometimes you just really need a break from “obligatory” sightseeing and there’s no better antidote for that than a hilariously absurd border control story.

P.S. That said, going back to Ghana from Togo was so much easier.
P.P.S. I still haven’t used those passport photos.

Filed under Ghana 2014 Travel

Never Ghana Give You Up: Accra

by Cindy Mon 10 Nov 2014 Comments4

I don’t have any excuses for the amount of dust and radio silence that this old blog has collected, and I always dread the inevitable moment, where I hang my head in shame because I had only one job. Record-keeping for record-keeping’s sake doesn’t come as naturally to me anymore, and I’ve developed the blogging habits of a drowning man who comes back up for a gasp of air, only to drop back down, never to resurface again.

But anyway, here’s to trying. (And I need to pour one out for Amanda, who has been providing me with all the mojo I need to stop being lazy and actually write a blog post — hi, you rock!) Status update: I’m currently in Accra, Ghana, actually, as I have been for the past three weeks, even though my sense of time has been slow-cooked enough for me to believe that I’ve been here for the past six months. More specifically, I’m wrapping up a community service program at work where 15 other Googlers and I work on various consulting projects with local NGOs in Accra.

First off, I’m lucky — really lucky — to be able to take time off of my day-to-day work sched and do cool work with cool people in a country whose many quirks and facets have gained real estate in my heart. Mondays through Thursdays are for Soronko Solutions, where two lovely Googlers and I are helping to create a STEM mentorship program for high school girls in Ghana. Fridays are for teaching about tech to the kids in the local high school, followed by creating videos at the local arts centre. From 8am to 5pm, we’re knee-deep in hands-on work. Most days are exhausting. I have developed predatory instincts for caffeine. I never quite get my expected 8 hours of sleep. I deal with things like not having any power (which means running on 5% battery with my laptop and sometimes 5% of my own energy reserves) or not having a functional sink or toilet that are usually considered unthinkable back in Silicon Valley but are merely minor inconveniences over here. But the overall experience in Ghana has been the good sort of exhausting, in the sense that I’ve eaten a full delicious meal right after running on empty, and now I’m in the food-coma stage where I’m still digesting everything that I’ve experienced and I know I’m going to have so many good things to say after the fact, but if I could just lay down and roll around on a bed for a minute (because right now, at this present moment, I’m still bloated), that’d be amazing.

I’ll talk about Accra first. It’s very much a city, but a city with social circles that overlap and run tangentially, where run-ins with people I’ve met from the week before are not coincidental but the new normal. On my flight from Accra to Dubai, for example, I ran into the owner of the gelato/pizzeria place where I had been going for my Friday morning latte fix. (Also, if you couldn’t tell, I have since relapsed from my three-year coffee fast. More on that later!) Accra runs on a system different than that of any other city I’ve lived in, but it works. Power might be randomly shut down at any given second, but people find other things to do than wait around for Internet. People run on a wider wavelength of time here, but you learn to adapt and slow your roll. Almost everything is up for debate. I have to negotiate upfront for everything from taxi rides to a pair of printed trousers at the market, and as somebody who’s stonewalled into stubbornness (“Ten cedis? Are you fucking kidding me.” And let’s not forget that ~3 cedis = $1 USD.) and much too prideful to budge when it comes to paying 6 cedis versus 7, I can probably count negotiation as an “area for development”. Despite these idiosyncrasies (or maybe because of), life still goes on — but at varying speeds, because everything here is up in the air.

Some other things I’ve jotted down during my time here:

When I left New York, I never thought I would miss coffee. After coffee and I had our “I WISH I COULD QUIT U” moment back in New York, I gave it up cold turkey, didn’t look back for nearly three years, when slowly but surely we started easing back into a healthier and less frequent relationship. Long-distance, if you will. But absence does make the heart grow fonder, and when you’re working all day and going to group events all night, you become more dependent on caffeine, to the point where you don’t start your mornings until you go to the local Putt-Putt golf course to drink non-instant coffee at the lounge because Accra doesn’t do cafes. And yeah, you heard me: I go to Putt-Putt golf course lounges just so I can drink coffee. What’s it to you?
Similarly, I was never a fan of Sweet ‘N Low (I’m a Splenda girl), but the dearth of artificial sugar (a staple of my breakfast tea/coffee) means shamelessly hoarding packets of those pink packets in my purse so I’ll have my emergency fix when I need it. Yes, Ghana has forced me to admit that I am hopelessly addicted to aspartame. Also, shame is overrated.
I have better luck finding a unicorn than diet soda, which maybe explains why I froth at the mouth whenever I see a Coke Zero nowadays. Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I had soda with sugar.
My laughable experiences with Ghanaian toilets have not given me better insight into the mechanics of a toilet. Dumping water into a toilet can fool you into thinking that it’s clean, but don’t try this lifehack at home, kids.
Ghanaians seem to have either a soft spot for Chelsea or Man City, which runs anathema to my own football tastes. This doesn’t stop me from going to Man-City-centric sports bars, because sometimes all you really need is a large bowl of honey chicken wings and a football game (any football team, really!) on a TV to make your Wednesday night.
Chicken and rice play a starring role in my Ghanaian diet, and plantains have a supporting role. Vegetables, on the other hand, are strangely absent.
Ghanaian radio plays the same sort of music you’d expect in an elevator at JCPenney’s in Midwest suburbia. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard Celine Dion’s “All By Myself” played in an unironic context before (Bridget Jones doesn’t count.). I might even have heard more country music on Ghanaian radio than American radio, come to think of it.
“Seihor” by Castro, on the other hand, will never not get stuck in my head.

Above all, though, Ghana will occupy a piece of real estate in my heart. Everything has been jam-packed and compressed in the past three weeks, that one blog post isn’t ever going to scrape the surface. I could talk about the people that I’ve been fortunate enough to work with (both Ghanaian and Googler alike) who are constantly doing amazing things, the high school girls in Accra that we’ve been mentoring who have enthusiasm and drive in spades, the constant friendliness of the people here, the joy of finding a restaurant here that you really love and know you will eventually revisit even though three weeks is about to draw to a close, the greatness of kelewele — I could talk about all of these things, but in a way, it still feels too soon and I have to remind myself that I didn’t actually make up any part of my experience here, certainly not the absurdities or the memories or the highlights that made Ghana Ghana.

Filed under Ghana 2014 Travel