A Million Minutes in Africa

The second leg of our Tour de Ghana took us from Lake Bosumtwi to Baobeng-Fiemi Monkey Sanctuary.

Along the way we passed between the two halves of a giant tree.

We’ve seen a lot of big trees cut down or bulldozed down, sometimes due to the widening of roads and sometimes for purposes unknown to us. What a shame. [Read about our own neighborhood’s loss of several near-hundred-year-old trees on our friends’ blog.]

The villages of Baobeng and Fiema are part of the sanctuary. The monkeys are sacred to the people here.

The sanctuary is home to 2 species of monkey: mona monkeys and black-and-white colobus monkeys. The monas spend a lot of time on the ground and come quite near people. We saw a lot of mothers and babies. The babies hold onto the mothers’ tummies as the mothers bound from ground to branch to other branch.

Looking for colobus monkeys, who tend to stay high up in the trees, we explored the sanctuary’s trails. We saw many, but too high up to get good photos.

Saw some beautiful trees, including mahogany, kapok, dahome, and ficus. This huge ficus once encompassed another tree, upon which the ficus was a parasite.  Now the other tree has died, and the ficus trunk has a space in the middle big enough for a person to stand in.

We drove through here in March, but for those of you who have a thing against scrolling back through the blog, we have posted this out of order.  However, please scroll back through the blog to see newly added pictures.  I am looking at them and can’t believe how cool the stuff was that we saw.  Weird.   Few can deny Augusto Pinochet of Chile was a ruthless, bloody dictator; a megalomaniacal tyrant guilty of torturing and ‘disappearing’ dissenters. Somehow, while he was busy violating the human rights of Chileans, he found the energy for his government to build the Carretera Austral, a gravel road that connects the remote communities of the Chilean Patagonia.   Here’s a really tall alerce tree, once a bountiful species along the Carretera Austral, but now not so common, especially since alerce socks became all the rage in Chile. (Disclaimer: For any Chileans who may become upset by that lame attempt at humor, please, it is only a joke.)

Thanks to the Carretera, previously isolated settlements now had an overland connection to outside world.  Also part of the plan was to provide access to the forests, which could assist in the economic development of the country with increased logging activity. Fortunately, there are still a few trees left and even a national park or two.

Parque Nacional Quelat has a ‘hanging glacier’ that drops avalanches of snow and ice off the side of the mountain. Crash!

Giselle is sitting with Uwe of Germany whom we met in Parque Nacional Quelat.  He has lived permanently on the road since 1991 all around the world. This would be the vehicle for doing that!  It is (for me) a jaw-dropping combination of a 4X4 on serious steroids with a vignette from the Ikea catalog inside the cargo area of the truck.  My head was spinning with plans. Our little road trip suddenly seemed like a drive to the grocery store.

Here Giselle interacts with the local flora. Giant rhubarb for giant rhubarb pies.

A couple of trees were overlooked by loggers.

Evita and Juan Peron still have their followers.  Let's see, you can get the lawn jockey, or the Perons.

Below is a milonga, a place where the locals come to ... [Continue reading this entry]