This past weekend, the members of the Pentagon hostel and homestay kids went on a CIEE fieldtrip to the Volta Region of Ghana. After a night of being out until an hour before the bus left (a story I shall tell another time), I fell asleep instantly: head bob, drool and all next to Aly.

Four hours later, I wake up to green. Seeing green after being in Accra for so long is always so refreshing. I seem to never think I will see green again. Especially when I go from brown, smoggy Accra to a rainforest I feel like my breath and brain are not stifled by smoke and gas.

Anyways, we get out of the bus and straight to a walk in the rainforest with a guide who showed us pineapples growing, rivers flowing and saved us from fighting snakes. After about 45 minutes, we walk into a clearing, and past that clearing is the tallest waterfall I have ever seen. Photos (which I will put up when I have patience to put them up) could not do the grandiosity of this waterfall justice. The way the light caught the top made it look truly magical. We swam underneath it and the water was freezing, and hurt my head as the water fell on it from hundreds of feet above me. We imagined later that a rock falling down that waterfall would kill us instantly. But that thought might take away from the enchanting experience.

After the rainy walk back through the rainforest, over nine wooden bridges, back on the bus to a monkey sanctuary. Now I thought this monkey sanctuary would be more like a zoo with only primates, but it was nothing of the sort. From what I understood about the story, this sanctuary was started to raise money for the village, and to save the monkeys in it. We walked through the forest for not 10 minutes and we saw a pack of medium sized monkeys swinging on trees and everything. We all fed them bananas. So stereotypical but I obviously enjoyed it, especially after taking an entire class on human evolution last semester and learning everything about primates.

Then back to the hotel for a relaxing rest of the weekend. We had Sunday morning free, so Aly and I laid in the hotel beds with real mattresses and pillows and watched Spanish soap operas dubbed in English all morning. Beautiful

The Cape Town Waterfront is a magical place. The sparkly lights, the boats, the ocean and money clearly everywhere make going to the waterfront a wonderful experience. It is peculiar though, how places like the Waterfront exist in Cape Town as compared to the drive from the Cape Town Airport, passing by hundreds of makeshift homes, trash and homeless people everywhere. It is times like these that I feel the pangs of white guilt hit me.

The difficult part about South Africa as opposed to other countries in Africa is because it is much more developed and has a much more stable economy, ignoring the poverty in this country is not a large feat.

Cape Town can be seen as the new hot European city: tons of privileged students run up and down the clubs on Long St, spending tons of Cash on cocktails and clubs, dining in swanky restaurants on the Waterfront, spending time looking at the beautiful view from the Mountain on which University of Cape Town is perched. It is easy to keep walking when you see street kids begging for money, tons of homeless hidden under blankets on the streets. You have to drive farther outside the city to see the townships that take over a gigantic amount of land, because the black people were driven far away from the city during the apartheid. The Europeans have made it easy to ignore the poverty and ridiculous distribution of wealth that exists in this country.