I HAD THE MOST FUN HERE! || KOFORIDUA|| GHANA || July 2018 || Part 1

Last time I said I’d tell y’all the story of the last of my Ghana jollof consumption. Today is that day. This is also the story of the Ghanaian mountains and Koforidua Friday nights.

Afternoon of Day 7 – Thursday, July 26th, 2018

A’ight so boom… after lunch we continued our drive up the mountain and stopped at palm wine joint that Uncle recommended.

We hopped out and got three huge bottles to share. The palm wine was home brewed so it came in those recycled liter plastic water bottles. Once I opened one, there was a fizz due to the fermentation. Palm wine must be served chilled to get the best flavor and drinking experience. The bottles of fresh palm wine were already cold when we purchased them so we passed cups out on the bus and enjoyed! The wine is kept refrigerated because it’ll ferment more and become bitter if left sitting out. It tastes fruity, slightly sweet, with a strong smokiness like barrel aged whiskey or something, and has a fizziness to it; not like sprite but like fancy sparkling mineral water. There was no mouth drying like red wine and no alcohol burn like bottom shelf vodka when drinking it. It looked like a cloudy liquid with the consistency of fresh coconut water. Not sure why I had to describe the appearance. There is a picture right over there. *face palm emoji*

I was told it is traditionally paired with Guinness to give the drinker an extra boost. That week I was determined to do a cocktail Friday Instagram post using the palm wine. So, we stopped at a fruit stand the next day to get some mangoes and other fruit so that I could make my cocktail in the hotel room. We had one of the guys on the hotel staff, who later ended up going out with us, wash the fruit properly and he gave me a knife to cut it up with. I went back to my room, made the cocktail, pulled an Ankara wrap I brought from home out of my suitcase, and took the picture on the balcony connected to the room. And there you had it #CocktailFriday.

Check out the recipe for AUNTY ADUNNI’S PALM WINE PUNCH, the cocktail I made that day. Friday is the actual day I made the cocktail but I’m talking about the palm wine now, so yea…

Okay, so once we got the palm wine, we checked into the Capital View Hotel. It was another one of the nicer places we stayed over the trip. They had Wi-Fi, air conditioning, a pool, and a restaurant that we ended up eating at / ordering room service from while we stayed there. The rest of Thursday was just a chill day for us. We ate (I had salad, fried fish, and jollof rice again; this time molded into a ramekin shape) and slept while some of the others hung out at the pool.

Day 8 – Friday, July 27th, 2018

So then on the next day we had breakfast at the hotel. Then we stopped at the fruit stand I mentioned earlier in the story.

We were on our way to Aburi Botanical Gardens, in the Akwapim region of Ghana, to learn about the plant life native to and brought to Ghana.

I jotted down some notes as we were walking. I’ll just leave them below.

Aburi Botanical Gardens Notes

The first thing under the “notes” on my phone was…

“I might have the shits tomorrow. We both got plantains” – not sure what this was about but I think it is in relation to my story about Ghana Jollof. I could have written this while we were out in the wrong spot or I could have been making a note to myself so that I would somehow remember something? I don’t really know, but it makes sense later on in the story.

The actual notes begin here. They are supposed to correspond with the pictures. These are what the notes said verbatim (except what is in italics) as I was simultaneously trying to type notes and look at the corresponding plants the tour guide was teaching about.

Teak wood - rub leaves and makes red dye. Women in north use as lipstick.

Shea tree - eat fruit like mango and make oil and butter from nut

Royal palm trees - from Cuba

Cedars - from Lebanon. Solomon built the temple for God from these

African quinine - anti malaria
Mimosa plants - sensory plants. Close when you touch them

Sensory Plant

Monkey tree - from Brazil. Pods have fruit inside and when it is ripe the lid comes off and releases the fruit. Monkeys climb the tree and force head in pit to eat the fruit and they end up getting stuck and dying

Baobab trees - fruit can be used for ice cream, oil can be used for cooking
Cotton tree - 94 years old. Grows in northern part of Ghana. 70,000 years ago, people would build their homes in the tree

Cypress - from US. First tree planted in the garden.
Tree of Life – It took 5 years to carve the tree of life. (The artist was so talented so I got him to carve a present for my boyfriend)

Kolanut Tree - used to make dye in Nigeria. Used in northern part of Ghana. Suppresses appetite. Can be addictive.

Cocoa Tree - Ghana is 2nd and Nigeria is 1st largest producer of cocoa.

Nutmeg Tree – the outer red part of the fruit is used to make mace for cooking and pepper spray. The inner core is dried and ground as nutmeg.

Cinnamon Tree – leaves are full of oil. Bark used for flavoring foods, to cure diabetes, and improves eye sight (drink 2 times a day for 3 months)
Old Raggedy Helicopter - from England after queen Elizabeth’s visit in 1961 for the kids to play in after they couldn’t fix it. Crappy gift given in exchange for all the resources stolen from the land. *eye roll emoji*
Arrow poison plant - used to poison tip of arrows. Also used as anesthesia. Grows in tropical Africa
Travelers palm - from Madagascar. Protection from rain, leaves used as sleeping mat, plates, and can be a source of water.

Hosanna palm - used to lay down in front of Jesus’ donkey. Used on Palm Sunday. If you sit on palm you live 123 years. We all sat pon dat thang!!

We placed our order for food before our tour to ensure it’d be ready by the time we were done. It was! I got some excellent fried chicken, some fried rice, and a pineapple Alvaro soda. This was also the time when we told the artist who carved the tree of life what we wanted for him to make for us.

After Aburi Botanical Gardens, we drove to Mampong to visit the Centre for Scientific Research into Plant Medicine. There we got a tour of the facility, learned a history of how the program and facility got started, got to see some of the plants the scientists there are researching, and purchased some natural remedies for common ailments from their store.

Okay so here’s the beginning of the Ghana jollof story. We went to this restaurant named Linda’s for dinner. I wasn’t too hungry so I ordered a side of jollof rice and plantains. It was taking longer than normal to get our food; specifically, for our table. We were seated first and didn’t get our food until the very last. The plantains finally came out once we had all finished our pineapple and ginger juices, which happened to be the best bottled juice I’ve ever had.

The jollof rice then came out so late that they just had to wrap it up for me because we were about to go, hence why i have no pictures of the food. Up until that particular jollof rice, which I ate a few bites of when I got back to the room, my pastry chef friend and I had eaten the EXACT SAME thing ALL DAY! I could not have imagined what was coming…

So, boom boom boom, we got ready to go out with a few of the guys from the hotel staff and their friends. I was pretty tired but I had FOMO (fear of missing out) so I got dressed to go with them. The first place we went to was this super cool bar named Casa Bar & Grill. It was so cute and the set up was genius; they used shipping pallets and configured them into seats and tables, slapped a cushion on them and placed them in rows, threw up some string lights and bam! You’ve got a great place to party. There was a DJ, a bar, and a big cauldron of palm wine. We shared a bottle of rum and some coke and danced to Afrobeats. Everyone was dancing and singing along, especially all the guys in the club. It was the most fun I’d had in a club setting in a while. I’m a woman of a particular age (I’m ‘bout 30) and so clubbing isn’t really my thing anymore; I’m more of a brunch, day party on a rare occasion kinda lady.

We left that club and hopped over to Dady’s Bar (that was the actual name of the place. The sign only had 1 ‘D” in it). It was across the street from the Koforidua Guest Hotel. That place was poppin’ too! The music was afrobeats of course and others drank more but I was ready to go home at that point because I was NOT feeling the awesomest. We ordered some suya to share and I had to try some. It was super spicy just like I like it. We finally convinced the guys to bring us back to the hotel at about 1ish a.m. At about 1:30ish a.m., once I’d already showered, had some water, and gotten in the bed, I felt a shift in my spirit. All of a sudden, my body was up out of the bed, running to the bathroom, and up came whatever I ate and/or drank that entire day! Then it happened again, except this time, it looked like the Family Guy episode where Stewie and the rest of the family had an issue keeping things down. My diaphragm hurt for the entire rest of the night and the next day, even to the point of me missing one of the stops on our trip. That is how I ended my Friday night. I blame the Ghana jollof because it was the ONLY thing that I had that no one else on the trip ate that day. Now based on how food poisoning works, I very well could have been something I ate within the previous day but I will never actually know. I just know that it was the only thing I had different from my friend who didn’t get sick, that day. I had eaten so much Ghana jollof at that point that my body was just rejecting it; it said I had ENOUGH! When I told my brother the story, he joked with me about eating Ghana jollof when I knew better. Ha! For context, it’s a running joke between people from different countries in West Africa about who makes the best jollof (*cough cough* Naija Jollof is the best); kind of like the sweet or savory grits debate. I don’t put sugar in my grits because I was raised right; just saying. In spite of the issues, I did have a lot of fun in this town! Anyway, that’s it. This blog post is long enough. I’ll do part 2 of Koforidua next week on Travel Blog Thursday!

Until then…

Thanks for reading all these words!

Sorry if I grossed you out at the end ☹

Love ya tho!

Taste Tutor

TRAVEL BLOG THURSDAY – KOFORIDUA || Part 1