On our only free day in Ghana, Mark and I hired a car and driver to take us to the Cape Coast and Elmina Castle, where, during the slave trade, recent African captives were held before being crammed into ship holds for the Middle Passage. It’s only about 100 miles from Accra. We had all day to make the trip. We never got there.

Why not? At first, it was traffic. It took 45 minutes to get out of Accra, driving along potholed dusty streets crowded with people. Adults and even children balanced heavy loads on their heads: washbaskets full of clothes, wooden crates of hardware, trays of peanuts or candies, each burden seeming wider than the next, but we never saw anyone drop one. The road was bordered by shops with handpainted signs, lots of them Christian: Jesus in Heaven Motors, Everlasting Joy Hair Salon, Praise God Grocery. Behind them stretched colorful shanty towns of constructed of concrete blocks with tin roofs. The car moved slowly through the streets. Women and children came up to the windows offering food or toys for sale. Everyone looked industrious, busy at work. We saw no one begging.

Once we got out of town onto the highway, let’s just say Joseph, our driver,  was an aggressive passer of other cars. He flew right up on their bumpers, then jerked out into the other lane with inches to spare, into the face of oncoming traffic. By the side of the road, men waved at the cars with some brown things in their hands.

Dried fish for sale by the side of the road.

“What are they selling?” we asked Joseph.

“Bush meat,” was the best explanation he could come up with.

It looked like road kill to us, large flat rats. Later research confirmed that the animals were akrantie, or canecutter rats, which are now cultivated as well as hunted.

Joseph suggested we stop at the Kakum National Park before going on to the Cape castles. “It’s only twenty minutes,” he promised. Really, we should have known better than to accept this time estimate. Ghana time is more relaxed than our American precise scheduling. We’d waited over an hour for the “five minutes” it would take for our room to be ready at the hotel. But Joseph said we’d love the canopy walk there (and we did), so we barreled over the rutted and potholed dirt road to the forest.

The wooden buildings clustered around the park entrance reminded us of camps we’d stayed in while hiking in the Amazon years ago. Kakum is virgin rain forest; tall trees loomed overhead. Some of the greenery looked like office plants on steroids.

“How long does it take to do the canopy walk?” we asked at the ticket booth.

“Twenty minutes.”

Terrific. We could do the walk and still get to the coast. Except, of course, that we had to wait till a group assembled and our guide showed up. And then you have to climb up a trail to get to the canopy walk. And once up there, you’d be crazy just to scamper through and not look around. We gave up on getting to see the castles and gave ourselves over to the present moment.

Our guide, "Still Alive."

Our guide introduced himself as “Still Alive.” Maybe that’s an American phonetic pronunciation for his Ghanaian name, or maybe his mother was just delighted he’d made it through her pregnancy. Still Alive told us about the building of the walk, and warned us not to expect to see animals in midday. The best time for that, he said, was to camp nearby and book a night walk.

Still Alive was assisted by Valentine.

Valentine and Mark.

When he discovered that Mark lives in Northern Virginia, just a few miles from Valentine’s cousin who lives in Annandale, he rang the cousin up on his cell phone so they could chat.

I’ve walked over rope suspension bridges while hiking, so the footfeel of the canopy walk was familiar: a low bounce when you stepped onto the first board, then a springy, slightly swaying sensation when walking. The rope bridges are strung 40 meters (about 130 feet) above the ground. But I didn’t feel any fear of heights; we actually couldn’t see the ground because everything was covered in dense green foliage.

I admired the design of the ropes supporting the plank boards. They looked as though a giant and very clever spider had woven them into an elegant narrow web.

Sadly, by the time we’d walked out of the rainforest, soaked by sweat, not rain, we had to tell Joseph to head for home. We had a plane to catch that night. We’d missed any vestige of lunch, so Joseph took us to a crocodile refuge for a quick snack – French fries, not crocodile. On the way home, we passed open sheds where coffin makers built coffins in the shape of fish, cars, pineapples and beer bottles. These coffins supposedly represent the passions of the people who are buried in them. One coffin we saw was covered in glittering mirror, perhaps for a Ghanaian disco queen, we wondered?

And, even though we needed to get back to Accra for our flight home, Joseph asked if we could stop and buy plantains at one of the main roadside markets. They cost much less here than in town, he said, and his wife would be pleased. He slung two huge branches of plantain into the trunk. Meanwhile, we chatted up the kids who offered us platters of fresh fruits and vegetables, none of which we could buy, and most of which we didn’t even recognize. But okra, that we both know, since Mark’s from Texas and I’m from Louisiana.

“You fry the okra?” we asked.

Fry okra? Of course not. It’s for stews. If you were allowed to take vegetables home on international flights, I would have filled my bag with the stuff.

Joseph shops for fruits and vegetables.

I admit it: I’m travel-promiscuous. I’ll go anywhere with anyone at any time. And thanks to that “never say no” policy, I’ve just been in Ghana for fewer than 48 hours.

United's first flight to Accra landed on time.

The occasion was the United Airlines inaugural flight from Washington Dulles to Accra – their first flight ever to Africa, in fact. I was just a hanger-on; my friend Mark invited me to come along. United had sent a flotilla of managers and experts to make sure everything went smoothly (it did), and I learned a lot about airline operations just listening to them talk.

The Ghanaian ambassador to the US, Daniel Ohene Agyekum, was on our overnight flight to Accra. There were festivities at the departure gate: free cake, cookies, chips and drinks, and then some quick speeches.

Also on this first flight were several representatives of Malaria No More, an organization devoted to eliminating malaria in Africa. Malaria, they told us, kills more people here than HIV. United partnered with them to deliver the first shipment of anti-malarial bednets for a children’s hospital.

I’m a sucker for celebrations like this, where everyone is enthusiastic and full of hope for what might come next. Several speakers noted that this flight was capitol-to-capitol, and that Ghana was the first African country that President Obama visited after his election. It felt like a small moment of significance, of optimism and some badly needed good news from the corporate world.

After the speeches, we boarded the plane for the 11-hour flight to Accra. Oh, heavenly treat, we flew business class. United has new flat bed seats in business, something I’d never experienced before. And let me tell you, you sleep way better when you can stretch out.

Controls for the business class flat bed seat

There were a zillion options on the seat controls: Press this button, and you slide up and back, this one and the foot rest appears, another one for a change in lumbar support, push here and make the seat go completely flat. I slept seven hours straight both on the way out and on the return. No jet lag! (And no, United is not paying me for praising their business class seats.)

Of course, this entirely spoils me for the rest of my flying days, since I’m always back in coach, conserving my dollars or my frequent flyer miles. I fly cramped, but I fly often, is my motto. I’ll write more later about my impressions of Ghana (I loved it), but there’s definitely another flight to Accra in my future.

First, let us specify that we are experienced hikers – older, yes, but definitely experienced. I’ve been hitting the trails on independent hiking trips at least twice a year for twenty years.

And let us also specify that the Gargano Peninsula in Italy is quite beautiful, with green terraced hillsides looking down over the green Adriatic.

But we have been smacked down on this trip. We booked it through ATG, one of my two favorite self-guided walking companies. The Church Ladeez love ATG – excellent routes, well-written directions, good choices of hotels along the way.

(True, we have always complained about the quality of ATG’s maps. Most self-guided walking companies provide actual topo maps, in which you can read the terrain. ATG gives you black and white illegible copies of maps which are never detailed enough to be more than suggestions. Still, with our attention to detail and using our compasses, we’ve always been able to navigate without more than a little glitch every now and then.)

But the Gargano Peninsula hike has smacked us down. Let us not go into the first day’s directions which had us circling a mall outside of Manfredonia. And our surprise that the second half of the hike seemed to be straight up a mountain with no switchbacks…we actually didn’t walk that part because of rain.

On the second day, we descended from the hilltop town of Monte Sant’ Angelo over goat tracks in a stiff wind. For the entire first half of the day, we were never sure precisely where we were. We remembered to stop and smell the verbena, and to listen to the cowbells clanking in the distance. But the wayfinding was mostly of the “Well, at least we know we’re heading east,” variety.

And then there was the steep stony path downwards that seemed to never end. Let’s just say this: the standard hiking pace is about 2 miles an hour on uneven terrain. We did about half that, and our knees were screaming at the bottom. Three of us (me included) decided right then that a rest day was in order for Saturday.

Still, we were rewarded that night with grilled fish right from the Adriatic, simple and fresh, with grilled zucchini and eggplant, and a bottle of local wine. Nice.

Judy and Janet...before...

Yesterday, only our strongest walkers, Judy Leaver and Janet Randolph, took on the walk. It looked easy – only 7.5 miles. It nearly destroyed them…first with rock scrambles so steep that they had to pull themselves up by grasping clumps of rosemary growing among the stones. Then the directions made no sense…they found themselves wandering in a dry river bed with no obvious way out. They clawed their way up to a road and managed to get a ride with a guy in a pick-up truck part-way. But even that was to no avail…after seven hours on an “easy” trail, they gave up and called the hotel for a ride the last two kilometers.

Meanwhile, the rest of us, lounging at the beautiful Villa Scapone, were getting jittery about our friends’ whereabouts. We tried and tried to call them, but had no cell service. We’d heard – though Janet and Judy didn’t know this – that a Swiss couple walking the same route the day before had to be rescued.

In the end, Judy and Janet emerged, tired but unhurt, and very frustrated at the mismatch between the walking directions and what was actually on the ground. We’ve all decided to take today off from hiking. (Oh, and the Swiss aren’t walking today either.)

Villa Scapone

Manfredonia, Italy. This is the 6th annual walking trip that our Church Ladeez hiking group has taken together (we all met at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC). Since 2005, we’ve hiked in Umbria, Italy; the Dordogne in France; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Lazio (Italy again); the Lake District in England and (with a larger group), the Camino Portugues in Portugal and Spain.

People drop in and out from time to time (only Judy and I have made every single trip), but we’re determined to keep this up as long as we can. This year, our group is Pat McGovern, Judy Leaver, Janet Randolph, Claudia Liebler and me. Nancy Gist couldn’t make it this time, but she’ll be with us in 2011. We plan to keep this up every year till we can’t drag along another meter; then we’ll rent a car and faux-hike.

Among us we have bad knees, bad shoulders, bad feet, bad necks, bad backs. We’ve been through cancers, family deaths, lost jobs and severely depleted stock accounts. We’re all over 60, and our appendages just don’t work as well as they used to. So we ache, we moan, we medicate. But we do not grumble. Instead, we laugh loudly enough to disturb the other patrons in restaurants and pass the bottle of wine around one more time.

And so we find ourselves in Manfredonia, Italy. “Wait,” you may be thinking, “surely you mean Germany or Slovenia. Manfredonia just doesn’t, you know, sound Italian.” Our thought exactly. Apparently there was a King Manfred in these parts in 1256 or so, and his name stuck. Manfredonia is on the Gargano Peninsula, that piece of Italy that sticks out into the Adriatic just above the heel of Italy. Technically, we’re in Puglia.

Wednesday was market day in Manfredonia. Here are photos of the market, but what you can’t experience visually is the cacophony of sounds. The vendors shout nonstop. The place rings with calls of “Favoriti, cinque euro!” and, “Beautiful ladies, buy here!” The women in the markets confer loudly about the ripeness of the apricots, the freshness of the calamari, how thickly to slice the salami, precisely which of the 20 varieties of olive they want. We stocked up for our hiking lunches in the days to come.

My first memory of desperately wanting an object happened when I was four.

My mother and I were in the dime store of our back-bayou town of Houma, La. There, on a rack with other grown-up books, was a copy of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. I wanted it. No, way more than wanted it. I was sure I couldn’t live without it.

Although I was reading by that age, I didn’t have to sound out the title words, “T..t..t..O..o..o..M..,” because I instantly recognized the picture on the dust jacket. It was Tom, watching the other kids he’d tricked into whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. Many nights, snuggled in bed, my mother had told my brother and me stories from Tom Sawyer. I knew all about Becky, and the bat cave, and Huck Finn.

And I needed with all my being to possess that book.

“No, Sheila, you can’t have it. It’s too hard for you. You can’t read it,” Mama insisted.

“I want it!” I wailed. “I can read it! It says ‘Tom Sawyer’! I need it!”

And then, when Mama stood firm (probably because we really couldn’t afford to buy me a hardback book), I did what I had to do. I threw myself down on the wood floor and pounded my head over and over into the gritty planks. I was going to have the book or kill myself.

I got the book. I also got punished when we returned home, and I never staged another tantrum. And Mama was right, of course. I couldn’t read it. But I treasured that book, and it was the first novel I ever read.

I was reminded of all this yesterday at the Annapolis Book Festival,

Robert Hirst

where I attended a panel discussion of Mark Twain by three authors who are Twain experts: Robert Hirst, official curator of The Mark Twain Project and Papers at U.C. Berkeley, Michael Shelden, author of Mark Twain: Man in White, about Twain’s final years, and Jerome Loving, author of Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens.

This Wednesday is the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death, so we’ll probably be hearing lots about him in the coming months.

Listening to the panelists talk about Twain, I remembered all my favorite Twain books. Although I never stop loving Tom Sawyer, the fiction was never as interesting to me as Twain’s nonfiction, in which he paints pictures of 19th century American life – often hilariously.  I’m planning to re-read several books now. Here are my absolute favorites:

1) The Innocents Abroad. In 1867, Twain accompanied a group of tourists on a steamship voyage in the Mediterranean. He reports of the fatuousness of American tourists (wow, even back then!). Among other things, they all bring chisels to the Acropolis to carve off a bit to take back home.

2) Life on the Mississippi. Samuel Clemens was a steamboat pilot before he made his living writing. This book describes how he learned the river and how to navigate it before the Civil War. Twain gives a brief history of the river, and also returns years later to take a trip from St. Louis down to New Orleans.

3) A Tramp Abroad. Twain takes a walking tour through Europe – except that he’s rarely on foot. I love his description of a vicarious climb up Mont Blanc – sitting on the veranda of his hotel.