Abrafo

New-to-us Port: #24.

OMG! What a day this turned out to be! A comedy of errors might be a good description. Except that we weren’t laughing much towards the end, and the problem was more a lack of time management than errors. As they say, tomato … tomatah! An adventure for sure … that ended well.

It all started with the authorities not clearing the ship on time. When a smartly-uniformed female officer and her contingent of 10 military aides arrived, the sour expression on her face was a clear indication that she wasn’t in a good mood. But her aides returned our friendly greetings with smiles and waves. Finally, we got the all clear to disembark around 9:00a. Thus losing an hour that would come back to haunt us,

We were on a tour organized by Pat and Tom … a group of 14 people. We had no trouble finding our guide, Felix, who had been patiently waiting for us at the bottom of the gangway. In no time at all, we were piled into a Toyota midi-bus with the words “Presbyterian Church of Ghana … Ebenezer Congregation, Pedu Cape Coast” emblazoned on the side.

Immediately, we told Felix that we needed to be back on the ship by 3:30p … NLT than 4:00p. Yes, all aboard was at 4:30p, but we wanted to get back before the designated time. Hah! Little did we know then how the day would pan out.

With our deadline in mind, Felix suggested that we re-order the stops … Kakum National Park … palm oil plantation and local factory … lunch … Cape Coast Castle … Takoradi’s Market Circle. That was fine by me as I really didn’t want to waste my time at another market. The rest of the group agreed. And off we went … a 2.5-hour drive with just two stops. One was a quick two-minute photo op at a fishing village in Sekondi where they build their own boats. The other was a potty break at a gas station.

The potty break was at the junction with another road. It was here that we had our first surprise. This one good. An Oceania tour was going to be convoying through here with a police escort … Felix hoped to tag along.

When the buses came through, the policeman hung back to verify that a bunch of ship’s people were in the midi-bus and then he waved us on to join the tail of the convoy. We followed the buses for about 1½ hours. Then they peeled off at another junction. They headed right to Cape Coast while we went left to Kakum. By this time, there was very little traffic, so the escort would have been superfluous anyway. At 11:30a, we entered the national park.

The scheduled activity here was a canopy walk in the semi-tropical rainforest. To get to the series of seven rope bridges that make up the walkway, first we had to hike through the rainforest. The uphill grade wasn’t bad and soon we were at the entrance to the canopy walk.

All but a few of us did the entire length of the walk which is suspended 100 feet above the ground … one or two took the short cut … one person skipped it entirely. We had a wonderful time, but little did we know then that there would be a price to pay.

In hindsight, Felix should have said that we all needed to take the shortcut spur back instead of doing the entire length of the walk. After all, he had a sense of how long it was going to take us to get to our next destination … we didn’t. But water under the bridge and all that.

It was 1:30p by the time we were back on the road again. Hmmm! Are we going to make it back to the port by the time we designated? We posed the question to Felix who said that we were still good … but that we would have to drop the palm oil plantation and factory and speed up lunch so we could visit Cape Coast Castle before returning to the port. Alrighty then.

The fast lunch was anything but. Kokodo, the guesthouse we went to for our meal break, took its sweet time serving us. We nibbled on the food that was eventually brought out, but the food was dried out — especially the chicken. Definitely a lunch that could have been skipped in lieu of snacks … or a boxed lunch as we drove.

By the time we left Kokodo, there was no hope that we’d make it to the ship by 3:30p. Now, the goal was to get there by 4:30p … the designated all aboard time. Again, Felix said no problem. So, we figured that the return route along the coast was going to be shorter.

A short drive from the guesthouse took us to Cape Coast … one of approximately 40 slave castles built by European traders on the Gold Coast of West Africa … an area now known as Ghana. Enslaved Africans were held here before being shipped off to the Americas through “the door of no return.”

Felix said we would have 30 minutes here. We looked at our watches and said, no can do. We finally settled on 15 minutes. Mui and I rushed inside, leaving the group to listen to Felix. I figured I could get the history of the castle from the the web. Photos were a priority. As I was wandering around, Mui called me on What’sApp to say that the group was already back at the van. Somewhere along the way our stop had been shortened to 5 minutes. I rushed to join them and off we went. It was now 3:03p.

Once again, we turned to Felix for answers. How long was it going to take to get to the port. Our group cry — Noooooooooo! — when he said that he’d get us to the ship around 5:00p reverberated through the van. No can do, indeed. Insignia was scheduled to leave its berth at that hour. Sure, there might be a delay if ship’s tours were late, but we had no idea if that was the case. Felix kept saying, 5:00p is OK. He just couldn’t grasp the concept that all aboard is different from the departure time. Finally, we got through to him and he told the driver to step on it!

And we flew! Luckily, there was very little traffic on the coastal route, so we could speed. But there were frequent speed bumps that slowed us down. Our biggest concern was going through Sekondi. That it wasn’t market day was in our favor, but we’d be hitting the city during rush hour. Nothing to do but hold on and hope for the best.

Several people, including Mui, got on Google Maps to track our progress. Concerns about our arrival time kept growing as the app showed an arrival past 5:00p.

Delonnie called the port agent and advised him that we were going to be late. She collected the cabin numbers to give to him in case he needed to get our passports from the purser in the event we were stranded.

Mui advised CD Ray via What’sApp … and OCA Cella, too. Ray reported back that gangway security had been given the cabin numbers so that there would be no announcements asking us to report in. Cella spoke to Claudio, who spoke with the bridge, and reported back that they would wait for us. Whew!

Long story short, we continued to speed towards Takoradi, where Insignia was docked. Each of us with an unvoiced concern … praying that no one would jump in front of the vehicle as we sped by.

We pulled up to the gangway at 4:47p and were on the ship minutes later. There was no movement on the part of security to pull the gangway up behind us. We later found out that we weren’t the last to arrive … another private tour came in after us … and two O tour groups as well.

If Malik, the driver, had not been so good, we never would have gotten back to the ship before sailaway. If the O tour groups had not been behind us, would the ship have waited? Since there were more than just one or two people delayed — and considering where we were — probably. But I’m glad we did not have to put that to the test. Malik deserved the tips he received from everyone.Read more