Enough with the depressing dog drama, on to our first week long vacation in Ghana! When I last wrote, I talked about our upcoming trip to Mole National Park, Ghana’s biggest and most well-know park. Everyone who works here goes to Mole eventually as it’s the only place to go to see elephants. Elephants are arguably the most exciting big animal that Ghana has, as it doesn’t really have other big game.

Gavin has really fallen down on his blog writing responsibilities, so I will attempt to pick up the slack! As I type it is a Sunday morning and he is actually off on a little bird watching trip with some colleagues from school. They left yesterday afternoon and drove a few hours north to try to find a particular bird (I think a moustachioed sunbird). This trip involved both an overnight stay in a Ghanaian truck-stop motel and a 4 hour hike in the blazing sun so I am thrilled to report that I volunteered to stay home with Nell. Reports back so far are that the group is having a great time-I am very pleased that Gav has found some people to Bird Nerd out with so that I don’t have to do it.

Before we talk more about our first few weeks here in Accra, let’s rewind a bit back to our last few weeks in Yangon. The last few weeks of any school year are a crazy blur of activities, but when you are leaving somewhere the craziness is exponential. Luckily Gav and I anticipated this and from way back in January decided that we would try to not put a lot of pressure to do things or go places in the final days but instead to take advantage of time that we had the whole semester to enjoy our favourite places in Yangon. In the last two months or so, every time we went anywhere we mentally said goodbye to the place in case we didn’t get a chance to visit again. That worked pretty well and we had some really enjoyable times and lots of great cocktails!

Hello from Accra! We landed 3 weeks ago yesterday and things have been a whirlwind ever since. There is a lot to catch up on, like our departure from Yangon and our entire summer but we will get to that later. For now I want to record these first days in Ghana while they are still fresh in my mind.

Whoops. Quite a lot has happened since Gav’s post so we have a lot to catch up on. It’s been quite a lot of drama, but let’s rewind to a more simple time, our final few days of our spring vacation.

After we left the national park we were driven (at much safer speeds!) back to KL for the night. We found a place to eat on the street food street and luckily managed to nab a table under cover as quite soon there was a major downpour. This caused everyone to scramble for new seats. The rain soon let up and the street filled with people again.

This was our April 2023 break over the holiday of the Myanmar New Year holiday called Thingyan. Our trip started with a flight to Kuala Lumpur with the novelty of actually leaving the airport. We have been through KL Airport so many times that we probably know it better than Heathrow but just never got to leave before. We were immediately struck by the large number of skyscrapers on the way to the hotel.

When we returned to Yangon in January we were very happy to feel that the cool season was still hanging around. This was the first year that I actually felt its arrival-when we first came to Myanmar our friend Dave had told me “one day you will feel a cool breeze and know that the cool season has arrived!” Well, for four years I waited for this magical moment and it never happened.