Finally came the much awaited departure Sunday, most of the team would journey together from Toronto and transfer through Amsterdam to get to Ghana. We are on KLM0696 for the first leg of the trip, thanks to the wonder of personal entertainment system, most of us survived with our sanity intact despite the constant cries of children.
I have to give credit to Amsterdam's airport, under any other sleep deprived state I wouldn't have been in the mood to explore but there was something inviting and personable about the airport that I simply couldn't resist. For one, I witnessed the brilliant industrial design in the most unsuspecting place: man's washroom. A fly is printed inside the urinal where the point of least splashing occurs, the designers knowingly did so because the gents tend to go right for the fly. The result, of course, is less work for the clean up crew and less embarrassment for the gents. The second flight from Amsterdam to Accra seemed to have taken a lot longer than the first flight, although I completely blacked out from fatigue minutes after the plane left the runway. The only times I was awake was to catch the meals and catch a glimpse of the vast African Plain glistening in the sunset (before the man in the window seat returns from his washroom break). 17 hours, 3 meals, 2 movies, 2 snakes, 1 stop-over and way too many washroom breaks later, we finally arrive to Accra (Capital of Ghana) to find a small airport with a mini bus and a pick-up truck from the hotel waiting for us. Just as we loaded the mini bus and the pick-up truck and cheered to the thought of ending our long journey, someone smashed the Mercedes Benz that accompanied the our cars to delay our arrival to the hotel for another hour and half. The night seemed never-ending, and we are so tightly packed into the mini bus like frozen Wontons, but it was all okay, because I am with this great group of people at the beginning of a truly extraordinary adventure.
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