Well, I have returned victorious from the Sahara, having conquered its heat, dry winds, and lack of water. By that, I mean I'm at least alive and well, and also back in Accra.

Words are frankly inadequate to describe my week and a half trip to Timbuktu, and if I tried to make this a travelogue, I would end up writing for the next four hours...and let's face it, nobody's attention span is that long. So, here's the short-short version, in point-by-point format...

-Departed Accra on Saturday
-Got to Kumasi
-Ate at "MacDonald's" in Kumasi...a little street stall with a very famous name. And also no Big Macs
-Got on night bus to Ouagadougou
-Drove through dust storm; had to tie boxers around my face to breathe
-Got to the border at daylight. Got visas for Burkina Faso. Camera got stolen off the bus.
-Arrived in Ouagadougou. Took out some money at an ATM, got hassled by street bums. Ate frites with mayonnaise (French-speaking country). Went to the hotel.
-Saw a man at breakfast who looked like Dr. Beck, but was with a 17 year old hooker...so I decided it couldn't be Dr. Beck. Got Malian visa and extension for Burkinabe visa. Ate Vietnamese frog legs (really). Got on bus to Ouahigouya.
-Arrived Ouhigouya. Got accosted by man who took us to a hotel. Slept in a storage room, drank guava nectar.
-Took shared taxi in AM to Koro in Mali (shared taxi was a POC station wagon with 10 passengers...it kept breaking down en route, but the driver knew to let it stop on downslopes so it would turn over when it started to roll)
-Boarded tro-tro of DOOM in Koro; 45 C heat, crowded, no real seats, little water, 4 hour drive.
-Arrived in Mopti; nearly passed out. Ate wonderful lunch, drank 3 liters of water. Purchased a turban for Joy. Found a hotel.
-Got hassled by every person in Mali who wanted to be our guide. Found a man named Moses who was willing to lead us out into the wilderness (a familiar tale for the Theology major...).
-Realized we didn't have money to pay Moses, and that the one ATM in Mopti was broken, and that no banks changed traveller's cheques, or Ghanaian cds.
-Emergency trip with Moses back to Ouhigouya and the ATM.
-Arrival in Dogon country. Slept on top of a mud brick building under the stars.
-Hike up to the 2,000 year old cliff dwellings, originally built by the pygmies. Sudden, urgent call of nature resulted in me being the half-naked white man on the cliffs above the village - am grateful that I brought a notebook with me to jot down interesting observations...the paper came in handy.
-Afternoon "nap" to escape the oppressive heat and dust.
-Hike up another cliff to a village on top of the bluff. Nearly had to make the others abandon me to the jackals - didn't think I was going to make it.
-Sunset on the cliffs - beautiful.
-Sat around drinking millet beer (mostly non-alcoholic) and looking at the stars
-Another night on a mud-brick roof under the stars, bundling together with my fellow travellers for warmth.
-Return to Mopti; first shower in 3 days. Felt very, very good.
-The drive to Timbuktu. 6+ hours in the heat and dust off the paved road with a maniac driver going 100 KMH+ on roads I wouldn't have driven 45 KMH on. But we made good time. Crossed the Niger on a ferry, and arrived in Timbuktu.
-Realized that Timbuktu consists almost entirely of mud brick buildings, sand, and Touaregs who want you to go with them to their camps and villages.
-Rode camels out into the desert sunset. Named my camel Pedro. Reached an agreement with Pedro that, if he stopped ramming a certain part of my anatomy into the front of the saddle, I would relax my grip on the saddle and stop making him nervous.
-Arrived at Touareg camp. Traded a pair of shoes that didn't fit and a broken $3 Wal-Mart umbrella for a silver and ebony bracelet and a hand-made dagger.
-Slept under the stars. Spooned with my other group members for warmth, including the 2 redheads. Didn't get any sleep, but the stars were gorgeous, and I can now claim to have spooned with 2 redheads in the desert.
-Breakfast of tea, dates, and groundnuts. Returned to Timbuktu. Met the other group traveling from Ghana and their new member, who was from TEXAS. College Station, to be precise. Realized the only person I've met in the past 3 months who knew where my hometown was I encountered in Timbuktu.
-Another traveller realized she'd been robbed of about $400 in CFAs. Ensuing Witch-hunt revealed the pathetic nature of investigation in Mali - the only one with half a clue was the local juju-man, who had a hashish vision about who took the money.
-Chilled for the afternoon in a Touareg's house. Ate dinner, went to sleep.
-Returned to Mopti in the 4-wheel drive. Finally changed some traveller's cheques. Ran into a Ghanaian who had been deported from Algeria. Found out simultaneously about the direct bus to Kumasi from Mopti.
-Boarded Kumasi bus. Chatted about politics, the US, and university life with my new friend. Got motion sickness from the crappy roads and spewed all over Koro.
-Stopped for the night at the border, slept on the bus.
-Entered Burkina Faso. Got stopped every 10 feet by overzealous, possibly illiterate police officials who insisted on checking everyone's passports at every stop. Bus caught fire; royally cussed out the Malian who tried to shove me to the bus floor so he could exit the bus - Kevin doesn't appreciate nearly getting trampled to death on a bus. Realized the bus fire was incredibly minor; got back on the road in 20 minutes. Returned to Ghana via Paga.
-Overnight bus ride to Kumasi; arrived at 6:00. Caught 7:00 bus to Accra, arrived back on campus around 13:00.

So, that's the SHORT version. I have a story, or two, or three, or four, for every step along the way. It was the adventure of a lifetime. Of course, adventure doesn't always mean that everything was fun, but was it worth it? Oh yeah.

Alrighty, second batch of photos for your viewing pleasure...

1. Emily, Darren, and Joy at my birthday bash at the Lebanese restaurant. These are the folks with whom I had the Valentine's Day lobster dinner, and I hang out with them fairly often.
2. This one is for Aunt Rose; me with a wall mural advertisement for Pepsi at Lizzy's, the open-air street bar in Osu. We trekked over to Lizzy's on my birthday after the Lebanese place.
3. No comment; the girls are Lisa (the Canadian kissing my cheek) and Megan (from North Carolina).
4. This one looks like it could be some sort of "meet the band!" photo shot from an album cover; I am sandwiched between two redheads (Carmen and Carolyn; Carmen is on the left) and two Jess(i)es...he-Jesse and she-Jessie. The five of us hang out together in he-Jesse's room quite often.
5. A bit dark because of the position of the evening sun, but that's Jesse playing guitar while sitting on his balcony railing with Carmen listening and looking on. This is how many afternoons and evenings have been killed.
And now, a little going-away-to-Mali treat...the Top 10 quotable moments (so far) of the semester! I am only responsible for a few of them; the rest have been culled from two months of conversation with other crazy international students experiencing all the idiosyncracies and general insanity of West Africa.

10. "So, you followed a drunk guide through the bat caves???"
9. "That is some really hot shito!" (shito being a very spicy Ghanaian sauce)
8. "The Botanical Gardens? More like the Rape Gardens, if you ask me..."
7. "So, we can stop here?"
"No."
"We can't stop?"
"Yes."
"So, we can get off here?"
"Yes"
"Well, stop then!"
"No"
6. "I give you GOOD PRICE!"
5. "Everybody drinks, everybody wins" (this is the operating motto of Quiz Night at Champ's...agree or disagree with it all you want, but it's still a heck of a motto for Quiz Night)
4. "Umm, are we going to Ho or Hohoe? Or both? Or neither?"
3. "That rasta guy over there just asked me to marry him!"
"Yeah, I've already 3 of them propose to me today..."
2. "Excuse me, are these kebabs beef?"
"Yes"
later....
"What meat are these kebabs?"
"Goat."
"I thought you said they were beef!?!?"
"Beef and goat the same thing!"
1. "Well, I sure just got hit on...by a Liberian prostitute. Again."

I was having some difficulty entering text into the previous photo spread, so this entry corresponds to the photo entry below; apologies for the inconvenience!

1. The landscape of the Eastern Region between Accra and Kumasi.
2. The grounds of Manhyia Palace, the abode of the Asantehene (chief of the Ashanti people); the royal animal is the peacock, and so several of them roam the lawns and gardens of the palace grounds.
3. We were driving back to our hotel from the palace when we saw, of all things, a GOAT tied to the top of a tro-tro in the next lane! As you can see, we all found this amusing and scrambled to get out our cameras.
4. The main market in Kumasi as seen from the motorway above it; the market is reputed to be the largest in West Africa, and it is indeed massive - th0usands of shop stalls selling anything and everything you can imagine.
5. More striking scenery in the Eastern Region.
6. Out on the boat, right around sunrise.
7. Casting out the net for the first catch of the day.
8. A true salty dog; me shortly after the near-capsizing of the boat - you can still detect a bit of a residual "what on EARTH am I doing out here???" expression on my face.
9. The Ghanaian fishing boat equivalent of the cabin boy; he did random odd jobs around the boat and drummed on the metal capstan in front of him in the picture to provide a rhythm for the fishermen to work to.

OK, so this is a Typhoid Tuesday, rather than Malaria Monday, update, but so it goes sometimes. To briefly address THE question that has, no doubt, been spinning endlessly through everyone's mind....I will make a massive picture update either today or tomorrow, and by today or tomorrow, I really actually mean today or tomorrow. I just need to borrow a friend's laptop long enough to throw the pictures over onto my flash drive, and I'll be set to update. Really.

So, since I have no exciting travel stories or grand adventures to relate, this week's entry will be another "what Kevin does on his days off from being a fearless explorer" entry. Last time, I talked about afternoons spent on the balcony of room 82, hanging out with friends and making music. This week, my classes. I sometimes forget that I am, in fact, here under the guise of taking classes. To say that the course expectations at the University of Ghana are perhaps a bit lower than back at TLU would be to make a massive understatement. To be completely, totally honest, of my 4 classes this semester, a whopping ONE of them feels remotely demanding in terms of academics, and even that one is not particularly strenuous. This class would be Religion in the African Diaspora, which is by far my favorite course this term...which is saying a lot when you factor in that the class begins at 7:30. I do NOT like morning classes at all, but I can make myself get up and go to this one. It's incredibly fascinating, and the professor does a great job of presenting the lecture material. I genuinely feel like I learn in this class, and for a hopeless nerd like me, that makes me happy. We just finished covering African traditional religion in the Diaspora (i.e. Voodoo, Shango, Macumba, Santeria, etc.), and it was a fantastically enlightening lecture.

Now, my other classes are...not so wonderful. My Twi class is the least offender out of the remaining three; it's informative, useful, and fun. However, any 100-level language class is going to be pretty easy, and our professor has effectively made it a sluff-off course...my feelings aren't exactly hurt by this (gives me more time to travel), but still...a sluff-off course is still a sluff-off course, and it's hard to really motivate myself to care about it. Drumming, too, is fun, but eesh...if you ever want to feel better about your rhythm skills, take a "Drumming for white people" class in Ghana. I've done enough drumming/hand percussion back home to where I'm probably a smidge above the level expected of us by the instructor, and ALL of us are bored with the class right now. We've been working on the same basic rhythm for the entire course now; it's gotten a wee bit old.

And then there's The End of the Roman Republic. I had more demanding courses in junior high, but the professor is (despite himself) highly amusing. For starters, his name is (I am not making this up) Dr. Shadow. Perhaps I merely have an overactive imagination, but Dr. Shadow sounds more like it should be the name of a video game hero's archnemesis than of the head of the University of Ghana Classics department to me. Adding to the comic factor is that he looks much like Bill Cosby from a certain angle; this was an unfortunate discovery for me, since I now have to fight laughter during lecture. The kicker, however, is his manner of speaking - he interrupts many of his sentences with a "what?," and then finishes his sentence. Example: "This course will be dealing with the Roman - what? - Republic." Typically, he sticks the "what?" before an exceptionally obvious word, such as "Senate" or "Gracchan Brothers," but occasionally he'll whip out a nice, surprisingly random one, such as: "The Roman provincial governors had a reputation for being very - what? - rapacious." However, his lecture mostly consists of the same 3 or 4 basic ideas being repeated over and over again in various permutations - I could get more information on any given topic from 10 minutes of Googling the relevant terms than from 2 hours of lecture.

After a few weeks of this, I became understandably frustrated, as did we all - EVERYONE is having the same, or worse, experiences with their classes here. And then...it hit me WHY the lectures here are typically so dreadfully dull to the American, Canadian, and British students. I think the realization came when I was actually talking to myself in Spanish (no, I am not insane; this is merely the only way I can get in Spanish practice in Africa) - English is NOT the first, or in most cases second or third, language of ANY of the students or faculty here. They don't go home and speak English to their families; they speak Twi, Ga, Fante, Ewe, Hausa, etc. English is as hard for them as Spanish is for me; I would be well over my head in an upper-division Theology lecture at Salamanca, so why is it that I expect them to be as conversant in academic English as a native speaker? The lectures are basic because they have to be just so that the students will be able to understand and absorb them; just as I couldn't handle a full-bore lecture in Spanish, Ghanaians (through no fault of their own) generally speaking aren't prepared for a full-bore lecture in English.

English is the language of instruction here for three reasons - the first is colonialism. Ghana was, up until 49 years ago as of yesterday, a British colony which frankly had English shoved down its throat. The University here was founded by the British and originally taught in English, and all of the books they furnished for the university were in English, so the university taught, and still teaches, in English. Secondly, I am not aware of any academic works (apart from linguistic studies, perhaps) which have been written and published in any of the major indigenous languages; suffice it to say this would make teaching courses in Twi or Ga an even greater challenge since the lecturer would be teaching in Twi, but still having to assign readings in English! Thirdly, and this strongly connects to the first point, English really is the closest thing to a universal language in Ghana. Ghana is a colonial construction, a mashing together of several historically separate tribes and people groups, each with their own languages and cultures. To select one of those languages as a national language would practically be inviting ethnic strife - the Hausa-speakers of the North and the Ewe of the Volta region would NOT take kindly to Ashanti Twi being established as a national language which everyone must learn. As sad as it is, English is just...safer as a language of government and education in Ghana; it's foreign to everyone, so at least no one Ghanaian people group is being elevated over another.

So, that's academic life here. Obviously, I've been...languishing a bit, but I've found means to keep my mind from going into atrophy. I've been reading a great deal, and am now resolved to work my way through several literary classics which I've not been able to motivate myself to read up until now - I'm currently working on Tom Jones by Henry Fielding right now, and I am mortified that I never made the time for this one before; it's superbly funny.

Well, I've prattled on and on enough for one entry; Timbuktu is now just a few days away!

So, this is the post where I explain what it is that I do in my large expanses of free time during the week, eh? Well, for starters, I have rediscovered my absolute love of making music. My friend, Jesse, brought a guitar with him from home, and he's nice enough to let me play it whenever I want, so I've been taking definite advantage of this. He, Darren, and I have all been writing songs; Jesse has a mic with his computer, so we've been able to record the fruits of our labor thus far. We're hoping that the creative rainy season continues long enough for us to throw together enough material for a (mostly, if not entirely, for sentimental value) cd we've jokingly entitled "The Ghana Sessions." We're like the ISEP Crosby, Stills, and Nash; it's great fun.

But yes, many afternoons already have been killed on Jesse's balcony, listening to music, playing guitar, watching the planes land at the airport, and talking about life, the world, and everything. His room seems to be the hangout for the more pensive among us; conversations regularly hop from crazy stories from back home to philosophy to travel plans to theology to what we're doing for dinner, and it's great. If nothing else, his balcony is worth hanging out at because of the breeze - I live on the ground floor and don't have the great view, or the cool breeze, that the second floor possesses.

I wish I could say that, at this point, I've managed to spend my time doing something more worthwhile than just hanging out, but all my assorted volunteering attempts have slipped through the cracks. There are finally some other folks going to an establishment that's part orphanage, part after-school center on a day when I can join then, so I'll start going with them as soon as I can.

So, that's life here when I'm not in class or on the road. Speaking of being on the road, I depart for Timbuktu next Friday...the average American college student does Florida for spring break, or maybe someplace in the Caribbean, but not me - it's Sahara time!