Shai Hills Resourse Reserve

This weekend, I and 3 friends took a trip to Shai Hills Resource Reserve. I’m not entirely sure how far it is from campus, since it took us about 3 hours to get there and 1 ½ hours to get back. We received directions Saturday morning from the front desk man in our building, who basically said:

Take a trotro to Madina, then one to Dodowa, then another to Doryumu. And from there, walk to the hotel.

From campus to Madina was fine. Madina to Dodowa was fine. Then we ran into some problems… the only tro in Dodowa took us to Ashaiman, where we were directed to a tro that would take us to Doryumu.
This extra leg (from Dodowa to Ashaiman) was a long trip in the wrong direction, that we backtracked later on the way to our destination. Granted, it was somewhere around 80 cents each and an hour of our time – we hadn’t planned anything else that day – so it wasn’t really a problem.
Upon arrival, we got a double room for all 4 of us for 34.50 cedis. (The beds were put together, and we slept horizontally… does that make sense?) We spent the afternoon/evening relaxing in the air conditioning – luxury! – and were asleep by 10pm.

The next morning, we woke at 5:30am and left for the reserve once the sun had risen at 6. We had read in the guidebook that the best time to see animals was early in the morning, so we made our way down the long road to the reserve. There, we saw baboons and took a long tour that ended at a bat cave. The baboons we saw were right at the entrance. The guide said that they were almost like domesticated animals because they had gotten used to eating food from visitors. There were others in the reserve, though, that stayed far away and didn't approach us. It was very cool. I’m so glad we went because it was so nice to go somewhere without 40 other American students. It also gave us a feeling of accomplishment because we did this whole trip on our own (except for the bad directions from the guy at our front desk).