Shakedown

Not too much new.  I’ve continued to be busy with the stuff I wrote about in my previous update.  I also visited a monkey sanctuary, finally found the cocoa trees, and traveled to Sunyani, the regional capital.

For those of you who don’t read my Facebook posts, I learned first hand that if you don’t pay your water bill, the water company comes by and cuts the pipe to your house; no advance notice- nothing.  Anyway, it was not our responsibility to pay the bill; this was supposed to be taken care of by the people who manage the house we live in.  Nonetheless, we decided to just go ahead and make the payment to expedite getting hooked back up.  Funny thing though, no one was able to produce said unpaid bill and/or tell us the amount due.  So, we just proposed a figure …yeah, so that fiasco was on the up and up.

Speaking of shakedowns.  When we were in Accra, we got in a taxi and the driver took us to a couple of different spots (the first stop was going to be quick, so he wanted to wait for us to drive us to our next stop – he even left the cab to “escort” us).  When we were getting out of the cab at the second destination, he was insistent on giving us his number so we could call him the next time we needed a taxi.  This was fine, but I thought it was a bit weird that it didn’t occur to him that we’d just grab one of the half dozen cabs outside of our hotel. Anyway, we discovered later on that we were both missing our phones.  So, thank God for the remarkable luck that we had the cab driver’s number to see if we left them in the cab!  Before the words were even uttered, he said he picked some people up right after us and took them to the airport, so they must have taken our phones.  About 20 minutes later, he called to say that he was going to go to the airport to track down the passengers and search them.  Then he called to tell us he had “seized” the phones, but, stressed that he had to travel very, very far to get them, so he wanted to be sure we were going to pay him for his time.  He proceeded to call no less than a half dozen times to let us know he was traveling very, very far.  Anyway, he finally meets us, produces the phones, which were obviously in his possession the entire time, and tells us he wants $200.00.  Other than somehow getting our phones, he really gets bad grades for execution.  First, the airport was ten minutes away and exactly how legit does walking into the airport, finding taxi passengers from earlier in the day and “searching” them sound?  Not that he cared that much about how legit his story sounded; he had something we wanted.  His biggest mistake though was that he handed over the phones before requesting $200.00 (mine was a $30.00 dumb phone from Ghana and Steve’s was an old iphone he was using only for the camera  -not worth $200.00).  Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting that figure.  Anyway, after a whole lot of commotion, he got an appropriate “reward” and went on his way.

Okay, so stay tuned for pictures next month.  I’ll try to upload a bunch with the free wifi in Cape Town.