Heaven Above; Hell Bellow: Our Second Day in Ghana

It was a Sunday, so we were given our porridge and Constance rushed off to church.

We met up with Eben and Matthaues, who were going to spend the day with us. Our first mission: finding transportation.

We wanted to go up and down the coast, a 70-mile journey (so at least two hours of driving through traffic and on the toll road). Thankfully, we found a driver we could hire for the day (with a car with air-conditioning)!

We spent two hours driving through the outskirts of Accra. Then the green hills west of here. Then patches of little villages where the green dissolved back into the red soil and brightly painted huts and people sprung up.

We were reaching some pretty great speeds, so we made it in less than the three hours expected on the way there.

Our first castle of the day was Elamira. This was originally built by the Portuguese, taken over by the Dutch, then commandeered by the British until Ghana got their independence.

We walked through the dark caverns of the slave dungeons. The guide described the horrible suffering of the separated male and female slaves for up to three months until they were sent through the "Door of No Return" to the waiting ships to be transported to the West.

We went to the Cape Coast Castle next for a bite to eat at a fairly tourist-centric nearby. The menu was more a process of elimination than a menu. We toured the slightly larger but fairly similar castle.

In both castles, the cells of the slaves were on a floor below the church, symbolizing, as the guide said, the heaven above and hell below.

The awful memories of the castles were surrounded by the beauty of the ocean. The waves were capping on beaches, either with a pair of men in flip-flops with a mission or on a busy outcropping where half of the splashes were for work and the other half were for pleasure.