Did an ambitious day of touring yesterday. A colleague and I hit the canopy walk at Kakum National Park and the castles at Elmina and Cape Coast.

The canopy walk is a narrow rope and board suspension bridge strung between platforms mounted on existing trees in Kakum. It enables visitors to walk through the forest canopy instead of just on the forest floor.

My colleague and other visitors make the walk.

The view of one walk from another.

Ghana Ghana Ghana Ghana Ghana ghameleon. These are all over the place.

It just goes to show you: everyone loves patio furniture.

Elmina town.

The beach market at Elmina.

Boats docked at Elmina.

A boat sailing by Elmina.

We had assumed that the boats were all for fishing, but we did spot some blocks of frozen fish being offloaded from one into a waiting truck. They must have been sailing out to a ship offshore to take on this cargo because Elmina is too shallow to dock ships.

Local fisherman.

Mending nets in Cape Coast.

Years ago I worked with a guy who did tourism development. He had recently done a lot of work in Ghana, and he was effusive about its potential. It's got a zillion miles of fantastic beaches, a well-deserved reputation for being friendly, it's very safe, and unlike most African countries, it has structures of historical interest in good shape that can be visited. There's only one problem:

...the structures are slaving castles, and the Club Med crowd finds that kind of a drag.

This is Elmina Castle. Built by the Portuguese, captured by the Dutch and then the English, it was used to trade in gold, ivory, and then slaves for the New World, bought from tribes who captured them and marched them down from further north.

It's a beautiful building, but grim, grim, grim.

The Door of No Return at Elmina. Slaves were marched through this to waiting boats to servitude in the New World, or death on the journey.

Same deal at Cape Coast Castle, where this cannon helped defend against enemies foreign and domestic.