Day 3 and 4 Hiking in Kpalime

We hired a guide out of the Geyser Motel where we camped last night.  After breakfast Jean-Baptiste (gee-bay)  took us down a couple of gorgeous hiking trails.  The first was a 3 hour circle through  crops including coffee, cocoa, yam and cassava, past some charming villages.   We are so glad to be out of smoky Accra and breathe fresh air.  The second trail was into a waterfall  on Mount Klouto, the highest peak in the region, where we were able to get wet and cool off.

Tuesday is market day in Kpalime so we went back into town in the afternoon and had the mud washed off the Land Rover while we wandered about through the shops.   As it turns out we were in the petit marche, the main market is at the other end of town entirely, but it was still fun.   There seem to be a relatively high proportion of muslim merchants, we bought a CD of contemporary Togolese  music  (hip-life we think, but don’t really know) and an umbrella.

 

Late afternoon we headed back for Mt. Klouto where we had discovered the government-run Campement  de Klouto  at the very end of a steep and winding road where we had taken our hike to the waterfall.   It is the site of an old German hospital.  Togo was ceded to France as part of the terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty following WWI.   Prior to that the Germans had been here for about 50 years and have left many traces.  It might have been a great hospital but as a hotel it does not have much to offer .  The staff were very friendly and seemed  quite accustomed to welcoming campers and overlanders.  They showed us where to park and gave us a key to a very austere room as access to a washroom.  Indeed austerity is the defining feature of this particular establishment.  The reception, the restaurant and any room we saw were sparsely furnished with bare walls.

The Campement is also where the trail to the summit starts and after breakfast we took the 45 minutes hike up.  It is as much a road as a trail and we could have driven up, but wanted to keep up our hiking habit.  From there we drove into Kpalime, had an internet stop and carried on further north to the a Benedictine  Monastery located north of Adete, far up in the Danyi Plateau, a mountain chain that runs along the Ghana-Togo border.  We could have entered Togo near here, but that would have meant going through parts of Ghana that we were already very familiar with so we decided to come into Togo further south.