Trip to cocoa farm and Boti waterfalls

Today was a really nice day - I finally got out of crowded Accra after few good weeks and managed to see new places and faces.
My boss (Fred), my fellow colleagues trainees [Tobi (Nigeria) and Patrick(Netherlands)] and me we all went to Fred's village (where he was born) - around two hours drive from Accra on good road.

Fred's mom cooked for us, which was wonderful - I got to finally try fu-fu with groundnut soup - and she also took us to see a cocoa farm - she's on of the big bosses in the business ;-). Ghana has the best cocoa in the world - they produce a lot (around 560000 tones/year - second after Cote d'Ivoire) and export around 70-80%.

So we've seen where the process of making chocolate and other cocoa products actually starts. It was all very interesting and new for us. We ate cocoa directly from the tree - totally different taste than you know cocoa has.
The process goes like this - they take out the white cocoa beans (which is what we ate) inside the yellow fruit and let it ferment for 6 days, then they dry it for another 8 and only then it gets the taste we all know. After that it can be sold to different factories - it's around $50 a sack like the ones you see in the picture.

Another highlight of the trip was seeing the Boti waterfalls - there are two of them and they say one is a female and one is a male - didn't exactly figure it out why - but i guess that because one has a rainbow must be the female. :-P It was amazing - really beautiful green surroundings with rainbows and everything.
Ahhh...loved it all. Great trip!