Harvesting PALM OIL in Ghana!! Eating Roasted Worms & Drinking Palm Gin!!

We're just going to roast it and I mean you'll taste it. Awesome. Very nice. Tastes like barbecue. Good morning everyone. I hope you're all doing well. This is David Hoffman from David's Been Here coming at you from beautiful Elmina, Ghana, the Gold Coast. This place is beautiful. Salt Flats behind me, the village, fishermen and the Gulf of Guinea and today what we're doing is we're driving to Kumasi. It's a four-hour drive to the second largest city in the country but because we're making many many stops it's gonna take like seven, eight hours to get there. We're gonna see palm wine, palm oil, cacao farms, many beautiful things on this long journey. He was telling me it's a good road, it's a bad road, you got a big mix and yeah this is my hotel, Golden Hill Parker. Beautiful place. If you ever come to Elmina, Ghana, you have to stay here. Look at this, infinity pool over here with restaurants and over there we have all the rooms and look at the view. You look over the entire town right. Salt Flats right here, really really beautiful. You have the village, palm trees and the ocean and yeah guys let's go to the car. Let's start this journey to Kumasi. Let's rock and roll. Kumasi. Kumasi all the way. Ben, let's go, let's go. You guys are the best. Isaac and Ben, my team here in Ghana. And this is Elmina. So we explored all day yesterday. We went through the fish market, we saw the castle, went all the way up to Kakum National Park and that's sort of what you can do right. So 24 hours you can do it but obviously take 48 hours because just to get here takes time. Coming from Accra it would take like four to five hours. The best time to visit the fish market or the fish the fishing harbor is from 6 to 10 a.m. Yeah you definitely need a guide to go through there and yeah once we pass this church we're getting through the end of the town and over here we have palm trees, Gulf of Guinea and then we're gonna keep going. We're gonna pass Cape Coast and then make a left right? Yeah. We just left the Accra road and now we're on the Cape Coast Kumasi road. If you don't stop and just go straight the whole way you're there in four hours. Four long hours and it's beautiful. It's like a bush right? This is real Africa. Over here to the right to the left bush you probably see a bunch of villages on the way. Lots of farming communities and that's basically it. This is the green road because we are heading toward the garden city which is Kumasi. A lot of activity on the road especially we're going to meet the women who are processing the palm nuts into oil. Hopefully we'll also see how they make palm wine. Palm wine is actually really hard to come by but he said it's the best. It's the best drink in Ghana. Oh my gosh. That was wild. Here's another village washing cars, goats. Again farming communities. Love it. Man I love Africa. Our first stop is going where they are tapping the wine and distilling the wine into gin. Let's get there. That's right here. Can't wait to see this. Guys you would never know this is here. Literally look at the hole. This is it. Because the bush is so thick you would never see it. Walking into the bush you can see over here to the right and the left are the old palms. So they cut the palm down and they get the trunk and that's where they tap it. Basically it's like the sap right and here on the floor. My god there's ants. Huge ants. Monster ants. Be careful. They do bite. Hello. How are you? Very good. Where's the wine? Where's the wine? So this is the fresh wine they collected this morning from the trees. They will let it be here for three or four days to be well fermented and when they are sure the one is well fermented then they come here. They pour, they fill the gallons to half with the fermented wine. Then they set the fire there. So it's the vapor that will pass through the tube. These two systems we call it the cooling system. So by the time it reaches the earth it becomes the gin. So I've seen this many times in Albania when they make raki. Same thing right. They put the grapes into these. They let it sit there usually 10 days here. You let it sit four days. Then once it's fermented put it over here. Heat it up right. Then it goes through cooling and then the vapor comes out and that is gin. So this is locally Can I try this? You can try it. Oh man, man this tastes like dolly. This tastes like the thing I told you about in India, in Kerala. Similar thing. Oh that's good. So some of these are the sap, fermenting sap. Some are the gin that's ready. So we're going to take a few bottles with us. Walking to the back here. Never-ending palm trees right. So they cut all these down. They get into the root and then from there they tap it. They pull out the sap and that's how this whole process starts right. So we're going to see them cutting a palm tree. So many bugs. We're in the jungle man. Wow so many. Look at this. It's like a palm tree graveyard. This is wild. Oh my god. So they have to actually like tip it over to get into that right. Yes. And this is what this forest used to look like or this farm right. It used to have all these huge palm trees just like these right here. All over the place and they're slowly cutting through them and pulling out the sap. Wow man. Never seen this before. So we have stages when you want to put wine into gin. So this stage is what we call the dressing. It's dressing the palm trees. That means it's going to make the hole, take off some branches and make the hole inside in which they will put the bamboo tube to let the wine flow through into the container at the base of the tree. Like Isaac said this is called dressing. So he undresses the palm tree, makes a deep hole, dresses it again, then later they come with the bamboo and you know a little container and it drips out, the sap comes out. This is awesome man. This is super unique. I've never even heard of this. First time man. I didn't know about this. This is very popular in the southern part of Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. I'm going to pull down 200 palm trees which you are going to tap. But the dressing you can do up to 100 a day. So that means two days you'll be done with it. Wow. So 100 a day. There's 200 here. So this is like quick right? So he got to move on to the next one. And do they replant here? I'm guessing they replant. After they finish this one, the owner of the farm can start farming maybe different crops, maybe cassava or corn and they will move to the next level. I mean they want to finish the whole plantation but you cannot do it at one go. So that's why they need to do 200, 300 at a time and when they finish, they go to the next place. Thank you. Yes sir. Thank you. Yes sir. You can see inside it's already wet. Unfortunately those viewing cannot smell it. It's nice. Let me smell this. Oh wow. It smells good. For us in the south, palm tree is a mystic tree because we have, you know, a variety of products from the same tree. Even the branches used to make a broom for sweeping our rooms or compound. We make the fence from the bigger part of the branches. A whole lot. And if they finish tapping the wine, there is some worm that comes out. After the worms comes the mushrooms. Very, very special. So basically it's sustainable farming because the product has like six or seven byproducts. So it's the palm tree but then many other things come from it. So now we're going to see the worm he was talking about. Oh man. This is way better than the gin. Boss man here is going to show me how he taps it. Oh it just popped like that. Wow. Okay I'm going to taste it. So I just put my finger inside. It's like sweet. So sweet. So good. So the hole he made earlier, now it's full of sap. He drills a hole to the very end all the way through the palm tree. Then he puts the bamboo shoot and then it drains it right. It drains it into this container and that's it. That's how you make the sap or that's how you extract the sap from the palm tree. From there it goes over there. Four days to ferment. Eventually they can turn into gin and so on and so forth. My friends this is epic, epic morning. Thank you so much. The first stop took about an hour. I think this road trip is going to be a long one. A really long one. Dude you got the gin? All going to be equal now. One for you, one for me. Let's go. We're two hours into our journey and as you can see the road has changed a bit. It's not as smooth and perfectly paved as before. There's more potholes. Ben here is like literally navigating. See the pothole he turns. He goes like this. He's going side to side. Oh there it is another pothole. So many potholes. So it's gonna get better again but it's not so bad. This is not like really really bad compared to like that real african massage dirt road. We're gonna probably have something like that in Mole no? It's like straight it's a straight jungle. We haven't had breakfast so we decided to stop here on the road and we found a lady who's uh you know roasting or grilling plantains. And we're going to take it with peanuts. It is a good combination. Actually we take this as a snack. All right so we took this as a snack right? So it's five CDs for like four roasted plantains. It's hot. Probably you have to wait a little bit. So we are in Asimposu and it's the biggest town in between Kepros and Kumasi. Huge town guys. Huge. You can see there's non-stop vendors selling clothing, shoes, produce. I mean it never ends here. These are the style right? This is sort of how it is always. There's one or two huge towns along the road. You know from Akira to Cape Coast we ran into a few. Here this is the main big one. Between here there's small villages right? And some of them have markets. Yeah I mean if you want to you can get off. You know buy some stuff. You know explore like local life. But that's basically it. And lots of music always blasting. Look at the speakers here. That Range Rover is in a hurry. Literally just like haunt its way through this whole traffic. All right let's try this plantain. Oh still hot. Good. Wow this one's nice and mushy outside. A little burnt. Smoky too. Isaac this is awesome. So good. Tasty. And for one dollar we all eat. So we just seen cacao beans being dried. But we'll make a stop later to see properly how they bring it. Another quick stop. Let's get some coconuts. I'm thirsty. That's coconut. Yeah man. You like it? I love it. Love it. Very nice. Coconut. Very nice one. Very sweet. I want one too. You want one? Yes. You? Everybody. My turn man. I'm thirsty. I'm really thirsty. So my friend's helping me here. Very tasty. Done. Yeah. Done. That's so I can use your hand. Yeah. So good. So fresh. Whoa. It's a big one. It takes a two per person. Not bad. So a dollar twenty for three people to have coconuts. Thank you. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. Thank you guys. This is the best part about the road trips. All the little stops. Every stop is super interesting. Very interactive. And everybody here along the road is super friendly man. Super friendly. If you want to experience Ghana in its best way, is to make stops along the route as you head towards your next destination. How much CC? How much? One for one CD. One for two CD and one CD. So now we are entering the Ashanti region. And what was the region we were in? Central region. So we left the Central region for the Ashanti region. So we just basically entered a different state right? Like it's a region but for us like Americans it would be like a different state. Okay. How many how many regions are there in Ghana? We now have 16 regions. 16. 16. So I gotta try this donut. This is a big piece of bread right? It almost reminds me of a cinnamon roll. Fluffy yummy bread. We are making a stop here to see our mothers, our sisters processing the palm nuts into oil. At this base specifically they produce kennel oil. Wow look at that mosque. Huge mosque behind us. Massive. This is where they produce the oil. So this is a kennel nut. A palm fruit. You know we have the palm fruit. After we have two types of oil that we get from the palm fruit. So the fruit is first processed and we get the red oil. And this is what my mothers are processing here. Inside this when you crack this you have the kennel nuts. And so this is what they are going to roast, ground it and then when they cook the paste the oil will come on top. So what these two women are doing is they're going through trying to find the nuts that were not cracked by the machine. So they separate them so they can obviously crack them. So the nut comes over here and this is where it's soaked. What these ladies are doing here is they're separating the dirt from the nuts okay. That's actually before it goes over here to get soaked. Okay so again starts over there. They bring it over here. They separate it. What they're doing there is separating the nut from the shell. So it's all about separating the nut and finally getting the nut super clean and perfect to turn into oil right. What the woman was separating when they bring it here you know the nut the shell are still mixed. So in order to get the nut out they have this water. It contains clay. So when they put it inside the nut comes on the top and the shell stays down because the shells are heavy. Now the nut it's a bit lighter. So they come to the top of the water and it takes this and this system they have come with it's really very really quick fast. A fast way to separate the nut and the shell. Take a bit of the water again to fill it with another nut with the shell. This is just finished right. On the top you saw all the nuts. She took them out. So this is done. So that's the process right. This lady wants me to come into this house. What's happening in here? That's the oil. So right there's the oil right. They ground it to paste. They are going to boil that paste. So when they are boiling the oil will come to the top to the surface and they'll be collecting it. It's the thickness of tar. She was saying it's super heavy it's hard it's really hard for her to lift it up but you can see that eventually it's boiled the oil goes to the surface and that's how we get palm oil. Kino oil is white oil from the Kino. Two oils are made from the palm tree. All right guys it's getting late we have to hit the road and yeah I mean we're about 30 minutes from Kumasi. Yeah we saw the process of everything you can make from palm trees. You got the palm sap which is basically palm wine. We saw how they extract a really really cool process. Then we saw how they distilled the the gin from the palm wine right. So they let it ferment. Palm wine ferments four days goes through distillation right and then you have gin. We also took out some bugs made like a a worm kebab. Ghana worm kebab. Very very different exotic. Pretty yummy. I mean it was just very crunchy right. I mean it was like crispy. I mean they cooked it to the to the limit you know. And then we kept driving right. So we drove roughly six hours so far. We are 30 minutes from Kumasi and this is where we saw how they make the palm oil or the Kino oil right. So the two different types of oils can be extracted from palm tree. This is the Kino oil. The other one is like a red one they always eat with the red red right. And yeah guys I hope you enjoyed the journey to Kumasi. If you did please give me a thumbs up. Leave me a comment below. Subscribe to my channel for more awesome travel content. I'll see you in the next travel food adventure somewhere in this area. you