The Perogi Truck Stop Thunder Run
Saturday, June 24th, Day 51 - today was just the closing ceremonies, two or three hours of speeches and wrap up, and photos.
This group was half the size of prior groups (25ish vs 50) and I think because of that it felt a bit more personal. Less a sea of faces. But also the majority of this group were from the same agricultural college bee club so it also helped that they all knew eachother really well.
Several of the students, members of said beekeeping club, thanked me at the end emphatically saying how much they learned. It's still a marvel to me that people who are even already in a beekeeping club at an agricultural college can learn so much from me. And one of the leaders said to me that they learned more in this four day course than they had in a two week course they'd put on last year -- which had me thinking "damn and here I'm always desperately trying to figure out how to fill the time" ahaha -- though part of that dynamic is that I'm deeply allergic to any busywork timefilling beating-around-the-bush type activities. Same as why I don't mind public speaking but am not good at making fluffy five minute speeches about absolutely nothing. I can't help but get right to my points.
In the evening Williams and I went out into town because I needed to get cash from an ATM for our planned travels the next day (the actual today as I'm writing this in the morning) -- the plan is to go to the tallest waterfall in Ghana (maybe even West Africa?), another canopy walk, and the tallest mountain in Ghana (maybe also West Africa).
While out, since we hadn't had dinner, Williams suggested we get something. There's KFC advertisements all over town so I suggested KFC. While the KFC in the capital had had all the usual products I found this one very limited -- I like to get the chicken burgers ("chicken sandwiches" as is official parlance in the USA, one area in which I'm not on the American side. Its a burger!) but they had none of those. I got a bucket of boneless chicken though. They also had no bbq sauce. And I found out later they gave me a unit of icecream, which, because we spent a bit of time looking for someplace where Williams could buy some alcohol, by the time I finally got to my room to dig in to my food the icecream I hadn't anticipated having had been reduced to a liquid state. I've put it in the freezer in my hotelroom minifridge though. Investigating just now, it appears to have refrozen into two subtly different layers. But anyway the important thing, what I'd been curious about the chicken was that normally all chicken you get here is a bit chewy, sometimes even rubbery, and I was wondering if the KFC chicken quality would be similar or more Western standard. And I can report the KFC chicken in Ghana in both cases I've tried it has been white and soft and more or less exactly the same as you'd get in the West. I always feel guilty for eating at an American fast food chain while abroad but its nice to have the familiar every now and then.
Meanwhile in Russia
So also all day I was reloading the news about Prigozhin's ongoing march ("truck stop thunder run" I've seen it amusingly referred to) on Moscow. This I did via twitter, which, I've found in the current state of the app the main "for you" feed gives you a random assortment of things from the last 24 hours so it's no good at all for following breaking news but the "followers" does load more or less the very most recent first and since by now I'm following a lot of accounts that are reporting such news as soon as they get it it was pretty good.
So one surprising revelation was that the "ammunition shortage" Prigozhin has been banging on about for the past two months may have never existed, he was just saving ammunition up for this planned mutiny/coup. Which is ironic since "the Ministry of Defense isn't adequately supplying us" seems to have been one of his biggest complaints. So the justification was because of his own preparations?
Anyway so Prigozhin got definitely within 350km of Moscow, possibly 200km and into Moscow region. There was surreal footage of Russian MoD airstrikes against the convoy and fuel depots along the way, entrenchment and sandbagging around Moscow, bridges being blown. Eight Russian aircraft were shot down by Wagner forces. It was madness, full on civil war in Russia!
And it looked like he'd succeed, he had many heavy tanks in his convoy and apparently there were none on the opposing side in Moscow. Putin and other elites fled Moscow (a very stark contrast to Zelenskyy "I need ammo not a ride" sticking it out in Kyiv through the worst of it).
And then inexplicably Prigozhin announced he had agreed to a deal negotiated by Belarussian dictator Lukashenko, that he'd turn his convoy around, leave Russia for Belarus, and it appears that Wagner will be disbanded. This seems really baffling to me, it appeared Prigozhin was in a position of absolute strength but agreed to a deal as if he'd completely been defeated. I saw a funny quip that "did the writers of the final season of Game of Thrones write this?" as for the weirdly anticlimatic ending.
To be clear Prigozhin isn't a good guy by any means. I was hoping he'd win because he'd topple the Putin regime and then I couldn't see him holding on and Russia would fracture to pieces and Ukraine would get all its territory back. It could be I suppose that he saw he couldn't hang on to the whole thing as well, but still this outcome seems baffling -- it at this point looks like he's left himself completely neutered of power from his former position of strength. Did he just completely lose all nerve at the critical moment or .. is there a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about?
Will be very curious to find out if more light is shed on this in the future.