GHANA -- View of Elmina's bustling port, as seen from the former slave castle of the same name.

It's very hard to get a group shot and think, my god, its like a gigantic Spielberg shot, with just the right groupings of people and movement, but I think this one comes close. I was standing on a architecturally restored slave fort looking down the coast. In the picture, in the distance, you can see another slave fort. Every so often along the coast were these giant Portuguese ports of slaving. ItŐs a very moving place, with some of these forts restored standing over the town, while life goes on. People here in the photo are repairing fishing nets, getting everything ready to head out onto the water. I think it was about 110 or 115 degrees the day I was there. It was so hot you could almost not breathe.

On the west coast the operations where much smaller where slaves were held underground in chambers, 100 or so at a time, while here on the east the scale was huge: 1000's and 1000's coming through these fortresses at a time. The Portuguese had their little chapels above along with their cannons. To see the sheer scale of it was a mighty and frightening thing.

I stayed in Accra and commuted west along the coast to Elmina -- the roads in Africa are often in very bad shape. This was a road that many people traveled on with small shops all along the way for like an hour and a half, and there were often huge dust storms. It was quite a wild old ride.