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[Nigeria]Nigerian glossary

2006-12-18

Lagos to Accra

Filed under: ghana,travel,VSO — kevin @ 20:29

Had a very early start, the taxi was booked for 4:30am. Dave was convinced that the driver wouldn’t come, in the end he was a little late because he’d got lost in the dark.

We got to the airport before check-in opened and had some breakfast. After check-in there wasn’t much to do, so we headed on to departures. Marebec was quizzed by immigration for a while, I’m not sure why there’s an immigration check for leaving the country. Marebec and Dave were a bit worried about Nigerian and Ghanaian immigration after their experience with the blatantly racist Egyptian embassy refused to give her a visa.

More distressingly, security confiscated Marebec’s bottle of Coke.

The flight, with Virgin Nigeria, was fine. The sandwich was better than the ones British Airways throw at you on European flights these days.

Kotoka International Airport in Accra is fairly small, maybe a little bit bigger than Abuja. This meant that by the time we’d changed some money at arrivals our bag was on the carousel. Ghanaian immigration were fairly rude, not quite up to USA immigration standards but they’re obviously trying. They wanted to know VSO Ghana’s phone number for some reason.

After laughing at a few obvious ripoff taxi drivers we managed to get a taxi into town for ¢50,000 (that’s Ghana cedis, not USA cents). We got the taxi to drop us on a street with plenty of forex bureaus. I changed some pounds into cedis at a rate of ¢18,200 to the pound. Marebec and Dave changed dollars, ¢9300; to the dollar.

While we were changing money I heard a radio advert informing people that in July the Ghanaians are introducing a new cedi, with 1 new cedi equal to 10,000 of the current ones. This being West Africa they had a catchy little song to convey the message. After stashing our envelopes full of money in our bags and around our bodies we wandered back out onto the street. The largest cedi note is ¢20,000, you get quite a lot of them in exchange for £300.

[Technical note: There is actually a separate symbol for the cedi, Unicode code point U+20B5, but very few fonts contain it so I’ve stuck with the cent symbol. Otherwise you see this: ₵]

Our next stop was to buy SIM cards for one of the local networks, we chose areeba, bought some credit and then went to a nearby bar to rehydrate.

We walked up to the Kokomlemle Guesthouse, where we were told that a room is ¢80,000 compared to the ¢40,000 mentioned in the Bradt guidebook. The manager said we could leave our bags while we tried other places but that Kokomlemle is the cheapest, of course we didn’t believe him. After a long, hot trek around the area we realised that most places were full and more expensive, so we took a taxi back to Kokomlemle and checked in. I had a double room to myself, sharing two toilet/showers with Marebec and Dave and two single rooms.

The Kokomlemle Guesthouse is clean and comfortable and the staff were helpful. The windows all had good mosquito netting and the fan was very powerful.

Dave decided that the guesthouse was too expensive for lunch so we wandered along the ring road a little bit. We ended up having lunch at a chophouse. Dave and I both tried banku, which is a fermented maize lump. Neither of us liked it much. It turned out that food at Kokomleme Guesthouse would have been cheaper!

In the afternoon we set out to find the VSO Ghana office. I’d got the address from the VSO office in Abuja and wasn’t too surprised to find out that it was wrong. VSO Ghana had moved during the year, some helpful people in the neighbourhood gave us directions to the new address.

At the office we met a few VSOs, including Karen and Juliet who we joined for drinks and then a long walk to find the perfect Chinese restaurant. We ended up at a new and expensive place called Noble House. The food was great and Juliet treated us to wine. The place is run by an Indian guy and has an Indian restaurant upstairs.

During the evening we’d been in touch with Leo and arranged to meet him the next day.

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