Caboose

I’m writing this from an internet cafe in Takoradi, towards the western end of the Ghanaian coast.

We’ve been travelling west from Accra and it has been very enjoyable, some lovely beaches, colourful fishing harbours and the lurking leftovers of the slave trade in the form of trading forts (now serving as everything from prisons to hotels!).

Anyway, I’ll be on the beach on Christmas day, so I hope you enjoy yourselves too.

We walked from Big Milly’s up to Kokrobite junction, where the Metro Mass Transit bus from Accra was sitting. If we’d known about it we could have travelled from Accra to Kokrobite direct for ¢4000 each. We were heading to Senya Beraku, a little bit along the coast. We asked a taxi driver how much to go direct to Senya Beraku, he wanted about ¢500,000 (£27.50) so we just took a shared taxi up to the junction.

At the junction we started asking some other taxi drivers how much they wanted while we waited for a tro-tro. Our driver from Kokrobite reappeared and asked for the much more reasonable amount of ¢120,000 (£6.60), so we chartered.

The coast road has been recently upgraded to a dual carriageway with three lanes in each direction along this stretch. We sped along, passing a few police barriers but only had to stop at one and no bribe was required to get through. The road down to Senya Beraku was not so good, we bounced along between the potholes, through town and right to the end of the road: the Fort of Good Hope..

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