Caboose

We hadn’t realised that the second would be a public holiday in Accra, for Eid al-Adha. This meant that lots of places, including the restaurant at the guesthouse, were closed. We ended up having meat pies at a bar on the ring road.

After an afternoon of resting we heading down to Osu to find an Ethiopian restaurant mentioned in the guidebook. The directions to find it weren’t much use but a helpful woman pointed the way to it, unfortunately it’s no longer open.

We went into the Koala supermarket, famous among Ghana VSOs in the same way that Park’n’Shop is in Nigeria. The prices are mostly quite good compared with supermarkets in Nigeria. We wandered along “Oxford Street” and ended up eating at the Tip-Top Chinese restaurant. The food was good (although my octopus was very spicy) and the prices are OK.

While we were eating I got a text from Leo to say he was a Ryan’s. After dinner we walked up there to meet Leo, Sarah, Pat and Kevin (a priest working in Port Harcourt) along with a volunteer (independent, not VSO) working at a music school in Takoradi. We said goodbye to the priests, who were due to fly home the next day, and to Sarah as we were due to fly the day after that.

During the night I got quite cold, while we’d been away from Accra the Harmattan had arrived. We had breakfast at the hotel then took a taxi to Kaneshie market to do some shopping. On the way we got a text from Leo to say that their flight had been delayed indefinitely due to the Harmattan in Lagos.

Kaneshie market is huge and, on this day, dark, there was something wrong with the lights. The main part is a concrete building very similar to the (burned down) one in Jos, with three storeys and a directory showing what products are sold on each.

I bought a load of Ghanaian chocolate once I’d found a stall that had the hard-to-find plain version. Marebec bought some cloth. In the market I saw a few signs advertising “invisible hand removing”, apparently something to do with making alterations to clothes or maybe markets in Ghana have a different kind of invisible hand?
(sorry about the quality, it’s from my phone and it was dark)

As we crossed the pedestrian bridge to get a tro-tro back into town we saw a crowd beating a man down on the road. We stopped to watch until someone said “the police will come” and there was immediately a stampede of petty traders off the bridge.

We took a tro-tro to “Accra”, which dropped us at Tudu, and then walked down to High Street and had lunch at Osekan Resort. The food was good but the service definitely wasn’t.

After lunch we returned to the National Cultural Centre for some souvenir shopping, Dave and I trailing along behind Marebec. I bought a few odds and ends for other people and a painting of a tro-tro station for myself. As we were sitting having a mineral we met the woman from Raleigh International again.

We returned to Osu, I bought some coffee at Koala (it’s much cheaper than in Nigeria) and some fabric at Woodin (a big chain of fabric shops). After shopping we met Susan, Aoife and Lucy from Raleigh and went for dinner at Byblos (aka Venus bar), I had a very nice pizza for ¢40,000.

The next morning things were still looking dusty, I wrote in my diary “hope Lagos is better or we could be stuck here for a while”.

We took a taxi to Osu for some last-minute shopping (mostly books), had a bad lunch at a fast-food place called Steer’s (a South African chain) and changed most of our money back to hard currency.

Another taxi took us to the airport, we checked in, I bought some Ghanaian cocoa powder and a Coke to use up my last cedis and we walked through to the gate.

After a while there was an announcement that the Virgin Nigeria flight from Lagos was delayed, with no new arrival time so I assumed it hadn’t yet left. They kept making similar announcements and eventually a member of staff appeared and told some people in the gate lounge that our flight had been cancelled. I only found out because I just managed to hear her over the TV showing Nigerian movies.

There was chaos at the Virgin Nigeria office but they eventually set up a desk to give us our tickets back. The morning flight the next day was already full but there were chances of a seat on the evening flight, they took my phone number and sent us off.

I had to beg security to let me into the baggage reclaim so I could change £10 back into cedis for a taxi into town. We checked back into the Kokomlemle hotel.

In the morning we returned to the airport, they still weren’t sure about the evening flight but there were definitely spaces on the Sunday morning flight so we rebooked onto that one.

Not sure what to do with ourselves I called Sarah and asked if she could suggest some things to do, she immediately offered to put us up at her place. So our final couple of days were spent in comfort at Sarah’s. We introduced Marebec to the joys of Fawlty Towers and did some washing.

Fortunately the Sunday flight departed without any problems and we got back to Lagos in the morning, to find it very dusty.