Caboose

We walked from the Fort of Good Hope up to Senya Beraku’s tro-tro station and took a shared taxi to the junction on the coast road for ¢5000 each. From there we picked up a tro-tro direct to Takoradi for about ¢10,000. It’s a fairly long journey and the coast road is being rebuilt in parts, which led to a very bumpy and dusty ride.

The authorities in Ghana actually seem to take road safety seriously. Even on major roads there are severe speed bumps at the entrance and exit of each village.

We managed to find our way to the Amenla hotel and checked in. I was in a single with shared bathroom at ¢70,000 per night, Marebec and Dave in an ¢80,000 double. The hotel is OK but seems a bit run down and the dark green and grey colour scheme in the rooms combined with the high ceilings, barred windows and feeble fans make it fairly grim.

For lunch we checked the guidebook and decided on the Silver Pot restaurant, which seems to have gone downhill a bit since 2003. The air conditioning was off and so were most of the items on the menu. In the end I had a beef stir fry that was mostly gristle.

After lunch we checked our email at the Unicon internet cafe, all the ones mentioned in the guidebook having closed. We went back to the hotel for a bit then out for dinner, finding a new place called Bocadillo’s at the end of the Old Asanti road. The menu had the usual Ghanaian and “continental” food with the surprising addition of Nigerian food. I had a nice vegetarian pizza for ¢45,000 (£2.50).

On the way back to the hotel I bought some mosquito coils, the mesh on the hotel windows is full of holes. Takoradi in general seems pretty run down. Open sewers run down both sides of the streets and down the centre of major streets, making the city stink. We saw a few huge rats scurrying around and some vultures picking through heaps of rubbish.

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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After a relaxed start to the day we checked out of the Kokomlemle Guesthouse and walked along to the tro-tro (minibus) stop a little bit along the ring road. It took a while to find the right one, the driver’s mates aren’t constantly yelling out their destination like the Nigerian ones do.

We boarded a tro-tro for Kaneshie market and immediately got stuck in traffic at Nkrumah Circle, sweltering in the heat as soon as the bus stopped moving. After the traffic jam we transferred to another tro-tro, it cost a total of ¢1500 (8p) to get to Kaneshie.

The tro-tro station alongside Kaneshie market was total chaos, even worse than Jabi motor park in Abuja. After asking a few people we couldn’t find a tro-tro direct to Kokrobite, so we entered one going to Kasoa and told the driver we wanted to drop at the junction. This trip cost ¢3000 (16p) each plus ¢5000 (27p) each for a shared taxi to Kokrobite and an extra ¢5000 between us to drop at Big Milly’s Backyard.

Big Milly’s is a bunch of huts in various styles scattered around a lovely garden full of palm trees. Leo had called and booked for us, so Marebec, Dave and I were sharing a self-contained room with two double beds (although my bed was more like a large single, the left-hand photo below) for ¢260,000 (£14.30) per night.

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Had to get up in the night because of mosquitoes and then a bit later with gut cramps, it seems that Club beer may not agree with me.

We had breakfast at the guesthouse, scrambled egg with toast and Laughing Cow processed cheese plus fresh orange juice for ¢16,000.

After collecting Karen from her hotel round the corner we found a bookshop just off the ring road nearby, seems to be mostly second-hand American books and too many self-help titles. We took a taxi to the National Museum to meet Leo (from Kabba), Sarah (a former VSO in Nigeria) and Pat (another priest working in Nigeria). The museum itself was quite small and probably not worth the ¢45,000 entrance fee, although there was an informative section on slavery. The best part of the museum is the restaurant in the grounds, where we had lunch. This was where Leo introduced me to Castle Milk Stout, a very nice local beer.

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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.

I’m in Abuja just now, on my way to Ghana with Marebec and Dave.

We’re picking up our visas from the Ghanaian embassy in a couple of hours then taking the bus to Lagos very early tomorrow. On Monday we fly to Accra with Virgin Nigeria.

Updates will depend on how often I have internet access in Ghana and when I can tear myself away from beaches and nice food.

Hope everyone enjoys Christmas (at least, those of you who celebrate it).

Got up well before the crack of and took an okada to Kawo motor park. I’d expected other people to be leaving early but I was the first person in the car (at six) and we didn’t leave until 6:30.

They insisted on squeezing four people into the middle row, normal on most routes but not on the Abuja-Kaduna run. I argued but the other passengers all meekly accepted that they “always” have four passengers in the middle, a blatant lie.

A couple of hours later I arrived at Jabi motor park. The road into Abuja was being dug up so I had to walk up the road a bit to get any transport. The bus touts insisted that there are no buses going to area 10 but then they tend to lie a lot too. No buses appeared, so maybe the routes have changed. Instead I entered a shared taxi.

As we reached the ring road the passenger in the back with me said he wanted to drop but the driver refused. The driver then started asking what was inside the back passengers bag (in the boot), the reply was “dollars”. A weird story followed, about an employer he’d worked for for three (later eight) years who’d sent him with the money.

After a bit more questioning from the driver and the front passenger it was revealed that the bag contained one million dollars and that the back passenger had stolen it from his employer. It seems the employer was involved in oil bunkering (illegal smuggling and theft of oil). The back passenger then begged not to be taken to the police.

At this point the driver and front passenger started negotiating over how much the back passenger should “settle” us to not take him to the police. His first offer was $10,000 but they preferred that he keep half the money and we split the rest between us.

This all seemed highly dubious. Even if the story was true I wanted nothing to do with the stolen money and I suspected it was a trick to get me in a position where they could extort money from me. I told them to drop me where we were and then had to get another taxi to Radio House.

Later in the day I took my passport and paperwork to the Ghanaian High Commission. It seemed to me that all the staff there are recruited on the basis of sullenness. I didn’t get so much as a grunt in response to my greetings.

I had a busy end to last week, with a huge crowd of VSOs descending on NTI for the northeast Nigerian patch meeting. These meetings are an opportunity for volunteers in each of the four ‘patches’ (NW, NE, SW, SE) to get together and discuss issues affecting them. In this case it was an opportunity for me to meet some of the new volunteers who arrived just as I was heading off to the UK.

We got some security information from VSO, mostly what they were planning to do in the run-up to the presidential election, and passed on our concerns on some things. It was also Jenny’s opportunity to pass on the mantle of being the patch representative. Due to some interesting rules only two of us were valid candidates and I was elected, interesting to see that Aine has also been lumbered with the job.

I’d had an especially day on Thursday, with Jenny and Irma arriving at lunchtime and a reception for Prince Charles in the afternoon. I managed to direct Jenny and Irma to the market and then it was time to put on a tie and hang around waiting at Arewa House. Prince Charles did the wandering around shaking hands and talking to people briefly, then there were the speeches. It has to be said that the Emir of Zazzau’s entourage (at least twenty of them, in very colourful outfits) were much more impressive than the Prince’s Special Branch escort.

The rest of the weekend was good fun, getting to know the new people and seeing old friends again. Even more fun was trying to get a party of twelve to fourteen volunteers around Kaduna by public transport!

I got back to Nigeria on Sunday night and it’s actually good to be back.

Arrival at Abuja was relatively trouble-free, a longish queue at immigration but nothing too bad. Some random airport employee demanded that I let him see what was in my bags, so I checked his ID, established that he wasn’t a customs officer and said no. The real customs guys greeted me, peered in the top of my rucksack (mostly full of socks) and waved me on.

It was quite pleasant wandering about Abuja on Monday, Harmattan has come earlier this year and all the dust in the air reduces the heat a bit.

I immediately felt at home, but then that tends to happen wherever I am.

Back in Kaduna it’s almost like I was never away. The weather has obviously changed, it’s now cold enough at night that I need a blanket. I picked up an electronic thermometer at Schiphol, so I’ll have to update this with the current max/min temperatures.

I spent most of yesterday wandering around NTI handing out presents (lots of nice National Trust calendars) and greeting everyone. Everyone was asking about my family and expressing horror when I told them about the cold and darkness in Scotland at this time of year.

Anyway, I’ll stick up some pictures from my trip back home once I’ve got round to downloading them from the camera.