Accra to Elmina
April 14th to April 21, 2009
So after much anticipation and 10 sometimes very long weeks, Sam and I finally left Have and the EDYM farm on Tuesday April 14th. Our departure was characteristically not without a few hitches (both literally and figuratively as it turned out) as we discovered that our Village Volunteer “contact” in Accra was somehow not going to be in town to host us upon our arrival in the city. Additionally, the Easter traffic we thought we’d so cleverly avoided was in fact at its worst the day after the long weekend, and we waited two agonizing hours on the steps of the library watching every tro-tro drive by packed to the gills before we managed to flag down a private car heading in our direction and secure a ride; this at least an hour after Paul had to leave us on our own in order to make an afternoon meeting in Ho. Utterly relieved to know that we would make it into the big city at all, and mercifully before the dreaded nightfall, we reflected that it was a wild and therefore fitting start to the next chapter of our adventure.
Arriving in Accra we did have some more help, in the form of Paul’s niece whom he’d called to help us in our time of need, and she got us safely to our hotel (and into a decent room for a cool $16) where we settled in for the next day and half in the city. In Accra we rushed around to complete 10 weeks worth of errands to last us the next 4 through sub-Saharan Africa. We circumnavigated the city by tro-tro and on foot and got lost twice in the process, but found the average person to be helpful with directions and, to our surprise, the tro-tro mates to be honest and fair. The highlight of the visit, however, was our epic postal adventure in which we spent at least one hour in a picture-perfect example of inefficiency and bureaucratic ineptitude trying to send home the generous but mammoth gift of Kente cloth we’d received upon our departure from the farm (see How to Send Mail in Ghana).
After leaving Accra on Thursday morning, we had a whirlwind couple of days trying to adjust to life on the road. The biggest adventure by far was the transportation as we made our way along the coast mostly by tro-tros, and mostly from the garbled instructions of this driver or that mate hollered at us over the din of the tro-tro parks along the highway. From Accra we splurged for a cab to Kokrobite, since it was rainy and we weren't keen on lugging our bags around Accra, but after that we found it fairly easy to get from place to place, even cover long distances and relatively desolate dirt roads, just by shared taxi and tro-tro.
For example, from our accommodation at Big Milly's Backyard in Kokrobite we walked to a shared taxi at the town road which, for 60 cents apiece, took us up the long winding road to the main Accra-Cape Coast highway. There, we crossed the highway (at a crosswalk, though with no functioning crossing lights) to a place where cars were pulling up heading West (there may have also been a Tigo sign - a cell network advertisement that seems to denote a bus stop in the South). We shouted our destination - Senya Beraku, an isolated town a little farther West on the coast - to a few drivers before a taxi driver told us we wouldn't get a car straight there and should go to Kasoa first. So we took a tro-tro to Kasoa, a place we'd never before heard of, where we got out at another station and looked for a car to Senya. There we were again told by a slew of mates that we wouldn't find a direct car, and that we should instead go to Abutu Beraku, another mystery place (actually later found to be mentioned in our guide), so we did. In Abutu Beraku, another passenger pointed out a shared taxi going to Senya, and so we piled in. The taxi took us to the town and to the Fort of Good Hope where, only about 3 or 4 dollars poorer for our transportation, we booked a room for the night.
Thus far we’ve stayed in Kokrobite, a backpacker’s haven just outside Accra in a charming little rondavel by a beach which would have been idyllic if not for all the trash. In Senya Beraku we stayed in an 18th-century colonial slave fort converted into a resthouse with a fetching view over the bay where fishing boats surfed in and out below a steep rocky slope covered in refuse. In Cape Coast we found the dirtiest, diviest accommodation in town and somehow couldn’t pass it up, but enjoyed the engaging and well organized museum at the Cape Coast Castle, if not the accompanying heat which continued on unrelenting. If, as our guidebook claimed, the children of Senya Beraku were the noisiest in Ghana, then the husslers and taxi drivers in Cape Coast and Elmina were the loudest and most insistent. As a reward for all our struggles, on the morning of my birthday we rode by shared taxi to the Elmina junction, portaged 45 minutes with our heavy backpacks into town, and hightailed it by another cab to the Coconut Grove Beach Resort where we were granted early entry to our air-conditioned room and promptly set about doing all our filthy dirty laundry in the bathroom sink.
While not without it’s African quirks, the Coconut Grove was a bonafide resort and Sam and I acknowledged feeling no small measure of culture shock as we ate ice cream with my birthday lunch (our first good meal in …) and swam in the pool next to a picturesque, palm-lined beach, helpfully raked of trash by the resort staff. While perhaps the pool and the food should have been the highlights, Sam and I instead enjoyed most reveling in the relative cool of our air-conditioned room (although we found we had to turn the heat up from the suggested 25 degrees to around 32) and watching the non-stop movie channel on the tv.
Acknowledging the first week out as having been a bit of a gauntlet, we had a tough time setting out again after two nights of calm at the resort. Eager to continue onwards (and finally upwards – North towards the border and, as we always think of it, towards the Mediterranean) we still reluctantly packed our bags and – by car, by taxi, by bus, and by tro-tro – began once again to move along.
