Part Four - The Highlife
Happy New Years one and all. Hope you all had a great time over the festive season. We've certainly had a relaxing time here in Ghana, with not much cycling to report.
From Bobo Dioulassou in Burkina Faso we caught a bus to Ouagadoudou and spent a few days there chasing our Ghana visas. Ouaga has some of the best music in West Africa and we spent one very memorable night travelling from pub to pub being chaffeured by Phillipe in his Peugot 504 with a crazy French crew. We started back at the hotel and progressed to a number of street bars and after visiting the craziest night spots in town ended up in a a street bar just down the road from our hotel drinking cardboard cask wine. A trucker brought all the whites at the bar drinks for helping him navigate his truck round the corner. Danny managed to donate his but poor old Jonny wasnt so luckyand ended up with a nasty hangover.
From Ouga we headed down to Po in a bus and the cycled across the border to Bolgatanga. The countryside was starting to get a lot greener and there were lots of cool huts painted with Zebra patterns . We hadn't been on the bikes for over a week and it was great to be cycling again. After Bolgatanga we caught buses right down to Accra as Jonnys sister Steph was arriving from France and we didn't have time to cycle. The roads were attrocious anyway and it probably would have been suicidal to try cycling. The traffic was shocking, it took us 10 hours to cover the couple of hundred kilometres from Kumasi to Accra.
One of the first thing we noticed in Ghana was the friendliness of the people up North. We constantly got helped without people demanding anything for it. The second thing we noticed was the money. The largest note is worth less than a US dollar so its hard not to be carrying large wads of cash everywhere.
We miscalculated the time it would take to get to the airport to meet Steph and arrived four hours to early. Luckily there was a big football match between Ghana and Tunisia going on and we were treated to scenes of fans running on the pitch when the police got overexcited and fired tear gas into the crowd. After that and the Tunisian goalkeeper being rushed to hospital after suspectedly getting hit by a shoe the game continued and the when the Ghanians won the bar and the whole town errupted into celebration. Unfortunately Stephs plane arrived a little early and we found her in the departure compound a bit freaked out and unwilling to venture out into the sea of black faces waiting at the gate.
We headed out to Kokrobite for a couple of days relaxation on the beach and never quite made it out of the place ... although we did get 500m down the road to a local pizza restaraunt one day before deciding it was too late in the day to leave. We stayed at Wendy's place (a.k.a) Big Millys back yard and spent the days swimming, chatting to Douglas and Steph , surfng and buying bananas . Douglas was another mad cyclist but hed done the trip in real style travelling the whole way from South Africa without taking public transport. Hed even made through Central Africa and had a few tales to tell, one if which involved scaring people with his rubber snake. It was the perfect end to our trip down through West Africa. The were lots of other westerners there and the realities of travelling in Africa were safely kept behind the compound fence.
We did manage one day out however and visited Cape Coast Castle and Kakum National park. Cape Coast Castle is one of the old slaving/trading forts that are dotted every twenty or thirty kilometres along the coast. It was originally built by the Dutch but changed hands many times as different European powers came to dominate the Coast. It had a video presentation room and museum and was well worth the visit.
Afterwards we headed out to Kakum National Park which has a walkway suspended 30 or so metres about rainforest floor . The scenery wasn't that much different to some of the forest in New Zealand but the view from the walkway was really novel. We managed to lag behind the main party and were rewarded by views of monkeys playing in the forest. At first Jonny saw a movement in the forest and after a few seconds Danny spotted one. After a few minutes we could see a quite a few of them playing and eating.
Christmas was a big celebration at Wendy's. We booked in for the big Christmas meal and werent dissapointed. By 9pm we were absolutely stuffed with food and couldnt possibly fit in the extra christmas puddings that Steph had brough as emergency supplies from France. Unfortunately the live band had something against the speakers and tried there hardest to blow them. The locals didnt seem to mind to much and danced away in the wall of sound while the rest of us escaped to the beach for some peace.
Steph returned to Accra early just in case the elections turned nasty. The never did but there were some very unhappy looking people wandering around and the atmosphere was tense for a couple of days. We stayed in our old favourite, the Kokomlemle hotel, where the manager Seth had stored all our gear. We got the top floor rooms with a nice breeze and great views over the city and have spent the last couple of days conserving money and waiting for our flight on the 3rd to Nairobi. Were flying Air Afrique which is notorious for delays so weve got our fingers crossed. The plan is to head down from Nairobi to Arusha, to Dar es Salaam from there and the down into Malawi. But as we've found with this trip so far all plans have to be very flexible. We've also decided to try and cycle the entire distance to Cape Town from Nairobi which is a big ask so watch this space to see how we get on.
Anyway, best luck to you all in the New Years. We'll try and get out another email soon.
Jonny and Danny
