See all the photos from Fantas Folly
When we started ringing around from Accra for places to stay on the Ghanaian coast over Christmas things did not look promising at first. Many places did not have the ten days in a row we wanted or bumped up the price to huge levels over the Christmas break. We somehow stumbled across the Fanta’s Folly website and a good thing too because it was a perfect spot. The bungalows are right on the beach. In fact, just as we were drifting off to the sound of waves on our first night Sarah’s genetic death and destruction response clicked in and she checked with me what our tidal wave emergency response procedure would be, that’s how close we were to the crashing Atlantic. There is no tidal wave emergency response procedure, by the way. We would be screwed.
The other attraction of Fanta’s Folly is the food. The owner is originally from France although has been in Africa for over 15 years. Fanta is his Nigerian wife. They have a good simple menu including freshly made pasta, which is a god send, and the best tasting tomatoes I have tried in living memory. Fresh fish in coconut sauce, chicken cooked in red wine, crepes for dessert, all very well done by their cook from Burkina Faso.
So we were quite happy to laze around the beach for a while doing not very much while the rest of the world went crazy with Christmas. It wasn’t all plain sailing to get here though. We caught the STC bus which is a government run long distance coach service. The taxi driver taking us to the station used to drive for them but was highly critical of how the company is run and we experienced this first hand. Getting on the bus was even classically African in style. We bought a ticket for the 8am bus to Takoradi, the oil boom town near where we were staying. When the bus to the Ivory Coast rolled in at 7:15 I went over to the luggage to make sure we weren’t loaded by mistake. The award for most unusual baggage item goes to the ambulance door. I think it will be hard to top.
“Where are you going?” an official looking man in a yellow t-shirt asked. When I responded “Takoradi” he assured me that this bus was stopping there and that we might as well just get on this one. We loaded the bags up and I went to tell Sarah. Meanwhile the main baggage attendant came over to us and said “Why did you put your bags on there? That’s not your bus!”. I went to get the bags off and the yellow t-shirt man said “What are you doing?”. I politely requested that the two conflicting opinions be sorted out without me being the intermediary and it was finally established that we would be getting on this bus.
It was a mixed blessing. Although the bus was earlier it broke down about three times. Something to do with an air-conditioning fan belt, although the driver just pulled over to the side of the road at very random times and then managed to limp along to the next town. At one stage we were pulled over in a middle-of-nowhere town, just too far from our destination to contemplate catching a taxi, with the engine off and all the windows open trying to extract whatever passing zephyr would evaporate the sweat from our skin. Sarah called on the travel charter’s command to embrace waiting and I was just enjoying reading my book and not having to do anything else. At one breakdown near some jungle people got off to relieve themselves, including Sarah who went a little way down a path for some privacy. Some women followed her saying “We were too scared to come down here, but then we saw you so thought it must be ok.” It’s hard to tell whether their fear is misplaced. In retrospect it was the perfect place for Sarah’s female penis. This is not a medical condition but a device that allows women to pee standing up. It’s hard to picture precisely the situation when this device will be deployed. You will be the first to know.
When we arrived and caught a taxi to Fanta’s Folly in took another hour to arrive, most of that along a dirt road that got progressively narrower the further we got. Intersections were marked with signs although one almost covered by foliage nearly escaped us. We drove through small villages with rutted dirt roads that somehow managed to have massive speaker stacks pumping out beats. The taxi driver started to get exasperated. After each turn when we hadn’t arrived he would subtly throw his hands up off the steering wheel. At last we saw the beach, gave the driver a tip, and began relaxing.
The palm tree fringed white sand beach is accompanied by a steep descent to the dumpers rolling in. Swimming is an energetic business of diving beneath the foaming, arching waves or jumping over the top of them. We weren’t game to go out beyond the breakers not knowing what rips and undertows were lurking in wait. There are no lifeguards sitting around in wait for a ‘drowning not waving’ hand to flash at them. You would have to flag down a passing fishing boat. Fanta’s Folly has small fishing villages either side. One village has a big drag net that they haul in by hand each lunchtime. You can see fishing boats off on the horizon, really just oversized canoes.
There are dogs lounging all around and a few kittens as well. A new puppy turned up while we were there and got the kids excited. He had to crawl under a table to escape from them, only emerging to gnaw on their hands. A few batches of turtle eggs hatched while we were here as well and we watched them being launched into the surf.
After a few days we even went on a tour of the neighbouring village. It’s recommended to get a guide because unofficial tolls can operate on the road to the village, ie. all the money you have on you. Our guide was called Francis and he had training. He learned that you should treat tourists well and not rob them. That way you will develop a good reputation. He didn’t rob us but he did try to charge us double the going rate and incessantly talked about the business he wanted to start which would sell mobile top up cards and only needed a hundred or two hundred cedis to get started. Sarah talked about how he could get a loan or micro-finance but Francis didn’t want to feel obligated, he just wanted some cash from us. He also asked for a laptop a lot which variously was going to be donated to orphans or help him go to school. The tour was kind of interesting. We saw a palm wine distillation factory, really just some barrels in the jungle with a fire going underneath. They take palm liquid directly from the tree, ferment it to make a yeasty wine which you can drink straight but which also forms the basis for stronger moonshine. We bought some palm wine which later kept fermenting in the bottle and exploded in our room when I opened it (against Sarah’s recommendation, let it be noted).
We also saw how the palm oil is processed. Palm oil has a bad reputation in the west because in a lot of countries they are cutting down prime forest to plant palm trees. The oil is gathered from a but which is dried, husked and crushed producing a very red oil which doesn’t taste fantastic in my opinion. We had a dish called red red at a nearby beach restaurant which consists of fried plantain and black eyed peas all cooked in red palm oil. Not bad but not great. We also saw the charcoal manufacturing plant, a clearing in the jungle with wood burning under a huge pile of earth.
Sarah later did a canoe trip up the estuary with Francis. When Sarah arrived at the canoe spot Francis was drunk and invited her into the beach bar for a drink which Sarah reluctantly agreed to. They eventually got on a canoe with a young guy doing the paddling who asked Sarah if she was alone. “No, my husband is at the bungalows”. “Are you lonely?” was the response. Francis spoke sharply to him in the local language but later somehow managed to lose his shirt when sitting next to Sarah talking about the laptop some more. The tour was incredibly lame. They saw a small crab, a small bird and a crab cage after paddling around one bend in the creek. It lasted forty minutes then it was time to go back. As they were returning Sarah went to take a landscape photo which an old man in a canoe drifted into. “Don’t take my photo!” he yelled at her. “”Don’t worry, I didn’t,” Sarah yelled back before Francis added “She can take your fucking photo if she wants to, she’s with me!”. This degenerated into a slanging match as they drifted back to the beach. All along the two guys kept asking Sarah if she was happy, an esoteric question which Sarah didn’t answer directly. Francis pocketed the tour money and indicated that Sarah might want to give the paddler a tip. She politely declined when the paddler came over and pointed him over to Francis who looked uncomfortable. Sarah did not feel guilty about this.
Sarah had a few drumming lessons from a rasta at the Butre town end of the beach. She enjoyed sitting on the beach as the sun went down losing herself in the beats. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I know I won’t be drumming when I get back to Australia and it just felt phony for me to do it, but Sarah had a blast, the teacher was a decent guy and she now has a reliable dum-dum-tap-tap-tap-tap-dum-dum beat to call on if needed in the future. On her last lesson some locals even came over for some booty shaking dancing, so as her teacher says, Sarah must be a natural.
The rest of the time we just ate nice food for dinner on the outside restaurant with fireflies joining us or had an afternoon drink on the beach while we sorted photos from the Middle East. On Christmas Eve there was a special four course menu which was tasty and then a reggae bonfire beach party down near the village of Butre. A bunch of the guests walked down there and they definitely had a good bonfire going with the help of some diesel. It was baking hot until it died down to coals. Fireworks are traditional at Christmas apparently but I don’t think the couple accidentally aimed at party-goers were appreciated. I positioned myself behind a convenient bamboo pole. The reggae band was pretty good, playing some old classics, and Sarah got dancing tips from the locals, so ask about her booty shake the next time you see her. We walked back up the beach watching the phospherescence in the sand as we trod on it. We’re unlikely to have a Christmas like it again.
See all the photos from Fantas Folly
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