View all the photos from Kumasi and Lake Bosumtwi
We had to celebrate New Year’s Eve somewhere and owing to circumstance we ended up in the centre of Ghana in a city called Kumasi, core of the Ashanti kingdom. While staying near the beach for eleven nights we had developed a habit of going to bed pathetically early, almost straight after dinner, watching a couple of episodes of something on the computer then falling asleep to the waves. It was always unlikely that on NYE we would be able to rouse ourselves to stay up late but it was extra challenging when we exited the restaurant at 8:30pm and found the streets almost empty. We are adventurous, but wandering the streets of a strange Ghanaian town until midnight did not seem prudent.
We had been in one of those restaurants with a mammoth menu that does Indian, Chinese and pizza. The Indian food was surprisingly good so Sarah and I recounted our past NYEs over a few beers. This one was turning out to be somewhere in the middle, neither a highlight nor one of the worst, and lord knows it’s possible to have a bad NYE. When we left the restaurant it turned out that everyone was in church. This is the tradition in Ghana. There are huge billboards advertsing “Crosssover 2011” at the Accra sports stadium, or “Passover 2011” featuring a baptist style pastor who rants for a while to bring in the new year. We popped our heads in a local church on the way back to the sparse Presbyterian Guesthouse where we were sleeping. There was an electronic organ and lots of loud singing. We stayed for a few songs sung in the local Kwi language we assume, then at some signal everyone started shaking hands with everyone else, us included, and wishing a happy new year. It was kind of heart-warming so we didn’t get into a contraception debate – the timing didn’t seem right. We were tucked up in bed well before midnight with earplugs blocking the church singing in the distance.
A couple of days previously we had spent two nights at Lake Bosumtwi which is about an hour from Kumasi. The lake was formed from a meteorite strike and is about 30 kilometres in diameter. You can really see the crater as the lake is ringed by hills that were obviously pushed up with the impact. The lake is a popular spot for people getting away from the bustle of Kumasi, especially because unlike a lot of lakes in this part of the world it is reputedly bilharzia free. This might sound like a technical detail until I reveal that bilharzia are minute worms (flukes) that can enter your skin while you paddle and in the worst case scenario cause kidney failure or permanent bowel damage. So even though it was a warm day and there were other tourists swimming around I would rather cool down in the shower given the option.
We did take a canoe out on the lake, although calling it a canoe is making it sounds more grandiose than the reality. It was more like a plastic bath tub big enough for two. Sarah sat in the front and paddled backwards while I sat in the back and stroked more conventionally. We bickered incessantly about stroke timing and who was paddling harder but the lake shore slowly slipped by as we grazed the plastic bottles and bamboo marking where the fishing nets lay. In an hour we paddled as far as the village we had walked to the previous evening in about fifteen minutes. We got back and had a cooling drink on hard wooden seats next to the lake.
Kumasi was historically interesting if nothing else. At least it didn’t smell like dried fish, but that was about the only olfactory improvement. It’s a city of a million people bustling and driving their way around. It is a bit higher and cooler than the coast but the sun burns more. It is famous for having the largest market in West Africa, but I fail to see how this is a tourist attraction. Small markets are bad enough but the biggest is just a nightmare of people squeezing past sidewalks jam packed with Chinese products for sale which no-one is buying. Sarah thought the place had good energy but I just saw chaos.
Kumasi is the traditional home of the Ashanti kingdom which is the dominant tribe in the area. They used to supply slaves to the Europeans from the other people they had conquered. We had a tour of one of the smallest museums I have seen, just a courtyard with four alcoved walls housing showcases. There was some interesting stuff. A bracelet made from lion’s teeth, an elephant tail fly swatter, the gold weighing system with matching symbolic metal money, a replica stool of the fake stool the Ashanti made to try and fool the British who coveted it (the fake stool was really copper with gold plating). Ashanti thrones are stools so thr leaders are stooled and destooled, which has to be the most unflattering term for losing power.
We toddled along to the Ashanti palace next where we were given a tour by a guide who was a mixture of rambling and officious. He would go into these long parables about his thery of life and then hassle us to take a photo of the wax model of the previous king quickly, not that we wanted to take a picture of it in the first place. While they call it a palace it is really more like a modest two-storey suburban home by modern standards, though I guess it’s all relative if your subjects are living in a mud hut. The British burned down the original palace looking for the golden stool at the turn of the 20th century. There could be an Austin Powers plot line in that.
The journey back to Accra was a nightmare. Not as bad as our twelve hour epic in Argentina where they blasted us with movies at full volume, including Unthinkable which is fittingly all about graphic torture, exactly what we were feeling ourselves. View our top ten worst bus trips of all time. We got on a tro-tro from Kumasi to Accra but this one was coach-sized. We still had to wait for an hour before it left while the buses from the VIP bus company rolled past us. In retrospect their more modern buses would have been a much better choice. As it was we were stuck on the bus without proper air-conditioning and dodgy suspension. The suspension was not helped when they loaded a motorcycle in the underneath luggage compartment. Every small bump on the road turned the bus into a pogo stick and we had to go over speed bumps below walking speed or everyone hit the roof. On an ordinary road this might not have been such an issue but the road out of Kumasi had speed bumps every five minutes so the going was slow initially, then became much slower when we hit the dirt road about 100 kilometres from Accra. The road leading up to this point had been fine. I suspect that the good road was in a part of the country which has a government minister looking after it. It staggers me that the road between a city of one million and a city of three million could have such a long stretch of ungraded dirt road with hog-sized potholes. We crawled along this stretch in the hot sun as more VIP buses overtook us. Driving through the towns you see houses and roadside stalls all painted red or yellow. This is not traditional, they are advertising either vodafone or the MTN mobile networks. Even the smallest towns have been painted up.
To add insult to injury we picked up a pastor at the one stop we made. Initially he just sat on a little plastic stool in between the rows of seats. This precarious position is the passenger overflow area where they can jam even more people in if they have to. The pastor was a man around my age in a dark suit, which immediately made him stand out. As he was sitting there the passenger sitting next to him bit into a chunk of pineapple, the juice of which squirted all over his face. He wiped himself down with a hanky and did not look amused. When we hit the dirt he stood up to face the bus and started his hour long rant (sermonizing I guess), again presumably in Kwi. We didn’t understand a lot of it thankfully. He mentioned his passport and credit card a few times for some reason. Sarah thought he sounded like Biff from back to the future. The passengers gave some half-hearted hallelujahs and amens when prompted but it was too hot and bumpy to be enthusiastic about anything. Towards the end he started asking for cash but it didn’t sound like he was having too much luck with this either.
We got into the bus station, a dirt patch in a shanty town where a couple of boys carried our bags to the VIP bus station in our futile attempt to buy a VIP bus ticket for the Togo border the next day (VIP didn’t ply that route). We rang around nearby hotels to see if anyone had room and got a budget place which did us fine.
View all the photos from Kumasi and Lake Bosumtwi
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