Rashers of bacon

This post might distress animal lovers.  I’ll italicise sections you might want to skip if a graphic description of animal sacrifice would disturb you.

Photos and videos are here (there are a couple that might disturb animal lovers if you look too closely, and I’m not talking about the snake)

The Voodoo festival at Ouidah, Benin was something we highlighted fairly early on in our travel planning as a unique event that we would like to see.  We had only a vague idea of what happens there but it just sounded intriguing.  It slotted in nicely with our planned itinerary although there was some shuffling to make sure we landed in Benin at the right time.  We arrived in Ghana three days earlier than our mammoth spreadsheet dictated which pleased our sense of planning and order.  Right on cue we arrived in Ouidah a couple of days before the festival was due to start.  Arriving in a bush taxi we were beset by taxi drivers offering to drive us to our hotel, once they collectively worked out where it was.  We agreed a price and went to walk over to the car only to find our drivers standing beside a couple of moto-taxi scooters.  We had broken our scooter virginity in Togo but now we had two big packs with us.  We prevaricated initially but were talked into it when the drivers just hoisted our large packs in between their handlebars to demonstrate how secure it was.  Luckily with us on the back as well they couldn’t get much above running pace anyway, but turning a corner on a road made of sand with that kind of weight on board was a tense experience.

In the meantime we had some Voodoo warm-up activities.  Voodoo, despite the negative connotations associated with it, is much like other organised religions, a superstition revolving around statues, appeasing the gods and warding off evil spirits.  Unlike other major religions Voodoo has not modernised and put a nice face on their beliefs.  It is still raw and for that reason comes across as more earthy than other religions.  I would argue it has done a lot less damage in Africa than the catholic church with its stance on condoms.  The pope recently visited Benin. He seems to be a fan of Voodoo having visited the home of Voodoo in Ouidah as well as Cuba with all their related Afro-Cuban religion.  The locals have no problem with people being Christian as well as using Voodoo.  They are seen as separate but not incompatible beliefs.  I think the catholic church is desperate to hang in to anyone who is a believer so probably indulge Voodoo practices on the sly.  70% of the country have Voodoo or Animist beliefs so they can’t ostracise all those people without loosing a large part of their flock (on a side-note apparently in Papua New Guinea the church faithful are called swine instead of a flock, pigs been much more important than sheep over there).

Our first taste of Ouidah Voodoo was the python temple.  This was not nearly as scary as it sounds. There is a walled-off compound you pay to enter, then the guide brings out a relatively small python and wraps it around your neck.  Sarah was our guinea pig, although luckily not guinea pig sized, and very bravely stood with the python exploring up and down her body while I captured it on camera..  I politely refused to have one around my neck now that it had woken up.  I’m quite happy to stroke a snake (no euphemism intended) but don’t feel the need to put my head in the hangman’s noose.  Forty of the pythons live in a smaller room where they laze around during the day rather than writhing over each other as in the movies.  To be fair it was blisteringly hot, as hot and humid as we had experienced on the trip so far.  The snakes liven up at night when they are let loose in the compound to hunt.  The pythons are worshipped as a god but we didn’t get too much detail on this as our guide only spoke French.  In Togo the Chief’s son at Koutammakou mocked this saying in disbelieving tones “In Benin they have a temple where they worship snakes, and they don’t even eat them!”

Ouidah sadly also has a strong history in the slave trade.  Much like the Cape Coast in Ghana Europeans traded with the local kingdom here for slaves, usually Africans from other tribes captured by the Dahomey empire in war.  To supply more and more slaves the Dahomey empire simply had more and more wars with their neighbours to capture people.  This trade lasted for 400 years.  We went for a stroll one late afternoon down to a memorial for the slaves and were quickly pounced on by three young local men who wanted to act as tourist guides.  A much better deal than simply being mugged. They took us around a few of the statues that have been erected in commemoration to the dead slaves and those that returned.  Then they asked if we wanted to see a Voodoo ceremony that was starting now.  Why not?

We went through a doorway to a dirt-floored outdoor verandah with a tin roof, a small courtyard attached to a couple of small rooms made from grey-coloured bricks.  Assembled here were a group of young men with drums.  In the room were some old men and a group of women.  Ominously there was a goat tied to a pole.  Libations were poured of some local gin of which Sarah and I partook.  It was a decent drop.  Then the drumming began in fits and starts while they searched for the rhythm they wanted.  It was a complex beat which sounded random at times but settled on a rhythm which gave a trance-like air to the proceedings.

The goat was taken inside to have leaves stuffed in its mouth.  Two men then brought it out.  One of the men held its hind legs while the second man gripped its head with one hand, knife held in the other. Even though the small goat had its mouth clamped shut sounds like muffled screams still escaped.  The killing was totally botched.  The knife was nowhere near sharp enough, more like a steak knife that one equipped for the task of killing an animal.  The man sawed into the goats throat like you would cut a tough piece of steak.  The goat struggled as blood dripped out of its neck into a waiting bowl.  Soon it struggled less and was abandoned on the ground but it was obviously not dead.  It twitched a few more times, making movements as though it was running in its sleep.  The old woman who had manned the bowl wiped her bloody fingers on the goats fur.  Meanwhile a chicken had been killed and was placed under the front legs of the prostrate goat.  The man who had cut the goat’s throat wiped the blade clean on it as well.  One man tried to break the goats neck by twisting it around but this didn’t seem to kill it either. Eventually one of the old men sitting with the drummers got fed up with the ineptitude and signalled for the goat to be taken away and killed properly.  It was then tossed back out into the courtyard dust where the old woman picked it up by the head and draped it over her shoulders.  With her goat cape in place she led the procession of dancing women around the courtyard.  The blood from the goat had been poured into something near the drummers, presumably the fetish statue in whose honour the sacrifice had been made.  The drumming continued along with the chanting and dancing of the women.  It was an intense experience for Sarah and I, especially as it had been unexpected.  It was upsetting to see an animal suffering like that but as meat eaters it would be hypocritical to criticise the sacrifice itself.  Sarah might be more inclined to become vegetarian when we get back to Sydney.  I just think that if you’re going to kill an animal, at least do it properly to cause the least suffering possible.

The three lads giving the tour were pretty reasonable about the price so we wandered off back the hotel feeling like we had experienced as authentic a Voodoo ceremony as we were likely to see. Our hotel in Ouidah cost $12 a night and wasn’t terrible, although the bed was a bit short and we were located directly above the wood-fired outdoor kitchen.  Ear plugs, travel pillows and travel sheets make almost anywhere bearable.

After all that the Voodoo festival itself was a bit of a let-down.  It’s a nationwide celebration but we were down at the beach on the seaward side of the ‘point of no return’, a memorial for the slaves.  It was stinking hot in the shade but thankfully there were free plastic chairs to sit on under open air tarpaulins.  There was special VIP seating possibly for the president (we weren’t sure what he looked like at this stage) as well as Angelique Kidjo who gave speeches in three different languages to little response from the crowd.  We were seated by pure chance in the section that was holding Voodoo royalty, a lot of sharply dressed guys in white suits and snappy hats.  There was a huge speaker stack playing music and lots of little groups with drums which combined to form a mish-mash cacophony most of the time.  It was a long way from what we pictured, a small amateurish and slightly scary festival.  This was just dull most of the time.  Once the speeches had finished the day got more interesting as all the small voodoo groups informally started drumming and dancing in their own styles.  It was illuminating to me as it proved you can dance to drum and bass music.

It was here that I came as close I as have ever come to getting my pocket picked.  We had been warned by the hotel owner that there would be pickpockets around so all the important stuff was in my money belt.  Still, I didn’t want to have my wallet nicked on principle.  As we were walking through a stream of people behind one of the tents two guys behind me and to my right jostled me into a guy coming the other way.  I felt his hand reach into my left pocket so I twisted my left shoulder into him and jammed my own hand into my pocket.  He shuffled past and as I looked back he was busy slapping dust of himself with a bandana.  We later heard that a woman at our hotel had lost her camera to a pickpocket.

It was really too hot to stick around all afternoon so we beat a retreat to our hotel, had a shower and lay under the fan.  Voodoo did not win any converts with us but it felt a million miles away from Australia so the essence of travel beat strongly through it.

Photos and videos are here (there are a couple that might disturb animal lovers if you look too closely, and I’m not talking about the snake)

View more of our photos from Koutammakou and Kara

Getting on the bus north the following morning was a much smoother experience.  The bus was like a Sydney commuter bus but with the middle doors roped shut and the alcove near the door used to jam extra bags in.  To get on and off the bus people had to clamber over the pile of luggage.  The bus is run by the post office so it doubles as the mail van and stops at all the post offices along the route, which are convenient places to go to the toilet or buy a snack or icepole.  Women sell loaves of bread, cashew nuts, fried bean curd, dried whole fish and plastic packets of water.

For the first half of the trip we sat behind a French guy called Louis who decided that after retiring from being an electrical engineer in France, rather than sit around watching TV, drinking beer and  ‘growing his gut’, he would come to Togo as a volunteer.  He’s one of these short guys that is a big bundle of energy and non-stop talker but he had a sense of humour about it and promised to leave us alone and not pester us for the whole journey.  He was helping to setup a catholic orphanage in Sokode.  The kids end up in an orphanage when their parents die of AIDS or simply can’t afford to look after them.  Louis said that there is also a large trade in children who are shipped off to neighbouring African countries to work for local families as unpaid servants, otherwise known as slaves.  He was critical of the work ethic of people in Togo saying that they will have a meeting and chew the fat for the whole meeting until they decide that they don’t have enough time to make a decision and will have to come back for a meeting the following week.  Contrasted with the Germans Louis had worked with in Europe the Togolese are incredibly inefficient.  They are often sleepy during the day because they go to church all night and don’t want to work.  In this heat I could understand that.  Louis also thought that Lome had way too much rubbish although he conceded that there’s not much people could do with it other than burn it.  He then proved to be kind of hypocritical by tossing his chewing gum wrapper out of the bus window.  This was not unusual behaviour – all the locals did exactly the same thing.  One woman tried to toss her banana skin out of the window as we were barrelling down the highway but it flew back inside and landed on a fellow passengers head.  Undeterred she tried to throw another banana peel out the window and this one flew back in as well slapping another guy in the face.

The bus journey was air-conditioned the same way as the taxis which was fine when it was moving but hellish at stops.  The journey itself, all seven hours, went through interesting landscape.  Unlike in Ghana which stayed covered in jungle as we moved north, in Togo the landscape very quickly became a dry grassy savannah with trees dotted through it.  As we drove along different images pierced the windows: a massive boabab tree with furry fruit, a flame tree, a bunch of eucalypts, a burnt out truck, a controlled fire burning by the side of the road with flames licking the road, kids washing themselves in buckets, women carrying bundles of small logs on their head, mud huts with straw roofs, people picking up the contents of an overturned truck, a billabong with lily pads, small dusty mosques with men sleeping outside on prayer mats, water taps at head height for filling bowls on your head, people making mud bricks, women with kohl around their eyes, billboards warning of AIDS, goats wandering on to the road and quickly trotting off again, school children walking home in beige uniforms along the dusty highway.

It felt like the kind of landscape where you could easily imagine an elephant stripping a tree or a lion taking a nap.  The humidity dropped the further north we went and to be honest it started to feel like an Australian summer in the outback, a nice dry heat with crackly grass and smoke in the air.  A few more hills appeared, studded with rocks and trees.

We arrived at our motel in Kara and it felt just like being in Stawell or any other dusty Australian country town with clear light.  This was especially noticeable after being on the coast which had the double curse for visibility of a thick atmosphere as well as the annual harmattan wind which blows dust and sand in from the Sahara making the sky permanently gloomy.  It was not the crystal blue skies of home in Kara but definitely brighter.

The main reason for coming north was to see the mud fortress-like houses of Koutammakou.  To do this we hired a taxi, as well as a guide to tell the taxi driver where to go, then near Koutammako we added the chief’s son to the car as the main guide who luckily spoke decent English.  It’s kind of a full employment policy Africans like to have, and who can blame them for milking the tourist dollar a little bit.  In this case it was worth every franc.  Dotted through the savannah in this valley are cylindrical mud brick houses.  We stopped at the chief’s son’s sister’s place which was in the process of being constructed.  The rooms of the house are made with wet mud which is piled on top of each other to form hollow room-sized cylinders.  When we were there two men sat on two of these cylinders that had dried previously and were slapping mud on top.  The mud was supplied by another man who picked up patties formed by yet another man and threw them to the men sitting on the cylinders.  They then shaped it much like my Dad shapes a pork pie, although if you’ve never seen him in action this might not make sense.  Suffice it to say that the rooms are slowly formed as cylinders and when completed the doors are cut into them.  The walls are water-proofed with cow dung and an oil extracted with great labour by women grinding a type of nut.  We took a quick peak in the house nearby and while it is small by modern Australian standards (but then most of the worlds housing is small compared to McMansions) they looked like perfectly comfortable places, especially if you spend most of the day outside.  Given that it rains nearly all the time in June and July you might go a little stir crazy after a while.  We were offered trinkets for sale by the chief’s sister.  She wriggled into a dress behind one of the huts being constructed before coming out.  Bare breasts are not a big deal here but I guess you don’t go flashing them around to tourists willy nilly.

We passed two boys on the highway hunting mice.  They would either take these back to their family to eat or sell them at the market.  We have passed a few random animals being sold by the highway.  There are not a lot of animals wandering around freely apart from those that have been domesticated.  I think the wild animals sensibly stick to the national parks whenever they can.

We next stopped at the chief’s village to pay our respects.  There were a number of the fortress houses here.  All the houses are built to the exact same specifications.  Before getting the tour we wandered over to the chief, past the guy milking cows and the woman grinding oil on a flat stone.  The chief was much like a male lion, just resting in the shade with a radio.  He was personable.  We shook hands and moved on.  The people in this area live in small villages of 500 people or so.  They were driven here by a war with the tribe in Benin, a major regional power.  You can see the psychological effect of the war in the way they keep making their houses, a hundred years after the last war was fought.  It is dark inside with the main light from slits to fire arrows out.  Each house has a dark room where people would hide from attackers if worst came to worst.  You have to slide between a couple of wooden poles to get in the dark room and I can imagine it being easy to defend.  The houses are two stories with the top floor housing the bathroom, bedroom and grain store.  The kitchen is hsalfway between the top and bottom floor.  They have a lot in common with a modern studio flat.  Everything is placed just where you need it.  We ate some dried boabab fruit.  There is not much fruit on it, mainly seed, and I couldn’t really tell you what the flavour was.

Next on the itinerary was the massive boabab tree where they held ceremonies.  You can squeeze inside the hollowed out trunk and which could accommodate four or five people comfortably.  The space inside the tree is about four metres high and the inside of the trunk is as tough as elephant hide.

Despite the chief’s son being well dressed and prosperous looking to greet tourists the same cannot be said for the entire village.  There were quite a few hungry looking kids and disabled old people who were doing it tough.  One old guy had a stroke so that half his face was drooping but he was still carrying bales of straw around.  In fact he kept hitting his straw in people’s faces while he turned around to talk, much to everyone’s amusement.  You would say that one old lady was bed-ridden except she was not in bed, she was lying in the dirt out the front of her house.  I guess she could talk to people as they wandered by at least.

The village is self-sufficient.  They grow all their own food and only buy some soap and shoes from the market.  They grow millet, maize and cotton.  Maybe their fortunes go up after harvest time and when it’s raining but from the crowd following us around begging for change it looked like they were doing it a bit tough.  I’m not saying they were starving to death or anything like that, just poor.  We did see deeper poverty in town where a couple of guys were the definition of ‘dirt poor’.

A couple of the young men gave a fighting demonstration which involves one guy with a whip attacking another guy who defends himself with a stick.  The chief’s son managed to deafen himself with a whip crack that must have broken the sound barrier.

As we left the next batch of tourists rolling through.  It’s kind of sobering to think that this is a relatively prosperous pocket of rural Africa.  I’m not sure how much money trickles down from the chief to all the people in the village but I like to think that they look after their own.

That night Sarah had a suicidal desire for fufu.  We were staying in a hotel 3km from the centre of town.  There are no taxis to speak of, just moto-taxis, small 125cc bikes that constantly ride up and down the road.  Sarah desperately wanted to try some authentic African food.  The meals we had been eating were good but mainly French or Italian in style.  We previously had banku (fermented corn meal paste) but had not had fufu (pounded yam or cassava mash).  We started walking in to town and had not gone 20 metres when a moto-taxi pulled up offering us a ride.  No no, we said.  Both of us can’t fit on one.  Sure you can, he replied.  Sarah got on behind him and I sat on a rack behind her.  We didn’t have helmets but, somewhat reassuringly, neither did the driver.  I think it is the most dangerous thing we have done so far on the trip.  I rode a motorbike for a year and had two minor accidents on the smooth roads of Canberra.  Falling off hurts and getting hit by one of the trucks thundering past would have caused injuries that I’m doubtful northern Togo is setup to handle.  We made it to the restaurant ok, swerving around the potholes and slowing down for speed humps, and we even made it back at the end of the night without incident.  Sarah, the woman who seriously wanted to fly from Benin to Rwanda via Europe to avoid an African airline, got off this death trap and exclaimed “That was fun!” Well it was fun, as long as you don’t crash.

The fufu was not really worth it, although interesting to try.  I would eat fufu over banku but there is not much in it.  The consistency of fufu is the same as if you take mashed potato and whisk it in a blender until it is stretchy and smooth.  It’s as thick as a dumpling.  You take a handful of fufu and dip it in the sauce of your choice, which is tasty.  The fufu itself doesn’t taste like much at all.

The bus journey back down south was fairly uneventful apart from the fellow passengers.  It was one of the noisiest buses I’ve been on.  West Africans are not shy and retiring by nature but these guys were booming at each other as we took off.  At one of the stops we were just about to pull away when this French guy with lion mane hair and a goatee stopped the bus to jump on.  This caused pandemonium on the bus but as it was in French we couldn’t figure out precisely why.  The French guy was yelling, all the passengers were yelling, the French guy kept tapping his watch and laughing.  He had an African wife and child but looked more like a fading 80s rocker.

The bus erupted at a later stop, we think because we started to leave without one of the passengers who got off to go to the toilet.  The passengers were screaming at the conductor and getting incredibly heated about it.  The guy who was left behind had to restrain fellow passengers when he got back on, telling them to calm down.

We got into Lome after dark, found a taxi driver who didn’t know where our hotel was again, but this time we had a map and were located in a simpler part of town to find.  The hotel was lovely, great French food and a little swimming pool with cold water.  It was an oasis of calm.

View more of our photos from Koutammakou and Kara

When you’ve crossed a land border in Israel the West African version is somewhat underwhelming. We got to the border in another tro-tro, this one ruthlessly fast but safely driven with no air-conditioning but plenty of air-cooling coming in the open windows.  We were deposited in Afloa, the tro-tro station being a convenient walk from the border.

We crouched in the shade of a wall while we ate leftover pizza we had brought with us and I tried to ring MTN, the mobile company we had a Ghanaian SIM with, in the vain hope of finding out whether the SIM would work in Togo.  This being a public holiday for New Year’s Day (actually Monday the second) I got the expected waiting music which made for some entertainment while I chomped my food.

Afloa in Ghana borders with the capital of Togo which is called Lome.  It is on the coast so as you walk up to the border you catch glimpses of the glistening water and tanker ships out on the horizon.  It’s a very pretty spot for a border, but this is not the place to be sightseeing.  We had important things to do like stand in line and watch bored officials stamp our passports.  Getting out of Ghana was simple enough once we had established where the passport office was.  We were checked by the officials then waved through by guards.  On the Togolese side the official held court on the verandah of a dilapidated building with the sea sparkling behind him.  We were purchasing a seven day visa which required a hell of a lot of stamps, including one postage stamp showing the price.  It makes a nice change for passport geeks in these days of visa waivers and no stamps at all in many places.

Sarah confessed later to being annoyed at how slow he was going but I would rather have a well done visa than a slap dash version with mistakes in it.  We didn’t have any urgent need to get going.  It was just after lunch and the sun had some sting in it.  The official called over a passing boy selling cold drinks from a cart, then told him to wait in a classic power play.  When he finally ordered the drink he told the boy to place it on his desk, “No, no, not there, put it there!”  He didn’t look at the drink for a while but when he did noticed that the boy had the last laugh by not opening the non-screw top bottle. When finally the last stamp had been carefully placed in our passports the official had to take our passports off to another building, which was the most anxious event for me.  I never like to see my passport wandering off without me.  All was well and we went through one final check before getting our taxi.

As usual the taxi driver had not heard of our hotel but there was a guy hanging around (one of the few West Africans I have seen with a full beard) who gave directions and got some change from the driver for his assistance before clicking his heels and giving a mock salute.  So we were on our way into the thin sliver of a nation called Togo.

View all the Cape Coast photos

Travelling in the developing world is never a totally relaxing experience, especially when the tro-tro transport have window stickers proclaiming their trust in God to look after them (I prefer not to overtake on blind corners, leaving it to divine intervention to sort out – if there is a God it’s not a traffic controller).  The tro-tro is a beaten-up van that gets jammed full with as many people as possible, bags shoved under the seats, and is a cheap and quick way to get around.  At least that’s what we tell ourselves as we go past the huge billboard with the 2009 road toll numbering in the thousands.  Not sure what happened in 2010 but I’m guessing the toll didn’t go down a lot.

As in most places outside the western world seat belts are entirely optional, if they exist at all.  If there is a belt, the buckle is missing.  The Ghanaian taxis all have a seat belt for the driver but that is only deployed when a police road block appears.  They put the seat belt on to get through the road block, then immediately take it off again as though it’s burning their skin.  The tro-tros don’t have the hint of a seat belt.  You’re lucky if there’s a board to cover the hole in the floor and the door closes properly.  Sarah is freaked out by flying in Africa but the road transport scares me more and seems far more likely to cause injury.

Ghanaians are nuts about football and are justifiably proud of their national team.  Men play football everywhere, on dirt pitches, patches of grass next to the road, any flat surface is a potential place to prove their skills.  We had travelled to Cape Coast in a tro-tro, which was ironically a much better experience than the government run STC coach service which broke down three times leaving Accra.  At Cape Coast for a change of pace we watched the sun go down while having drinks and dinner next to the beach, and when I say next to I mean two steps up from the sand.  In front of us a dozen guys played a game of football with the ocean being out of bounds.  Some guys took a break from the game by just diving straight in to an oncoming wave.  It was high tide and the beach was narrow and steep but these guys were playing pretty seriously.  Later on a guy came up claiming to represent the team and asking for money as sponsorship.  He was chatting away making his pitch when we heard this creaking from above.  He looked up and said “Holy shit!” as a huge palm tree branch crashed down on our table completely obliterating Sarah’s glass.  We knew enough to be worried about coconuts but the branches are a new and interesting form of danger.  No-one seemed too fussed about it.  The glass was swept up and everyone got on with their lives.

Cape Coast is a town famous for being the centre of the slave trade.  Cape Coast and the nearby Elmina both have European built castles on the water which were used to house slaves before they were shipped off like cattle.  We did a tour and it’s chilling and horrifying to hear about the conditions that these people were put in.  We stood in an underground stone room with a tour group of about 40 people which comfortably filled half the room.  They used to put 200 people in a room the same size with just a few small windows at the top for ventilation and a glimmer of light.  There were drains in the floor to carry sewage away but these quickly became blocked so that these poor people would be standing in six centimetres of filth.  They stayed here for often weeks at a time while they waited for a ship to arrive which they would then be crammed in and taken off to Europe. 20 to 30% mortality rate was standard.  The companies involved bought and branded these human beings.  It’s an awful indictment on humanity that we can sink so low.  All the major sea powers of the time were involved.  As one rose to prominence they would take the castle of the previous owners: Portuguese, Dutch, English, Swedes, they all had their snouts in the trough.  Slaves were traded for European goods such as tobacco and weapons and were supplied by the ruling African tribe in the region, captured in wars or criminals offered up.  Not surprisingly these castles had a lot of African-American tourists who can no doubt trace their ancestry back here.

While walking along the beach near Elmina castle, Sarah snapping away, some small boys ran up and asked her to take a photo of her.  One of the small boys had a steak knife which he held in a pose pretending to stab Sarah with it.  I’m not sure to what extent he was fooling around but he stopped when he caught me staring at him.  After the photo a teenage boy came up at started berating Sarah for taking the photo without permission.  When she argued that the boys had asked for the photo he said they weren’t old enough to give consent, and anyway, if he came to Australia and started taking photos of people they would demand money.  This didn’t make much sense.  If it was a shakedown he didn’t approach it the right way because Sarah just deleted the photo.  When we thought about the incident in retrospect it’s hard to think of a place where black anger against white people is more justified so it’s hard to get to huffy about being yelled at.

People in Ghana are generally friendly, if not a little too friendly at times.  Sarah gets advances all the time, not that I can blame the guys, she is gorgeous.  One teenage boy kept smiling at Sarah and touching himself which started to get off-putting.  They are also not shy about asking for money.  The little kids come running out saying “Money! Money!” in greeting.  One of the tour guides we had whipped out his member to take a piss while carrying on a conversation with us.  One tro-tro driver pulled over to take a whizz and didn’t move much beyond the driver’s door to do so.  It’s all much more open and upfront here which usually manifests itself as friendliness but can tip over into machismo bullshit.

Cape Coast itself, like any other built up area in Ghana, is a very ordinary olfactory experience.  The open drains are clogged with rubbish and dirty water, garbage tips are really just a concentration of rubbish, not their sole location.  There is shit strewn everywhere, scattered over everything.  I don’t know if it’s lack of garbage collection or just littering but when it’s hot and humid the sweet stench of garbage everywhere does not make wandering around a pleasant experience.  Add to that the smell of dried fish in all the coastal towns and I hope you’re getting the picture that the cities at best smell bad and at worst are putrid.  Coincidentally I had just read a book about the history of water and civilisation which described the Great Stink in London in 1858 which goes to show that our relatively clean smelling cities are a relatively recent outcome.  Shakespeare’s London would have been much more like Cape Coast than the modern London.

View all the Cape Coast photos

The full set of Accra photos are here

After a brief overnighter in Dubai, which seemed ridiculously modern and comfortable after Jordan, we flew into the heart of Africa.  Well, not the heart exactly, a little more to the west and on the coast to the capital of Ghana, Accra.  For those that have been following my various travels for over a decade you might remember my missed flight to Egypt (curse London traffic) so it was a redemptive feeling to get off the plane on the African continent at last.

Big cities are not the major attraction of Africa, especially sub-saharan.  If Accra is indicative of the general standard then we will be avoiding them as much as possible.  Accra is bogged in traffic, polluted in every way imaginable and has nothing to recommend it other than the people being easy going.  Hotels are stupidly expensive so we stayed in the one place that could be booked over the internet without breaking the bank.  The room itself was good.  We got a free upgrade to a huge room with air-conditioning so no complaints there.  On the downside it was 30 minutes to an hour from downtown, depending how lost the taxi driver got, had nothing worthwhile to see nearby (and I include restaurants and supermarkets in that list) and the promised internet was always going to be fixed tomorrow (welcome to Africa).  They also served some very ordinary food.  The fried chicken was a strange colour and served with fried rice that had half a tin of white pepper in it.  When we tried the local food one night, okra stew with banku, a fermented maize dough, it was pretty hard to get down. The stew had flavourings of dried fish which you see sitting in the sun at the market and a layer of red palm oil on the surface.  The banku sticks to the roof of the mouth and its additional flavouring of raw fermented dough don’t improve the dish.

We didn’t exactly have high expectations for Accra so none of this was especially disappointing.  We had early nights and watched Game of Thrones on our laptop.  Local TV was mainly comprised of soap operas from all over the world which were instantly addictive.  The local news broadcast had some comical technical quirks, such as when the newsreader finished her introduction only for the stories stock footage to continue for thirty seconds before the required quote came up, or if there is not enough footage for the words they will just loop the footage over and over.  The local newsreader was in traditional dress, something a bit like a toga, which looked very impressive.  The traditional clothing is fantastically colourful.  Women on the street wear colourful dresses with babies swaddled to their back with some cloth.  It doesn’t look all that comfortable for their baby.  Their heads are jammed up against their Mum’s back but they sleep peacefully all the same.

The school girls here all have shaved heads which is a very practical and conformist hair cut.  It carries on sometimes into adulthood as well which strikes me as preferable in a hot climate to the massive piles of dreads that some people sport.  I got a haircut in Accra as well and I have to say that, although time consuming, it was the best haircut of my life.  I arrived in Africa in dire need of a trim not having had any hair lopped off since my last haircut in Sydney.  My hair tends not to grow down so much as out, becoming incredibly thick and burdensome.  Maybe this is not helped by my “no shampoo” challenge. I haven’t used shampoo in years, the idea being that natural oils in your head balance out given time. This is generally not a problem but with my hair turning into a birds nest it was essential to lighten my load on arrival in the tropics, and what better time to get my head completely shaved for the first time.

We turned up at one of the many shanty town style hole in the wall barbers and sat down to wait my turn.  When I got in the chair it turned out the the barber only had a number one gate which was shorter than I was prepared to go without knowing how my head was going to look, so even though it was only $3 we had to bid him farewell.  He pointed out a fancier barber down the street where I paid a whole $10, but what a haircut experience it was.  Blessedly air-conditioned with the most comfortable chairs I have ever experienced while getting trimmed.  The barber gave me a short back and sides then proceeded to nervously trim my hair.  After some failed communication attempts he got the message and gleefully shaved my entire head.  That was not the end of the experience.  As Sarah sat on the couch sipping her drink I had my newly exposed scalp massaged with a variety of oils and creams until I felt a new man.  $10 well spent.

Our business during the day was admin related, getting a Benin visa, a local sim card, local money.  We got driven around in taxis in what we can only assume was especially bad pre-Christmas traffic.  God help them if it’s like this all the time. Spray painted on walls everywhere are messages saying “Don’t urinate here….or here….or here” and “This property is NOT for sale.”  People wander through the traffic selling all sorts of potentially useful items, fruit, brushes for sweeping the dust from the inside of your car, mobile phone top-up cards, small appliances, all mainly carried in large metal bowls on their heads.  They do a roaring trade in fresh water which is sold in a soft plastic cube a corner of which is then ripped off to suck the water out as you drive a couple of tourists around in your taxi.

It’s not easy finding your way around as a taxi driver.  Many places don’t have a street address for the very practical reason that many of the streets don’t have names and almost none have numbers.  You’re lucky to get a suburb to go to and then it’s a matter of asking people when you get there if they know when the Benin embassy is, for example.  For the limited directions they get these guys do amazingly well but it’s not a very efficient system for a city of around 3 million residents.  Rubbish is strewn everywhere which might be due to lack of bins and garbage collection.  It’s actually cleaner than a lot of other cities in developing countries we have seen.  There are some slums which we drove through on their dirt roads as shortcuts every now and then.  Apart from horrendously unsanitary drains, no doubt there is no running water, they are clean and well organised.  There are little shops everywhere all with religious names like Jesus Weeps for You Barber shop.  Religious labelling extends to the bumper stickers such as “Thank you Lord J” and “U + Jesus = Enough”.  The radio in taxis is often tuned to the preaching station where African preachers ramble on with completely random statements made to cheering crowds.

The only sightseeing we did was to go to the memorial for Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the former socialist president of Ghana who was deposed and ended up dying in Guinea after being co-president of that country.  We also made it to the national museum which had some interesting drums and textiles but was mainly interesting for its new music exhibition which had a couple of videos, one on hip-life, a Ghanaian brand of music most similar to big band which has been mixed with hip-hop in recent years.  They also had a video showing a pidgin musical, which was actually a hip-hop opera called Cov ov Moni.  Check it out on YouTube or buy the soundtrack.

In between the memorial and the museum we walked through the big open air market in town.  In was complete chaos as vendors crowded the footpath with their pile of shows or bowls full of live enormous snails (hopefully not the ones that give you bilharzia and kidney failure but we weren’t going to be the guinea pigs for that).  We saw a photo of the same street a couple of days later on the frontpage of the paper and if possible the crowds became even worse in the days before Christmas.  It looked more like a mosh pit than a market with cars trying to force their way through the crowds.

We went for a traditional pre-Christmas trip to the mall while we were waiting for our Benin visa to be ready.  It is a new mall on the northern outskirts of the city where the burgeoning middle class hang out and the suburbs stretch to the horizon.  It was odd to see shelves full of whitening cream in the pharmacy.  I guess everyone just wants olive coloured skin.  Guiness have the Ghana soft drink and beer market totally sewn up, lord knows how.  They even make a popular non-alcoholic malt drink which tastes a bit like sweet weetbix mush.  We got a hit of carols, stocked up on mince pies and were on our way down the coast for a ten day break by the beach.

The full set of Accra photos are here