Accra was a glimpse of hell, set against a tropical backdrop with tropical heat drawing sweat from wells in the skin that you didn’t know existed. Vehicles sputter down potholed roads vomiting black clouds. People inhale dirtied air into blackened lungs causing eyes to itch, noses to run, and mucous to gather at the back of the throat. Everything smells like diesel fumes and rotting garbage, with the occasional hint of feces. It is the only city I’ve ever been to without a single pretty sight. Parks and beaches were paved with trash and every nice building was hidden behind a high wall with barbed wire spanning the length of it. I found myself missing the friendliness and cleanliness of village life.
I came into the city by trois-trois, the backbone of Ghanaian regional transport. Typically, a trois-trois is a dented 12 seater van that spews exhaust from a tail pipe that was repaired in some backyard “workshop” with a hammer and some rusty wire.
Luckily, we managed to find a decent mini-bus of Chinese make leaving Hohoe within the hour. Since we were early arrivers we had our choice of seats, which is quite a luxury considering the buses leave only when full and there were several seats with only 7inches of leg room and a wheel-well coming up so that the passenger was forced to sit in a semi-fetal position.
I found out later that they only let white people choose their own seats while blacks just have to file in. You’ll notice that when you get into an empty trois-trois, the people always file back. It didn’t make sense to me at first because those were the worst seats, but now I get it.
On the bus I sat in a single seat next to the door, which was comfortable enough, except it had a steel handrail right in front of it. The railing was positioned in such a way that if we needed to slam on brakes I would almost certainly have gotten a frontal lobotomy, or at least left the scene much less pretty.
Olivia brought her pillow along for the weekend, so I managed to cram that into a backpack and sit it on my lap as a sort of cushion from the rail. Luckily, I did not have to find out if it worked.
Hohoe to Accra is a 3 and a half hour drive if you have no traffic and a fearless driver. The roads between the cities are potholed, narrow, and dotted with small villages where houses are built almost on the street. The whole drive we were weaving to avoid pedestrians, goats and speed bumps.
Locals usually erect the speed bumps after someone has been hit by a car. Every pile of dirt in the road or line of poorly mixed concrete is a macabre reminder that some hapless pedestrian was killed on the very spot.
The buses stop once or twice along the way in some of the larger towns to refuel. As soon as the bus starts to slow down, hawkers come sprinting up with big bowls and crates balanced on their heads to sell you plantain chips, peanuts, bags of water, and snail-kebabs. They jostle each other trying to stick their merchandise in through the open windows and door, as close to passengers’ faces as possible. I bought some fried “yams,” which tasted a lot like steak-fries. A few times the driver sped off before people had paid for their snacks.
The sun was setting as we hit Accra traffic. After half an hour of riding the brakes we came to our stop. We were the only ones getting off at the Accra mall, where English was going to meet us. The stop was one busy four-lane highway and another congested road away from the complex so we asked the driver if he could drop us off a bit closer, but he said it’d be fine. The woman next to us was saying “it’s not safe, it’s not safe,” but with no other choice, we climbed off the bus with our heavy backpacks.
A woman directed us to a good place to cross the road (forget about zebra stripes or “WALK” signs). I hesitated as I was crossing and had to sprint to avoid an oncoming taxi. We finally got across with the helpful direction of some vendors, and wove through the long lines of cars coming into the parking lot. Accra Mall is the only western-style shopping centre in Ghana, if not all of West Africa (though I imagine Lagos has similar).
Stepping inside was entering another, and more familiar world. I absolutely despise shopping malls and would rather go to the dentist or take the SAT than hang out in one. But, I was so happy to be somewhere air-conditioned, well lit, and safe that I would have been happy to window shop or watch the girls try on clothes that they’ll never buy for hours.
We walked around waiting for English, my girlfriend who is working in Accra, to meet us. She showed up after an hour or so and we found a taxi outside to take us to our hotel.
Down Spintex Street, take a right at a Chinese restaurant and midway down the road is the Heritage Hotel. Most of Ghana has absolutely no online presence and few people use or have access to the Internet, including businesses. English, therefore, had driven around town shopping out hotels for us earlier that day. She found this place, thought it looked clean enough, and paid for a night.
We checked in and it seemed nice, at least by our tremendously lowered standards. We were hungry so we left to go hail a taxi down the street.
Nearly every taxi driver asked for some exorbitant fare. Luckily, Ghana is a nation of hagglers and English had a pretty good idea of what taxi fares should be, so she helped us navigate frugally.
Driving through Accra probably ages your lungs ten or fifteen years. About half of the cars in the country would be illegal to drive in the United States. We got stuck behind a huge truck that was absolutely spewing black smoke. I put my shirt, a thick cotton polo, in front of my face to try and filter out the carcinogens. I looked later and saw two black spots where my nostrils had been.
If Accra has a tourist section, Osu is it. It has some nice restaurants and feels safe with security guards at every decent establishment. I’d been dying for some Chinese food, or anything besides African really, so we stopped at a place called Dynasty. It was much pricier than anything we’d seen in our village, but that’s city life I guess. The food was decent but the atmosphere was like taking a shower after a day of shoveling manure.
On the way home we passed young prostitutes on the corner trying to hide their misery behind too much makeup. Being an African prostitute must be one of the worst jobs on the planet. HIV/AIDS is already endemic among sex workers, can you imagine what it must be like among African sex workers?!
Back at the hotel we called it an early night, or at least that was the plan. I tried to brush my teeth and wash my face before bed, but nothing came out of the faucet. Mom and Olivia were having the same problem so I walked downstairs and asked the guy what was wrong. He said that he would go turn on the water. So I got ready for bed.
About twenty minutes later I had to use the restroom, but when I went to flush the toilet and wash my hands there was no water again. Frustrated, I walked back downstairs and asked if he could turn the water back on. He did.
I climbed into bed only to find that my sheets were sandy. The floor was also covered in sand, so my guess is that the previous guest hadn’t wiped his feet before getting into bed and that the hotel hadn’t bothered to change the sheets.
An hour later and I tried to use the sink; no water. I called reception and the guy turned it on again.
At 5:30 am there was a soft knock on the door. Half asleep, I ignored it. 10 seconds later there’s another knock. Again, I ignore it. 5:38 am I got a phone call from reception: “could you turn off your air-conditioner, we’re trying to use the generator and it’s not working properly with your AC running.” I felt around for the remote, turned it off and tried to go back to sleep. Mom and Olivia received a similar call.
The next morning I got up and tried to take a shower. The shower head let forth a feeble squirt and cut off completely. I was already naked and had peed in the shower. I hopped out and tried to call reception. The electricity was out so I threw on some boxers and walked downstairs to have the water turned on again.
The guy tells me that “the water switch is locked, but I’ll bring water up.” I walked back to my room wondering what the hell he meant he’d bring water up. It didn’t take long to find out. He knocked on my door and hands me a bucket of water. “Can I have the other empty bucket from your shower,” he asks.
Back in the shower I tried my best to fling the cold water onto my chest and wash my hair with the half-used bar of soap that was provided.
I was getting pretty angry by this point especially since the staff was totally unapologetic about the whole thing. I went down to eat the “complimentary breakfast,” but there were only two plates sitting on the table. We were four people. I asked the guy where the other two breakfasts are and he says they only give one per room.
“Well, look, we’ve had no water, no electricity, sand in the sheets, used soap, and a wake-up call at 5:30 in the morning, how about throwing in two free breakfasts or give us our money back,” I say.
“I can’t do that,” says the moron.
The owner heard us arguing I guess, because she was there within 30 seconds telling the guy to give us breakfasts. We started telling her about the terrible service we’d received and she’s saying how “shocked” she is to hear it. She starts telling us that “there are standards to live up to!” and asks “how could this have happened?!” Of course, she’s the owner and had been there all night and all morning, but somehow this was all news to her! The electricity going out? No water?
“Oh yes, there’s no water or electricity in the whole city, it was shut off, no hotel has it,” she explains. That was an outright lie, we asked around later.
Then she starts asking us to stay another night and telling us that “we’ll work things out.”
After breakfast we left and found another hotel over in a neighborhood called East Legon, where English is staying.
We spent that day going around some markets and being hassled by hawkers around Kwame Nakrumah Park. We made our way back to Osu and ate at Frankies, a place popular with American expats. It was good to have Barbeque chicken pizza again.
We were itching to see water so we took a taxi to a beach resort called La Palma. At the beachfront bar we bought a few overpriced drinks and then sat down to be badgered by Rastafarians selling paintings and bracelets. The deck we were sitting on was built up 10 feet off of the ground and separated from the beach by steel bars. But, the clever salesmen found tires to stand on so that they could talk to us.
Unlike beaches at home, beaches in Ghana are not the playgrounds of the rich. Huge slums are built on beachfront, which is probably the most undesirable real estate in the country. Interestingly, the most exclusive neighborhood in Accra is called “Airport Hills.” As the name suggests, it is directly across from Kotoka International Airport. Don’t ask me why…
Occasionally, resorts can negotiate with the tribal landowners and buy up swathes of beachfront, but it’s fairly uncommon. The beaches play host to a number of characters, some nice and some, as we would find out, not so nice. Pot-smoking Rastafarians usually hang out at the shore, and many of them don’t especially like whitey.
After a few hours we got tired of La Palma and wanted to find an Indian restaurant. We walked into the parking lot and ducked under the security gate, waving at the guard. Out on the street I started to hail a cab and was at it for about 20 seconds before I hear Olivia screaming. I look over and there were three guys coming at us aggressively.
“They’ve got machetes, run!” English screams.
One guy grabbed me; he had a machete in his hand. I hardly knew what was going on. I shook loose and turned to run towards the security guard. I leaned a bit too far forwards and my legs came right out from under me. I toppled to the ground and let out a stupid “whoooaa” as I fell. It must have been a ridiculous sight: me clumsily tripping over my feet trying to flee from some big black guy brandishing a machete. But, I hopped right back up. The adrenaline in my blood kept me from noticing the big gash in my knee. I bolted towards the security gate yelling “we’re being robbed, help, help!”
English was next to me and Olivia had run off down the street towards a crowd of people. Mom stood picking up rocks and throwing them at one of the guys screaming “get the fuck away from me!” He didn’t bother her.
The security had a delayed response but bystanders from the street and the parking lot ran over immediately to help us and make sure we were all right. The thieves fled as soon as we started yelling, but not before they ripped Olivia’s camera from her wrist.
The people were shocked that we had been robbed. One woman had an absolute fit and told me “those guys must have been Muslims! They live over there and they’re rowdy.”
Other people told me that our assailants were probably from one of the nearby countries like Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, or Nigeria, because they cause a lot of trouble. Ghanaians are friendly, passive, and honest folk, and I really doubt that it was Ghanaians who robbed us. Either way, it was a holiday, we were near the beach, and we stepped out of the hotel’s secure zone. Lucky it wasn’t worse.
My knee was skinned up pretty bad and blood was running down my leg as I walked back to the hotel. The staff began to congregate as we explained what happened. A guy named James Brown helped clean up my knee. He grabbed a bottle of “spirits” which was just rubbing alcohol and it stung like a brand when he sprayed it on my leg.
We talked to the manager and he was apologetic. Interestingly, I don’t think anyone called the police or filed any kind of official report- that’s just not effective here, apparently.
Olivia was really shaken up, but English held it in for a while until she succumbed and broke into tears at dinner. Mom was upset, but mostly just exasperated and ready to go home. Honestly, I was pretty unfazed by the whole event.
I had Chinese food for dinner, again.
The next day we went to a big market called Medina. Inside was sold every variety of African delicacy. Snails the size of your hand sludged over one another and sometimes climbed out of their bowl and fell out onto the ground. Huge buckets of live crabs clack-clacked with the fiddling of crustacean legs across exoskeletons. Oversized hamsters, called “grasscutters”, were cooked whole and displayed on the table with their pinhead eyes staring off at you. Monstrous carp, tiny minnows, tilapia, some fried, some sundried, some headless, some raw all reeked and stung my nose with their foul rot. There was some kind of sharp-toothed fish cooked with his tail in his mouth like an Ouroboros.
I couldn’t find the courage or appetite to try any of it.
Being white in Ghana, I stick out like a Jewish lesbian at the Republican National Convention. Medina market was definitely for locals. I didn’t see any other white folk walking around and people yelled “Obruini, obruini,” which means white person in the local language, as we walked by. Still, I was surprised to find that nearly everyone in the market gave us a fair price, the same they would charge a local.
Mom bought a big wooden spoon used to make “banku,” a corn mash the consistency of bread dough. A Banku stick is about 2 and a half feet long, flat at the end, and weighs around three pounds. Aside from cooking, Mom intended to use the stick to break the wrists of any would-be attacker. She carried it around the rest of the trip, even to restaurants and in taxicabs.
English told us about a hotel called the Golden Tulip where we could swim and I could get my hair cut. While I was sitting in the barber’s chair I met a guy from Charlotte, NC who had lived in Moscow, spoke Russian, and had an apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania where I had just come from. It was awfully strange to meet someone with such eerily similar experiences, but where better to meet him than some equally strange place like Ghana?!
If you will excuse a tangent, I remember reading some magazine where they posed the question “if you knew that you were supposed to meet someone in New York, but you didn’t know who they were, anything about them, or where you were supposed to meet, where would you go.” Most people answered Grand Central Station during rush hour, or Times Square. But, one lady said “New York Public Library.” When they asked her why and pointed out that the library was certainly not the most frequented place in the city, she said, “well, anyone who I would want to meet would meet there.”
Back at our hotel later, it was getting late and English was feeling sick. But we were hungry and wanted to go to Frankies, the American restaurant. The taxi driver refused to drive all the way to Osu, so we settled for a nearby Chinese restaurant and I ate Chinese food for the third night in a row (if you’re in Accra and in the mood for Chinese, you can’t beat Palace of the East on America House Road).
The next day we were supposed to leave. We woke up late, English was still sick, and an angry thunderstorm was roaring outside. It rained so hard that the streets flooded within a half hour. We sat on the hotel porch and watched a guy wade through waist high water in the middle of the adjoining street. Accra has really poor infrastructure.
The hotel staff was pressuring us to check out, so when the rain let up we started thinking about getting a taxi. The hotel said that they didn’t have any taxis to call, so Mom stood out in the street to look for one. A passing lady asked what she was looking for and when Mom told her, she said she’d hail one and send it our way. Sure enough, the lady, Cynthia was her name, comes rolling up with a taxi a few minutes later. Just another example of Ghanaian friendliness.
We went over to English’s host family’s house, the nicest place I’ve seen in all of Ghana. The whole place has a tremendous concrete wall around it with electrified wire running the whole length. The gardener/security guard/house keeper, George, let us in. It was Sunday morning and everyone was at church, but we went in and the house staff made us feel right at home with chocolates, cookies, and juice. We sat around watching a Hollywood film from the 1940’s about an American artist in Paris falling in love, dancing and singing, and doing some other fluffy stuff around a nonexistent plot.
A few hours later English’s host family showed up. They fed us a big lunch with the first fresh salad I’ve had here, super spicy spaghetti, watermelon, and sugar cane. Now, sugarcane, if you’ve never had it (which I hadn’t), is a treat. It’s hard and sinewy and requires a lot of jaw strength to squish the sugary nectar out. Once you’ve chewed it up, you spit out the dry fibers and grab another piece.
Meeting English’s host family was lovely and we all felt at home for a few hours.
It had gotten late so we decided to stay the night in Accra once more. We found a cheap and clean lodging house called St. Thomas’s and set camp for the night.
We woke up early, said goodbye to English, and were off on another Trois-trois back to Hohoe. Thank goodness.
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