Ghana might be a beautiful country with rainforests and beaches – but it all gets kind of ruined from the extreme hassle that any kind of transport entails. Men screaming at you from all directions, wanting your business, but there is no niceness about it. And being white, they’ll happily charge you three times the local price without blinking. I don’t know if that is something that I should just accept, but, I just can’t let go of the feeling that taxi drivers and bus ticket sellers constantly want to cheat me and treat me like I’m stupid, and that makes me put my warrior suit on. I have no problem haggling here, since I can do it in English and I can hold my own, but constantly having to do it, well. My point is: getting anywhere (spatially) in this country is exhausting.
After a slow morning at the B&B, we kind of haphazardly ended up in a not very comfortable bus that took us from Kumasi to Cape Coast. The system here seems to be No Timetables. Instead, the bus leaves when it is full. And it really was. Completely packed.
So there we sat, in the back, mother and I. Her reading, me knitting and listening to radio programs about the new political situation in Sweden. All windows were open, so there was a constant breeze, but most of the time it felt like we were breathing more road dust and exhaust fumes than air. It wasn’t the worst bus trip that I’ve ever been on, for sure, and I’m not particularly picky when it comes to public transportation. But it wasn’t a relaxing trip.
It ended up being a five hour trip. We drove past small towns, beautiful green mountains and secondary forests with the odd high rainforest tree. It was a beautiful landscape, but still the journey wasn’t really enjoyable. Halfway through, the engine of the bus started sounding suspiciously coughy, so, that stuck in my mind instead. What if the engine would explode?
But it didn’t, and in Cape Coast we gave up and took a taxi the last stretch of road to the beach-side ecolodge that will be our Christmas hideout.
(A photo from Cape Coast, taken from the taxi window. As the Christmas week later unraveled, this would turn out to be the only sight-seeing we did in the former capital of the colonial British Gold Coast. Mother and I were simply too lazy to take the forty minute tro-tro ride from Elmina to Cape Coast for some proper sight-seeing and slave trade fort visiting.)
The sun had just gone down when we got to the lodge Stumble Inn, but from the little that I saw before complete darkness, everything here seemed lovely. The first thing that I did, after dropping off our bags in the hut, was to take off my shoes and walk down to the beach. I stood in the surf with sand between my toes, letting the waves wash over my feet, with the darkness descending around me. A white-and-brown dog from the lodge came and sat down beside me, and for him and for the waves I sang a couple of Christmas carols.
Dinner was a sturdy stew.
Here, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to relax.
Katja Malmborg 