It always seems to be the case in countries outside of Europe, that the range of comfort in the terrestrial public transportation is extreme. I’ve never traveled in anything as comfortable as the bus me and Natalia took from Cochabamba to La Paz, with seats basically as big as beds. On the same trip, though, I had my least comfortable experience in public transport, sitting in the back of a small truck traveling on the bumpy, muddy road between Rurrenabaque and Trinidad in the Bolivian Amazon, even being forced to sleep on the spare tire after the truck had gotten stuck in the mud too many times.
Ghana is the same. The range is extreme. And for our trip from Accra to Kumasi, we ended up in the luxurious end of the spectrum. What else could be expected from a bus company called VIP?
I sat there, among the pink and gold decorations, for the five hours it took to get to Kumasi, knitting and listening to a weekly news program from the Swedish Radio called Godmorgon världen. They were discussing the re-election that would be taking place in Sweden in March. Seriously, how did we end up here, with the third largest party in the Swedish parliament being just a bunch of political cowboys and petty racists? The prime minister, the leader of the Social democrats, has called them neo-fascists. It’s possible that that was mostly meant as a ploy in the political game on his part, but I think there’s definitely something to it on a deeper level too. The fact that they chose to topple the government’s proposed budget, with the argument that they would never support anything where the Green party had been involved, just shows such disrespect for the processes of parliamentary democracy, and also for the political, economic and social state of Sweden at large. The Social democrat and Green party minority government had been accepted by a democratically elected parliament, so why make it impossible for them to do their job by voting for the opposition’s budget? It’s not only the Sweden Democrats, though. Most of the other parties are also behaving like children, accusing each other of lack of responsibility without seeming to consider the larger picture. Many Swedes are already skeptical toward politicians in general, and this budgetary crisis is not making things any better.
So, yeah, it was a pretty depressing, albeit comfortable journey. Outside the bus windows, the landscape was very green and hilly, beautiful really. But the traffic. It never stopped, even on the highway. The bus could rarely drive at normal speed. Where are all these people going? It’s like there’s a glitch in the system: people’s personal economies have become better, so they can afford to travel a lot or even buy their own cars, but the public economy has not developed at the same speed. Or they just don’t get anything done, due to corruption. I don’t know, I’ve not read enough about Ghanean politics to be able to say. I can only state the obvious: the capacity of the roads in Ghana does in no way meet the demands.
When we reached Kumasi, there was the obligatory heated argumentation with the taxi drivers, after which we were driven to our bed and breakfast. We just dropped off our bags, and took a short walk down the street to a restaurant called The View.
Situated on the top floor of a very new-looking building, it really did have a view. The interior design was stylish, almost Swedish in its light simplicity. And the food and drinks too, when it arrived, was better to look at than to eat. Not that it wasn’t good, it just looked better than it tasted. Made for some old-fashioned food photography.
Katja Malmborg 