One more night (or four)...
0Wednesday, 23 January 2013 by Renee
Following our New Year’s celebrations, our crew disbanded to
our various homes except for Adam and I
– we had decided to have a little bit of a retreat a few beaches down*, before
heading back to the big smoke. As much
as we love camping, it was a great treat to have four nights in our own mud and
straw hut, complete with outdoor shower, right on the beach.
Our days were filled with lying on the beach, drinking occasional coconuts when the local kids with their cutlasses came past, swimming when we felt brave enough/hot enough to hit the turbulent waters, and lying back
down to read until the next meal was ready – BLISS! We realised we hadn't had a "doing nothing holiday" for three years...
After a huge year, it was great to just kick back and watch the sunlight change from a silvery dance over the ocean in the morning to bathing everything in a warm glow in the late afternoon as the sun reached the horizon.
Or the Harmattan haze as we found out... It's currently Harmattan season, where the winds change to come from the north, at which time Ghana and it's neighbours tend to get covered in half of the Sahara Desert. As we found out, this means that the sun disappears behind the dust rather than the horizon, and makes for unique sunset viewing...
And the food! Oh Cape
Three Points had great food, but this was something else, and all served up
in a under a huge grass hut to a soundtrack of azonto (Ghana's new dance craze), regularly interspersed with a
Phil Collins live album, which of course is what every Obruni expects from their West African holiday.
*As an indication of how much more difficult simple things can be here, although it was only about 10km away, the move from Cape Three Points to Safari Beach took us an ENTIRE day! Payments are always cash here, but atms are not that easy to find outside of Accra, and frequently break down or run out of money. The atms on our journey to Cape Three Points were broken, so we still needed cash to pay our first lodging, and then get enough for the next. We were going to meet and pay the owner in Agona, the nearest town, but alas, the atm was broken again. So, we had to get a shared taxi to Takoradi, the next major city on the way back to Accra, find an atm there, and then head back and hopefully find the owner again before heading off to our new accommodation. (Even this wasn't straightforward; our shared taxi had a teenage Ghanaian girl in it who seemed to be distressed by the driver, pleading with him about something in their own language. When I asked if she was ok, things started to get weird, and Adam and I concluded it was either all a joke or some sort of scam, but it was nonetheless a weird experience!). Then once we were on our way back, we found out the accommodation owner had left Agona to attend an emergency, and thus directed us to hunt down a shopkeeker he trusted and to leave our hefty wad of cedi there. Finally, exhausted, we headed to the trotro station, only to find there was a long wait. Luckily, we found a lovely couple Alex and Aisha from the UK who were heading to the same lodge, and ended up sharing a cab with them. Just as the sun was going down, we reached our destination, less than 10km from where we had started! It was a good thing we had four days to relax...
