WHATCHYA GHANA DO?

Fairly early on in the piece we headed to +233 Jazz Bar and Grill and caught Della Hayes & the Dzesi Band, aka "the Women of Colour Band". These women are absolute legends - absolutely stellar musos and according to the word on the streets, also fiercely committed feminists (which isn't surprising given that this kind of music is generally seen as men's domain in Ghana).

Not long after, we got to see the amazing Malian Griot guitarist Vieux Farka Toure perform his brilliant desert blues music at the Alliance Francais. Vieux is the son of the legendary Ali Farke Toure, but is a legendary player in his own right.

I've long been partial to a bit of blues, but there is something so engaging about Malian desert tunes and the way it just washes over you. You can so easily imagine you're in a 15-seater bus with 30 of your new best friends tearing along red dirt roads towards the Sahara....

  

What do you think? Are strangers to Ghana suprised at any of this? Have I missed anything obvious that needs a special mention?

Our final adventure in Francophone West Africa was Senegal, notably the first French colony in West Africa.  In between coming home from Benin and heading off again, we had a couple of weeks back in Accra, in which my lovely friend came to visit, I got really really sick and spent the best best part of three days being mislead around a hospital waiting for the right appointments, had a great (though sickly) time down in a coastal fishing village with our friends, finished a large proposal at work, spent more time at the hospital and tried frantically to find out why we still didn't have a visa for Senegal - it frequently seemed like we would never get there (you might recall the difficulties getting the flights in the first place).

I spent the day of our evening flight juggling work with phone calls from my medical insurance crew. Having made the terrible mistake of asking my insurance for advice ("just to check I'm on the right medication to finally deal with this ear problem before I fly to Dakar" - never again!), I had to spend days trying to get a medical report to confirm my ears were ok for flying - the Ghanaian/bureaucratic equivalent of herding cats who themselves are looking for needles in haystacks.  Meanwhile, Adam was in charge of working out what on earth had happened to our visas, which had fallen victim to a new online biometric visa system, and trying to work out what the punishment is for unauthorized entry to Senegal.  This included trying to locate the rather mysterious Senegalese Embassy which in Ghana is not done by phone or internet but by taxi and a general sense of smell and feel, while I tried to see how much it would cost to cancel or postpone our flights, also not an easy task in Ghana.  Being Eid, when Adam finally found the embassy no one was there except a guy hanging around the gate claiming to be a visa officer (or gardener? or security?) who informed Adam they were having lots of problems with the new online visa system, so as long as we had the first email, it was fine if we still hadn't received the confirmation.  That was enough reassurance for us - we were off to Senegal.

Despite this, our 1am arrival was completely uneventful right through to waking up to finding that this was the view from the rooftop of our guesthouse!  We stayed at the lovely Auberge Keur Diame in the beachside suburb of Yoff, run by a Swiss lady Ruth and friendly Senegalese manager Ibra.  We'd definitely recommend it with just one caveat - the courtyard is in the interior with rooms around it on each level, and as there are no windows on the outside, the lack of airflow is not the greatest design for Dakar's oppressive heat (there are fans but no a/c).  When we were there it was even hotter than Accra, which we thought was impossible but obviously not.

I'm a sucker for always trying to jam pack way too much into holidays, but we made a deliberate decision to slow the pace down on this holiday and try to rest and enjoy a couple of towns well rather than a new spot every second night.  We spent our first lazy morning kicking back on the rooftop, and then ventured out for an afternoon stroll around the nearby streets.

People had warned us that Dakar is a crazy and intense city, but I'm not sure if those warnings were given with the fact that we were already living in Accra in mind; comparatively, Dakar seemed fairly tame. We were there in the thick of Eid though, and we were told most Dakar residents head to their home villages over the holiday period, so we may not have gotten a typical experience of the capital.

When we wandered into the CBD of Dakar, we were taken aback by how developed it seemed. By many measures, Senegal is much poorer than Ghana (Senegal's Human Development Index  is 154, compared to Ghana's 134 or Australia's 2) yet here were paved roads, proper gutters, things just seemed cleaner and more functional - hell we even found hot showers at our guesthouse!  But those things a fairly rough measures of poverty - that there is hot water on tap in a tourist guesthouse doesn't mean much for the vast majority.  When we noted there seemed to be far fewer slums and informal buildings than in Accra, we were told that's actually just because the Senegalese government knocks them down quicker.  As a result, tiny apartments are often shared between 30 or so family members who take shifts over the day/night to use the facilities or sleep.  Looks can be deceiving, right? Just like the impressive Dakar train station at the end of the line to Bamako, Mali, which stopped running in about 2003.

We spent another day exploring Ile de Goree, a fascinating and stunning island near Dakar's port, which was used as an administrative post of the French (and occasionally other colonisers when they stole it with one treaty or another).  It is littered with elegant French colonial buildings and exudes a serene atmosphere, but also is home to the House of the Slaves and other museums to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.  It's actual role in the trade is somewhat controversial - some say only a handful of slaves actually passed through.  Nonetheless, the French-ness of it all makes it quite conducive to meditating on what life must have been like for Senegaese under the French during the slave trade years.

On our last afternoon in Dakar we decided to cheat a little and hired a guide and his car for the afternoon and caught some parts of the city we hadn't yet seen.  I'm often quick to dismiss the value of having a good guide - if you can get a recommendation and a guide who speaks your own language, it's a great stress-free way to quickly get a feel for a new city, plus you get a specially-designated person to ask all of those burning questions you have about what you're seeing and experiencing.

We couldn't leave Dakar without seeing the Monument of African Renaissance. The monument is enormous, apparently the tallest statue in Africa and taller than the statue of liberty, and was massively controversial at the time of construction: for it's $27 million cost, its scantily-clad models, the gender implications, the role of North Korea in its construction, and the fact that the president planned to take a chop of the entrance fees (his defense was that he helped design it.  Haha). Like most, we were content just to walk around it and not take an elevator up to the man's forehead.

Our final Dakar stop was to check out the most Western point on the African continent, Pointe des Almadies. By comparison to the African renaissance monument, this was much more in line with what we had come to expect from significant places in West Africa - more unsigned than simply understated, tucked behind a restaurant, a fishery and some art dealers.

We then piled into a TroTro, and headed north to Saint Louis, the first place of settlement of the French in West Africa. After shelling out a pretty cfa for a great French breakfast in a cafe the first morning, we followed the locals the second morning and hit gold.  First stop, the hole-in-the-wall-bakery selling fresh baguettes for next to nothing.  Next , one of the mamas who had set up shop next door selling beans, eggs, and chilli to add to your baguette. And final stop, the nescafe cart, but not just for instant coffee, but Senegal's amazing Cafe Touba - like a short black with an insane amount of sugar and grounded with djar or selim pepper, making it something like a spicy, coffee version of chai. This my friends, is how Senegal should be done.  We were kicking ourselves for wasting so many days doing breakfast any other way!

The next day we headed out to Langue De Barbarie National Park, known for its rich ecosystem and temporary home of thousands of bird species as they migrate from Europe.  Sadly, the area has changed dramatically for the worst in recent times.  In an attempt to manage regular flooding in Saint Louis, a channel was cut through the peninsula to the beach to allow the Senegal River to flow more quickly.  But as always, earth wins and soon the channel was kilometres wide, changing this freshwater ecosystem into a marine park.

I was most disappointed at not seeing pink flamingos close up (we did see spot some white babies on our way home) but that is hardly the worst of it.  The change is destroying not only the ecosystem but the economies of the locals too as farmland became salinated.  Before this happened, had already noted climate change was impacting on bird migration and salinty in the soils, and now this latest change has only worsened the situation, evidenced by abandoned field after abandoned field.  It's still a beautiful park and well worth your time to check it out.

Even in Cotonou the rain meant we didn't see as much as we would have liked, but we saw enough to believe that Cotonou is a cool place to hang out for a while.  It's also an amusing place to attempt to find internet and stable enough electricity to submit a job application for a government aid agency which, unbeknownst to you, has just been touted to be abolished, but that's a whole other story (!). Cotonou has become a bit of a cultural hub, with some fantastic art galleries promoting local artists of both the traditional and contemporary variety.  We spent a surreal rainy afternoon at the Fondation Zinsou art gallery, where we happened upon a great exhibition by local, Basquiat-inspired Gerard Quenum - we even ordered a coffee afterwards which wasn't instant.  It was fantastic but this was not the West Africa we knew! Which of course, is precisely the point.

On the less pretty side of things, we had a strange experience at our hotel where we encountered three middle aged French woman with three Beninoise infants who I can only presume were about to be whisked away from everything they know and have come from to live in a developed country with their white saviours.  Yes, in many African countries HIV/Aids in particular has meant many children grow up in without parents.  But there have been so many studies that show that the vast majority of 'orphans' around the world actually have living relatives if anyone actually took the time to ask, and that with just a fraction of the money involved in facilitating adoptions or operating orphanages, those relatives could set up their own income generation to support the children.  It's a complicated issue of course, but seeing it close up made it seem quite simple: gross and orientalist.  Can you imagine if a wealthy Benin woman wanted to adopt a French child?

Anyway, I digress. As the skies temporarily cleared, we made our way to Ganvié , aka "the Venice of Africa", a village an hour away from Cotonou built completely on stilts. In the 1700s a village ran there on the edge of Lake Nokoué to hide from slave drivers, and Ganvié has been there ever since. It was fascinating: even small children operate canoes like extensions of their own bodies, and water for consumption has to be pumped up from a boar into jerry cans on the canoes. We stayed at Chez M which was just what we needed, and headed to bed early to the sounds of drums and village life on the water.