Zebrafish

Sunday October 6 – Rushing off to West Africa

 I was feeling washed out from all the last minute rushing around in London. Starting at Heathrow with KLM I changed flights at Schiphol, Amsterdam where I got hotel booking confirmation in Accra, Ghana’s capital on the Internet.

From time to time I peeked out the aeroplane window to see the ancient khaki brown scorched hills of Algeria below. I saw mirrored lights of watercourses and remote ordered streets through towns and villages. From this distance they could have been deserted and in isolation for hundreds of years. If there was life down there I wondered what it would be like. Would we be welcome if we had to take an emergency landing? How long would it take to find us?

Flying in over Ghana at night, the country below at first just dark. Then small constellations of white and yellow lights, villages like signs of the zodiac, the night sky below me and just before landing the light forest of Accra, Ghana’s capital. Now is the only nervous part for me, my transition into Africa.

Outside the airport I was hit by a warm closeness of humidity and a concoction of new tropical smells reminiscent of previous trips. The taxi provided a cool breeze that took the sweat away. My driver stopped along the way to buy me some cough sweets. At first we had some difficulty finding the hotel. After driving around we were surprised to discover it was just in front of us. My driver let out a howl of laughter, slapped my hand, the joke was really funny and without any self-consciousness we sat there laughed away and shook hands as you only do in Africa.

Monday Oct 7

Beatrice and Nii made friends with me as soon as I arrived. I changed money € 200 at Barclays bank and got a huge wad of notes 8cm thick, which I had to stash most of away in my bag, which made me feel like a drug dealer. I walked a lot today, drenched in sweat. I visited the national museum, which included Ashanti gold weights, cloth, masks etc. Also a display about a Norwegian slave ship, between 12.5 and 20 million slaves were traded with European on the triangular trade route with the Americas.

At the restaurant there I ate ‘Red Red’ grilled fish covered in spicy tomato black eye beans and plantain cooked in rich palm oil. I walked down to Nkrumah memorial gardens, past the presidential palace and independence square which is a huge communist style empty square surrounded on one side by the sea and concrete stadium stands and the nearby huge statue of the Ghanaian black star. There were a few men lazing around but one man was training by leapfrogging up the stairs and doing squats.

I visited Makola market a vast crowded market with permanent stalls in a narrow grid style and walked through a labyrinth of tomato and spice stalls, patterned cloth, shoes, meat and fish. Many people are here just to sell one product like peppers.

On the streets outside women and men carrying boxes of nuts, bananas, apples, clothes, anything you can imagine on their heads. Solicitors work in the shade of a tree with a typewriter and a display board offering marriage, divorce, wills, attorneys.

As it seems everywhere in Ghana and as I will find out, the colourful batik printed clothes worn baggy and the shapely African women with babies wrapped in batik around their backs. Selling their wares by the roadside. I passed the university where smart young Ghanaians are learning accountancy and computers.

Lots of people want to talk to me, say hello and shake my hand in various ways African style. Many want my phone number and email address so they can show me around. Most of them seem to be offering genuine honest friendship; so open it would be rare and seem unusual in Europe. But what do you say to a person who walks up to you in the street and asks of he can be your friend?

In the evening I worked on Nii’s computer recreating his website for the Hotel Marymart on the Geocities Internet site. Nii and Beatrice are becoming really good friends and brought me beer and cooked me chicken with fish in tomato sauce with rice.

Tuesday Oct 8

I spent time going to the Burkina Faso embassy for my visa and organising myself, working out currency values and talking with Nii. Pulled his website together in the evening Beatrice cooked yam, plantain, tomato sauce and chicken.

Wednesday Oct 9

I chose some cloth and Beatrice had a beautiful long sleeve cotton African shirt in patterned indigo made. I decided to wait around to meet George the brother of Peter a friend of my girlfriend’s cousin in London. Spent the day joking with Nii at the hotel and resting then in the evening George and I went to the ‘Bus Stop’ bar where we drank the locally brewed 7.5% Guinness. George moved with an engineering firm from Ghana to Leicestershire for 30 years before another company asked for him to move back to Ghana. He is now working with the ports and crane loading technology on a wealthy UK salary.

Thursday Oct 10

Sent my sister Louise a birthday email card and updated my online website. I took Beatrice and Nii’s photos and talked for a while before we said goodbye. Beatrice is from Togo and speaks 5 Africa languages, English and some French.

I caught a Trotro minibus to Kaneshee market bus station. Inside the bus there was smoke rising next to the driver, in traffic he would open a lid beside him to the engine and peek inside, then turn the key again to restart the engine and manoeuvre between cars, motorbikes, people, apple sellers and then into the market clearing sellers out of the way to park.

This is an extremely colourful market, very noisy, hot and almost overpowering for a newcomer trying to find his way around. I walked into the Trotro station, two people helped show me the way. You learn to walk slower here in the heat and spend more time greeting people and shaking hands. My backpack was loaded in the rear and I sat around for half an hour for the bus to load up with various characters while being offered sachets of water and homemade pastries through the door.

Transport here does not run to a timetable like in Europe, you simply find a bus going where you want to go and sit in it, sooner or later if will fill up and go but you may have to wait anything between 30 minutes and 4 hours for a full load of passengers. I bought an onion pastry off one of the women standing around and sat next to the driver, the electric switchboard was by my feet and the driver was testing the circuit by sparking it off the door.

I’m on my way to the Kokrobite beach village 32km away. We speeded with no speedometer listening to country and western music on the radio. There are some cool jazz and RnB radio stations for music and BBC West Africa for news coverage.

Kokrobite village has no tarmac road and looks very poor to my newly arrived eyes. There are simple hut churches everywhere and concrete rectangular ovens smoking hundreds of small silver fish in trays three deep. Wendy’s place is an idealistic traveller resort. Simple rooms by the beach but enclosed for security. There is no running water here so you have to collect water in a bucket from the well and shower in a stone built open roof cubicle, there were similar arrangement also for the toilet.

The beach sweeps a long way into the distance and is lined one side with tall coconut palms and fierce surf on the other. Later in the day fishermen sit mending their blue nets while naked children run into the sea. One child has a broken piece of wood, looks like a piece of fence which he is lying down on like a surf board to catch the waves.

In the evening I ate delicious barracuda then went with Dan and Eric to the Italian pizzeria for rum, lime and sugar in crushed ice. We later sat around the bar in Wendy’s talking music, Africa and drinking Star beer. Eric is a sound engineer from Tilberg in the Netherlands. Dan had been with the American Peace Corp volunteer aid organisation for 2.5 years based in Niamey, Niger. He had successfully been installing condom machines in bars there, been involved with health education and setting men up with bicycles from which they could sell cigarettes and condoms from in the evening. He seemed to have seen a lot here.

Friday Oct 11

This is a day for me to practice slowing down and adjust to a different slower pace of life. I’m now writing up my diary while sitting in the open walled restaurant looking out onto the beach watching fisherman going out and villagers pulling in the nets of silver fish, barracuda, flat bottom fish, sometimes sea snake, jellyfish and brown shrimps. The large canoes are pulled ashore by the men while on the beach women are preparing fish on charcoal fires, the fish are brought to them by children carrying pots straight from the new haul and the children stand watching their mothers cook.

During the day more people arrive for the weekend. I go swimming at first with Eric and Andy a Welsh trainee doctor who had been working in Kumasi. The surf is really powerful and this is one of the few places on the coast where it is safe to swim. The saltwater is murky but very warm. You resort to playing around like kids in the crashing waves and then making sand castles on the beach. Dinner is served all at the same time and a group of ten of us sit under the thatched open restaurant by the sea with oil lamps on the wooden tables, this evening I had tuna palm soup and seafood soup starter and we sit around discussing Iraq, USA and Israel.

Saturday Oct 12

We took a trip this morning to see the bird life sanctuary along the inland waterways behind the coast and to visit nearby fishing villages. The first village stretches down from the sandy road to the coast here as everywhere African daytime life is spent outside together, trading and socialising with family and friends.

Here where the river meets the sea and runs behind a huge sand island fishing boats converge, all with different flags and hollowed out boats carved on the side with striking names, I remember some of the more unusual eye-catching ones such as Israel and Hiroshima. We were taken in a small canoe and punted around by a man who introduced himself to us only as Rasta man, the dread locked son of a chief of a nearby village.

The waterways were less salty than the sea and lined with mangroves. Several species of crab could be seen climbing the wooden stick fishing traps geometrically arranged and we saw birds like white Kingfisher and black Heron. On arriving back at the sandy island between us and the sea we stepped out of the canoe and watched the fishing nets being pulled in. Shrimps were tasted fresh and jellyfish crushed between fingers into water. Here Rasta man had set up his own basic guesthouse retreat for travellers constructed from palm branches with the beach as floor. He’d also created a special sweat box for people to sit in and told us about the physical benefits of sitting in one, although a that point I felt as if I already was sitting in one by just being there.

The sun became intense and bad sunburn and sunstroke could have a reality without sun cream and a hat. We walked back through the market, markets are one of the most interesting places to visit but very hard to photograph partly because you are conspicuous as a white tourist with an expensive camera and the whole experience feels very voyeuristic.

We walked back to the road and had chilli black eye beans in banana leaf for 1,000 Cedi, about 8 pence in UK Sterling which I shared this with Eric. Later swam again in the surf or rather jumped into each wave and floated in-between. It can look like paradise from in the sea when the sun is shining which hides the poverty on the shore.

That evening after being served small lobster kebabs we were entertained by a drumming and dancing cultural show at the guesthouse. Intricate black African drumming accompanied by sensual funky rhythmic dancing. The previous weeks group had been a troupe called ‘Aklowa’ meaning village. This was the Ghanaian side of the same Aklowa my previous employer had been involved with in London. Aklowa run a Ghanaian educational village in the Essex countryside for visiting school groups.

Andy and I worked our way through the Star and Club beer and afterwards were joined by Lukeman a local Rastafarian and a few of his friends playing drums in the beach bar. Andy, Anja from Leipzig and I danced and provided percussion. We played some African music and some reggae. Everyone took part making the music, singing, clapping, shaking percussion balls and tapping bottles. There was an amazing atmosphere created that night especially when singing Bob Marley’s redemption song, which brings on a deeper meaning when sang under the stars on the former Slave Coast.

That morning I’d taken a bongo drumming lesson in the village and had been lent a drum to practice with. The next day I continued sharing a lesson with Andy, it may have been the hangover but I found it very difficult to learn new rhythms and swap between them. It takes a lot of concentration at first to learn but then you have to stop thinking about what you’re doing and let it flow unconsciously.

Sunday Oct 13

I missed breakfast but went straight in the sea to cool off and wake up. A lot of people left today and the evening was quiet. I gave Lukeman a Crystal Palace shirt that had been given to me by my friend Andy in London to give to a keen footballer in Africa. I’d met London Andy six years ago on Komodo Island, Indonesia.

Monday Oct 14

After a lazy morning of farewells Welsh Andy and I caught a Tro Tro back to Kaneshi Motor Park. We visited to Niger embassy to get my visa in case I decided to go there and did some shopping for camera batteries and fresh coconut milk.

We sat at the back of the Tro Tro to Cape Coast it was packed solid with people sitting five across and using special folding aisle seats. The roads are so bad that we often drive on the other side of the road to avoid potholes. Along the way a preacher stood up and talked for over an hour, conducted prayers with the passengers and gave out Christian moralistic books donated from organisations in the USA.

I sat next to a friendly student called Eric; he was studying African history and Shakespeare. He pointed out things to me as we passed like a Liberian refugee camp. Later he helped us to find our hotel and even paid the taxi driver for us when we were busy retrieving our sacks from the boot. This was unusual but Eric seemed different from most of the African’s I’d so far met. His education was sponsored by a half brother in the USA and he wanted to go on to study law in the UK. He was keen to talk and listen to us about our opinions on politics, African European differences and history.

That evening we went to the Castle restaurant next to the old British Slave fort there was a fierce sea crashing on the beach and rocks below us. On the next table to us sat ten American Peace Corp workers sat that had been evacuated as refugees out of Cote D’Ivoire during the recent coup attempt.

We were joined by a local rapper called ‘Raz Eze’ and sat on the rocks below beside the fort. We talked about slavery and politics. The likelihood of the USA attacking Iraq is a popular discussion point here as well as the plight of the Palestine people. Ghanaians like to discuss politics but CNN and BBC world service and their only source of news about the outside world and they need to learn to be independent in how they interpret the news.

Andy and I got a bit drunk again; travelling with another Brit can be an intoxicating time. Andy was teaching Raz Eze about some of the problems of nutritional education in Ghana and Raz was creating raps on the spot to illustrate the need for kids to eat vitamin rich food. We then got into an argument about religion with Raz. Many Ghanaians are extremely religious and to say you believe otherwise is very hard for them to understand and accept.

Tuesday Oct 15

Today we visited the Cape Coast Slave Fort, all the forts here swapped hands several times over several hundred years and there were sixty alone along the Gold Coast. It was a strange feeling being British and visiting this place. Although many European countries were involved with slavery Britain was responsible for transporting the most but also for its abolition. Although the abolition came about through pressure from religious groups this was also because industrialisation had started to create a greater demand for raw products and soon afterwards colonialism started to form as a way to farm and mine the areas. But the staff were welcoming and the overriding message was about understanding what happened here and learning from that for the future. There was also an excellent museum about the culture of the people of the Gold Coast as well as the background to slavery and movements against the ongoing slavery in the USA.

The tour at the Dutch Elmina fort was more interesting to visit; the conditions described here were truly horrific. Women were picked for rape by the officers and were left in cramped dungeons without being able to wash. The sons of this sexual violence grew up in the local village and were employed back in the forts. They would often marry locally and hence today gives the reason for the number of Dutch names in the local business in the town.

At this fort the door of no return for which slaves were led out to the boats awaiting to take them to the Americas was extremely narrow. Apparently anyone too fat to fit through would be kept until they lost all their weight that way many people could be stacked into the hull of the ships for transportation.

Off the main courtyard there was a death cell for disobedient prisoners. This had no windows and a skull above the door. Up to ten people at a time would have been left here without food or water to die. Sometimes people would have been thrown in before the dead inside were retrieved because of the fear of attack by those remaining alive inside leaving the still living to die in the darkness amongst the corpses of their brothers.

The Dutch fort opposite was crumbling away although it was also a UNESCO significant World Heritage site. We crossed the remains of a patched together drawbridge and the guardian inside showed us around for a donation. He told us how some local kids can go to school but do not because they can beg more money from tourists visiting the forts than they could ever earn. Consequentially they don’t get an education and when they’re older and they can no longer con tourists they turn to worse crime.

Throughout the town there were odd sculptures made by the Afato and Posuban people representing a diverse amount of things important to them such as animals, European ships, policemen, soldiers and even Adam and Eve. Nearby the fenced off Dutch cemetery has one gravestone you can read from a distance that says the person buried here was ‘murdered’, rather ironic when you think about what went on here inside the forts.

Eric spent the day with us mostly quiet but openly wanted to discus the slave trade and politics with us. On the way back to Cape Coast our Tro Tro broke down by the side of a stunning beach. We left it behind and jumped in a passing taxi.

Wed Oct 16

Andy and I hired a taxi for the day to Kakum National Rainforest Park. Two Canadians and a Ghanaian built the rainforest canopy walk quite a few years ago consisting of five posts linking rope bridges 350m long and thirty metres high up. Here we met Mireille a young Canadian working at a refugee camp in Benin for mainly Togolese and Ogoni people from Nigeria.

The three of us took a guided tour through the rainforest looking at the different medicinal properties of the trees there. Afterwards we visited Hans Cottage restaurant built on stilts above a small crocodile lake. When the staff threw bread in you could watch them feed on fish at the water surface.

Back in Cape Coast Andy and I took a Tro Tro into Kumasi arriving at 9pm. During the journey there was a disturbing salesman at the front of the bus selling brightly coloured cure all tablets for malaria, sleeping sickness, bilharzia and worms. We took a taxi to Ryan’s bar an unexpectedly authentic looking Irish bar apart from the addition of black prostitutes in the corner and their elderly expat clientele playing gambling machines in the corner.

Thursday Oct 17

We walked into busy Kumasi and visited the Internet café. A woman working in the café showed me her own website containing pictures of herself and dedications to God and Jesus. The market here is the largest in West Africa. It meanders off in all distances for hundreds of metres. As usual in Africa similar products can all be found in the same area. For example there are sections for medicines, fruit, meat and clothes. In the evening Andy and I went to Chopsticks a top Chinese restaurant where the food was good and the portions huge. Inside a large group of women were celebrating their friend’s birthday and singing the famous song.

Friday Oct 18

At the omelette stall this morning I had a marriage proposal from a man on behalf of his sister, and then later I was asked out to the cinema from a waitress in a restaurant. I visited the National Cultural Centre and took photos of the various crafts being made including men working a traditional pottery wheel, the colourful Ghanaian Kente cloth weaving, furniture and basket weaving and the ancient method of brass moulding using wax and mud.

In the evening I met up with Andy and Oli his friend who had also been in Kokrobite last week and a group of German and Ghanaian medical students for one of the 24^th birthday party of one of the German girls. She received lots of romantic rose covered birthday cards with messages of undying love inside.

Saturday Oct 19

As I left my hotel on a 5am misty morning women in the street were chanting songs as they prepared to start their working day and I passed the many ‘baby foot’ table football games by the side of the street, now empty of young children who are normally engrossed in their game.

It was a 7 hour relatively comfortable coach trip to Tamale in northern Ghana and it rained outside over the lush green tropical vegetation viewable through my window. There are no major towns and the villages we passed through were mostly made traditionally from mud with grass roofs. Met up with a Yorkshire man named John in the evening, a retired BT employee now living in Kenya and turned VSO volunteer and world traveller.

Sunday Oct 20

Met Ben another Welshman I’d met in Kokrobite in a restaurant in Tamale then travelled onto Mole National Park 130km or five hours East of Tamale with Lucas and Kathy from Frankfurt by a decrepit Tro Tro that costs about €1. The Tro Tro took just under an hour to load followed by an argument about seats which I found very Hard to ignore in the intense humidity on the sunny side of the bus.

The Northern part of Ghana is mainly Islamic and there are a few mosques around. There are also one or two young men walking around wearing Osama Bin Laden T-shirts although I think they are just young and easily impressionable and not very interested in terrorism. Tellingly Saddam Hussein used to get some respect in the past purely because he was seen as the only person standing up and defying the west. Apart from the kids trying to make money from tourists it’s mostly friendly here.

The Tro Tro broke down in bush land out on a sand road just as the sun was preparing to sleep. We all stood around outside and watched, many people were listening to the BBC World Service news on their SW radios. After thirty minutes we were on the road again and as we drove into Mole Park Kob herds of antelope could be seen running away from our headlights.

Monday Oct 21

We went on a 6.30am two-hour bush hike with Lucas and Kathy. It was the first I’d walked through African woodland savannah and it we started off surrounded by thick mist. We saw Kob antelope, local women and children collecting water and a few water hogs wandering about. By 7.30am it was getting hot and we started to circle back through some woods.

Afterwards I went for a swim in the hotel pool before breakfast at 9. Now is the end of the wet season. The land is still damp and not many large animals are around at this time. Although we saw elephants from the lookout and we had heard that some people had seen a lion seven weeks ago. I then took it easy all day until 4.30pm when we hiked another 2 hours in the heat before sunset.

A group of girls were here from the UK they were all working in Accra with the i2i charity. i2i is a new charity enabling volunteers to gain interesting experience in work such as journalism, radio work or television while abroad. But rather than being paid you have to pay quite a lot for the experience of working. One girl Catcha was working with the Ghanaian radio station but was disappointed with the lack of responsibility she was given and was thinking of leaving. Ii was interesting talking to them as I’d looked into this same position for myself before leaving on my journey.

Tuesday Oct 22

On my insistence for the morning hike we headed straight for the water hole where the elephants were. We approached five elephants until they were just twenty metres between them and us. They stared at us for a while before four of them ran back to some trees. The lead elephant the largest there just wandered slowly on eating and demolishing entire branches.

We walked around the back of the other four into a field of waist high grass, buzzing with the drone of bees. We waited ten minutes and watched the elephants eating in the shade. As we moved on to explore further, the guide threw a stick towards the elephants and they ran off scared like cattle.

We later sat down by a stream and watched a large group of baboons swinging in the tree. There were a couple of another monkey species living with them. They had been kept as pets illegally and had been gradually released back into the wild and adopted by the baboons. We saw more bush kob, water kob and several beautifully coloured birds.

After a swim in the hotel pool from the lookout I watched two elephants swimming and playing with each other in the waterhole below. They would link trunks together and pull each other lovingly under the water.

Later we met up with Kony a local guide and cycled the seven km along sandy roads to visit the nearby village of Larabanga. For the moment let me just remind you that it is always immensely hot and I’m always covered in sweat. Kony guided us through the village and we had to pay the chief a small amount of money plus the entrance fee to visit the mosque. The mosque is the oldest in Ghana built in 1421 and besides being quite low down and small it looks striking in bold white and black painted mud next to an old gnarled Baobab tree.

The village buildings were all made from smoothed mud. Some were decorated with repeated thumbprints as in olden days this was a method used as a way of recording calendar days. Kony bought me some fried yam and gave me a colourful set of shirt and shorts. Partly as a way of saying thank you for my offering to build him a website for his eco-tourism project. But this did have the effect of making me feel more obliged to donate money to his cause.

He made us feel unintentionally awkward by asking us to sign a comments book and make a donation. He appears to be really trying to improve the village though development of eco-tourism by providing sanitation for clean water and the building of a school. But because he is just really developing these tours on his own he hasn’t had the experience to make it appear more official. After spending some time with him I was able to explain this to him. It is difficult for tourists to take another person asking for money seriously. He needs to legitimise his good intentions by making it into a registered charity.

I the afternoon we went for another hike through tall grassland but didn’t see much in the way of wildlife.

Wednesday Oct 23

4.30am start; don’t let people believe travelling is a holiday. The two Germans, Kony and I all caught the Trotro back to the town of Tamale. By 10.30am we were having breakfast there and I was feeling awful through tiredness.

We were introduced to Kony’s friend Randy and went back to his flat to rest. This consisted of a concrete room down a sandy track a couple of km away. In an empty half constructed room next door I took a bucket shower taken from the local well and sat down to relax. A few hours later we all went to a local Internet café and spent four hours building him a four page website. Randy went off and scanned some photos in for us. The Internet café owner was really impressed; it was a good job well done in the four hours it took on an unbelievably slow connection.

We took a taxi to visit Kony’s uncle and to take him the money for the charity. His family lived behind a small market; the single storey concrete or mud buildings are arranged around a square courtyard for each family. Their front room was basic, a young boy came and sat on my knee and started playing with my hands as we spoke with Kony’s uncle.

On the wall there were posters from a magazine that were about the war in Afghanistan. He made some effort to be friendly but also comments about how rich I was to be able to travel around West Africa. I agreed with him and said it was because I wanted to learn about different cultures and inform my friends at home. He then seemed to accept me and make friends.

Kony, Randy and I went for dinner at a cheap chop restaurant near the market. I had Jolof rice with chicken and tonic water. Jolof rice consists of rice fried in a tomato chilli sauce. There is a curfew after 10pm here because earlier in the year a nearby chief was murdered and so we returned back to Randy’s unlit neighbourhood trying to avoid patches of mud on a dark moonless night to watch TV in a hotel reception.

A Ghanaian advert for washing powder stars a young boy who loves football coming home after a game covered in mud. She washes his shirt in a bucket with the new improved powder and his father gets a new office job because he is wearing a clean shirt. The BBC World Service is all about the Chechen Muslim kidnap of a Moscow theatre. The last two weeks the news has been full of terrorism issues. The bombing of the Sari club backpacker resort in Bali, a place I had been to about seven years ago, jets grounded in Sudan and an Aeroflot plane grounded in the USA with possible radioactive material on board, in Washington DC two snipers were caught after a spree of killing people randomly, the Israel Palestinian conflict and the potential war in Iraq. I went to bed at 9pm completely exhausted. Kony and I shared the double bed and Randy slept on the floor.

Thursday Oct 24

I was awoken around an hour before sunrise, about 5am by several nearby mosque singers on loudspeakers, cockerels crowing and a crackly radio outside tuned into the reading of the World Service news headlines, pretty much the same as I had watched the previous night. I woke up that morning feeling very paranoid and I felt like heading back down to the Christian coastal area. I neither support George Bush or Al-Qaeda but felt very much caught up in world events.

Yesterday I’d talked with Randy and he seemed to share my thoughts on religion, i.e. I don’t believe in any religion especially one organised by man. Where as Kony was a Muslim and so I found it hard to bring up the topic of religion with him. We all sat silent for a while in the room while Kony performed his Morning Prayer ritual. He then asked me if I had a bank account if I could transfer money for him. This added a sharper edge to my paranoia that morning but I didn’t show this as I didn’t want to offend my kind friends. I explained that on principle I would not do this especially with the amount of Nigerian email scams about.

At this point I didn’t know what to think anymore about my hosts. I was still tired and didn’t want my paranoia to get the best of me. We had breakfast and I spent a further two hours in another internet café checking emails and writing my online diary which I tried very hard not to put across completely how low I was feeling after this morning feelings of alienation and in the face of the poverty of others, I don’t want people at home to worry unnecessarily.

Kony and Randy spent a lot of time helping me and other travellers. He looked upset that I was leaving and explained it was because I took him seriously in what they were trying to achieve with their charity. I was finding the whole experience very unnerving. I felt Kony had become a genuine friend but the gap both financially and culturally between us was huge.

They saw me off on a Trotro to Bolgatanga and on arrival I checked into the comfortable Black Star hotel and that evening met Ahmed a boy of 16 or so years of age who helps as a tourist guide. We went to Madame Rakia’s for Chicken Jolof.

Friday Oct 25

I arranged to meet Ahmed at 6am sunrise to beat the heat of the day for the 15km cycle to the area of Tongo. Here I first had to visit the local chief by entering through a low entranceway into a thatched roof mud meeting room.

Soon the elders entered and later followed by the chief, a very old but friendly dignified man. I made a donation of just under £2 to the chief, probably slightly too much and about £1 to the elders. They welcome me to the village and invited me to the equivalent of their New Year festival tomorrow evening.

Ahmed, I and another boy cycled off down dirt roads and tracks up to an area of rocks where we scrambled over the top for a view of the valley and then cycled back. On our return to Bolga we visited a deaf school where an American woman called Linda had been working for 18 months. I had met her the previous day in the market and as Ahmed knew her he said we should go and visit.

In entered the class and were asked questions by the pupils in sign language. I learnt how to say thank you and good morning and was given my own sign to call myself by. This was done by shaking an enclosed fist below my chin as if I were holding an ice-cream.

We were back in Bolga by 12.30 as the midday heat was reaching its worst point. I had a cold beer and spent the afternoon reading Atomised by Michel Houlebecq, a novel about the collapse of contempary society in the West, set in France. I didn’t leave my room until 6 and as if by magic as soon as I did Ahmed appears out of nowhere. I bought him dinner again but by now his boyish behaviour was getting on my nerves.

Saturday Oct 26

Had to change hotels this morning because a tour group was booked in but moved to a cheaper more peaceful place popular with Peace Corp volunteers and spent the morning reading and writing up my diary, part of me was hiding from the heat and the outside world because I was feeling a bit lethargic of travelling but also there didn’t seem much else to do here.

At 2pm I met Mohammed and we again took bikes without brakes and with patched tyres back to Tongo. Prince Abdullah a local guide who had had his training paid for I believe by a volunteer worker invited us into a small open area within the mud village. Here I met Eve an Art History student from France being instructed in how to cook Ghanaian food, she was here to study the mud architecture.

Early evening the drumming and dancing started. One man beat two large drums in the open area before the large Baobab tree, these trees can live up to 7,000 years old and are often referred to as upside down trees as their branches look like roots. Thirty to Forty people danced around moving in a slowly anticlockwise direction around the drummer. The key performers weren’t wearing much but had metal percussion around their ankles, which added to the rhythm as they danced. Then there was the group chanting, singing and a couple of women in the centre of the party adding vibrating bird like shrill into this tribal sound.

In-between this slow revolution of dance around drums two dancers might dance rotating around on their own axis taunting each other to dance funkier. Together everyone formed an entire ritualistic body of rhythm within the music. It made me think of comparisons to that of a European tribal techno dance club but here people danced together as a whole rather than in the latter individually or in small groups under a flashing strobe light and lasers.

As sunlight faded dust was kicked up by the performers and spread above the watching crowd of many hundred circled around them, the dust blocking out the background so only dancers could be seen, a coincidental self sufficient eco-smoke machine. A couple of other white people appeared but we mostly avoided each other probably so as to best enjoy and absorb the atmosphere.

I was recognised by a group of children from the deaf school and got into a couple of basic hand conversations from a phrasebook one of them had with him while sat under a bright light outside and being head butted by moths. We set off back in the dark on our bicycles, for the first half of the journey I let Mohamed borrow my head torch, the only light we had with us so I had not much option but to ride in the blackness behind him with virtually no brakes.

Business names

There are some great business names in Ghana such as the “God cares for tailless animals” Shop, “The Lords way plumbing service”, “Very nice too spot” Spot bar (small Ghanaian bar), “Mama I’m here chop quick food” on a Chop bar (fast food restaurant) and “At the appointed time” written in large type on the front of a Trotro.