Scraping along the shore
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2004
1
7
8
Trip End
Ongoing
Cape Coast,
Ghana
Wednesday, February 2, 2005
Bamako was both a nightmare of total non-stop movement and a refreshing burst of life (as mentioned earlier about Accra, people actually LIVING in the streets, rather than just shopping in them), but Mali had got to me, finally, and I lasted no more than a couple of days there. The constant hassle, the liars, the overwhelming heatnoisepollution, guides, salesmen, the whole frustrating tourist circus that exists there etc. etc. Nightmare bus to Bobo in Burkina, explosive yell-fest at some slightly rip-off taxi driver, throwing his money on the floor and then picking it up again in the fear that I had gone to far and that he was going to punch me. Calmed down a bit and then spent almost a week in Ougadougou again, waiting for a Ghana visa,in a city that suddenly seemed a whole lot more welcoming than the last time I visited it. Spent most of my time in Ouga with the 'Far West' boys, a group of twenty-something year old students whose primary occupation seemed to be sitting in a dirt road alley drinking sahel tea from about 7 at night until 6 in the morning. On my last night there, when one of them, William, got up and walked away, I asked "Where is he going?", they told me "Hes going to go get a gun to shoot a cat to eat." and laughed. I laughed too, not thinking they could be serious. About 10 minutes later William comes back with an enormous gun, sits around for a while, drinks some tea, and leaves again, this time with a guy called Snake. "Where are they going?" I say. Again, everybody laughs and says "They're going to shoot a cat to eat", and I laugh too, it not dawning on me that they actually could be serious, not thinking that hunting domestic animals with a large gun in a heavily developed and populated capital city is a serious option. 15 minutes later William and Snake come back holding a dead cat by the tail, and are greeted with much jubilation by everybody. I get some photos of the proud hunters holding the gun and dead cat, then a small bonfire is made out of dried reeds ripped off somebodies fence, so as to singe the hair off the corpse. You have no idea how bizarre it is watching somebody singe the hair off a dead cat over a bonfire in the early hours of the morning in the middle of a capital city. Later they open its stomach with the tip of a ballpoint pen (the same pen they give me later to write my address with) and somebody else takes it to his house nearby to gut and cook it. I never got to view the finished product, as by this time it was 3 or 4 in the morning and I had a bus to catch at 7.
I finally succumbed to malaria in the insane heat of Tamale, Ghana, and spent a few days getting over it. Luckily it wasn't too serious, and I didn't need to spend any time in
Ghana's scarily antiquainted, overcrowded, kafkaesque hospital system, although I did have to visit Tamale hospital to pick up some drugs and visit a doctor after I got my blood test done and one look at the goats running around in the reception and the inhuman howling coming out of the consultation room was enough to convince me that it wasn't a good idea to stay too long.
Went to the Volta region where I spent some time in the rainforest and got to see the first day of rain I've seen in over 3 months (vicious lashing sheets that lasted only 20 minutes)(the 2nd day of rain was today, just a sort of aimless drizzle with thunderclaps).
Spent time on the ghost-like east coast, fishing villages, palms, desolate beaches and unswimmable rips, gentle coastal rot, colonial buildings eaten by the sea. Keta, Ada, onwards to the west, to Cape Coast, rusting corrugated iron roofs and disused slave trading forts, costal languor, grey sea pulling the land back under...
