Don Post 1: From Ghana to Benin

Aloha everybody, a word from the West! Getting time to write this blog has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. So far we have been on the move a lot, usually arriving in camps quite late in the day. It’s easy to get sucked in the evening camp routine and data entry and forget about writing things down. Beers are also nice. Anyway, this is a basic summary of what we got up to in Ghana, Togo and Benin. It’s a bit long, will try to keep it shorten next time.

I arrived at Accra international on time at 03:30 on Friday morning and found a taxi driver named Charles holding a ‘dontye’ sign waiting to take me to the hostel. Naturally he thought my name was “dontye”. I didn’t fight him on this, because it sounded cool the way he pronounced it. The next morning at the hostel/guesthouse we all had breakfast together and chatted with Mike and Mark, the two guys who have just finished a 30 day leg in Ghana. When I say we, I mean Greg, Chris, Sebaz and me (henceforth know as ‘we’). We spend the next two days prepping cars and planning routes for our leg. We also found some time to go walkies around the outskirts of Accra, chatting to some people and trying out the local beer. Luckily there were no major mechanical problemos with the cars so the preparation all went smoothly. If there were any problems I would generally fix it and explain to Chris how cars worked.

We hit the town (Accra central baby!) on Friday night after having some supper with March (the director of MAPA project) and the teams who handed over the vehicles to us. Nightlife in Accra is good fun, and it would have been cool to spend some more time there. Chris had some adventures but I’ll leave that for him to tell. Basically he fell in an open drain, or “poofiesfontain” if you will.

On Monday we left Accra and headed to west to Kokrobite beach which is a very similar setup to Tofu in Mozambique. Loads of tourists, nice beaches, outdoor bars, and tasty beers. On the way there we stopped by Jamestown to check out the harbour market and the lighthouse. Jamestown is packed with people and the harbour market was mad. Good times though. It was in Kokrobite that I realized that Chris is worse than me when it comes to loosing things. He lost the cars keys on the beach and a bunch of other stuff which were all returned to us later that day. Sometimes I give him things, watched him put it down, then I take it back and ask him where it is. He then missions off for 30 min trying to find it. After a night in Kokrobite we headed west to cape coast and did some of the tourist stuff and saw the slave posts. We went on a tour and saw the Door of No Return, hectic stuff. I would write more about this but I’m rushing thorough this blog at the moment so I’m not going to. That night we stayed at a campsite right on a beach lined by palm trees near the town of Almino. Such a cool place and it blows my mind that it is not more popular with tourists, or even with locals. Ghana is so accessible, people are relaxed and getting around is easy.

By now we were used to the cars and starting to get a hang of knowing where everything was. The first stop on out mapping itinerary was Keta wetland, an IBA on the Ghana coast close to the Benin border. So we headed back East toward Keta the next morning and arrived only after dark because we stopped in Accra again to buy some food. Had to do a massive repack of the cars in the parking lot of Accra Mall to fit everything in, but we succeeded and people cheered and gave us money.

In a guesthouse just outside Keta I woke up early to some terrible news. Chris had diarrhoea. How did I know? Well we shared a room with an open plan toilet - interesting design. This meant that I woke up to him saying “sorry don, sorry don”, while laughing and sharting. Hectic times! But I couldn’t stop laughing either which meant I didn’t get anymore sleep. Later Chris and me (Team 2, AKA TeamBetterThanTeam3) cruised the roads on the west of the Keta lagoon, while Greg and Sebaz (Team 3) mapped the coastal side. The wetland area was great but not less accessible than we had hoped. We all met up again just before the Togo border, filled the cars, and then learnt how to do the border shuffle.

Togo is obviously poorer than Ghana, and the Togo immigration buildings are nothing more than wooden huts, but with no walls. So basically just roofs. Nice roof though. We drove through Togo in about two hours, and then hit the Benin border. For those of you who like titbits of information, Togo and Benin are “the home of voodoo”… that’s all I have. Togo had some awesome beeches, and it would have been cool to spend more time there, but it had been almost a week now and we had not done much mapping of protected areas yet so we had to get moving. We improved or border shuffle at the Benin border, got into Benin in the late evening, and stayed in a campsite called “Grand popo” or “big bum”, right on the beach in Benin. That night I went down to the beach pretty late for a beer and ended up watching some guys doing a voodoo ceremony/meeting under a full moon. Not something I ever thought I would see I my life, so it was a great experience !

I really liked Benin, especially the clothes. The guys there where the most colourful shirts ever, some even wear the matching pants. Very tropical – classic stuff. Benin is also packed with motorbikes, and traffic is crazy but good fun to watch. Stopped in a Market in Cotonou, the capital of Benin, and I tried my hand at bartering in French. Chris watched me go and was dying laughing because apparently I become Chinese when I speak to French people. I disagree, I feel I was more understood very well by the locals, unlike Chris who listens to French tapes in the car all day. Fude fafa! Anyway we hit the Nigerian border later that afternoon and it was not as hectic as we had expected., all though it did look like a bit of a war zone. By now our border shuffle is not bad and we got through without too much hassle. Then began the madness that is Nigeria. But that will come some other time.

Later daters.
Dontye