We're into stage two of our trip. As I write this we're in Crawley England (just outside of London near Gatwick airport). In the strange world that is modern travel, it was less expensive to fly from Amsterdam to London, hang out here for a couple of days and then fly on to southern France for the next leg of our journey.
There is so much that we saw and did and felt in our last ten days in Ghana that we wanted to write about that one blog entry won't do justice to, but I don't know how much time we're going to have to write in the next couple of days (if we were to make one pre-trip change we definitely would have brought an iPod or iPad with us -- everywhere, even in Africa -- has WiFi and it would have made staying in touch a lot easier...); we're going to take the train into London proper tomorrow and then we fly out early on Sunday morning. I'll do my best to capture some of the high (and low) of the week and half we spent travelling around Ghana and then if we have more time and access in the days to come we'll try to expand on some of them in longer entries.
Once we were done our placement in Hohoe (we will definitely have to write about the last day at the school -- we made paper airplanes with the kids and played games with balloons; it felt like we actually added a tiny little bit to the KG class's education, but it also felt like it was time to move on) we travelled back to the capital Accra. We had made arrangements to stay at Hotel Obama (as you might expect, the first black president -- with African roots, even if they are in east Africa -- is very big in Ghana; one of the larger and fancier drinking establishments in Hohoe was called Obama Gardens) but we learned upon arriving at the hotel (after a great deal of difficulty) that they had fudged their location on Google maps and were nowhere near the airport as the map had suggested. One of the other volunteers still had to be dropped off at her hotel so we went with her and got a room there. Coconut Grove was very much the lap of luxury, after a month in Hohoe, but you paid for it. An airport shuttle was inlcuded, and we got up bright and early the next morning to catch a plane to Tamale in northern Ghana.
Tamale is where Alice worked 11 years ago. I will let her write more about the city then and now, but suffice to say it's changed a lot in a decade. It's gone from a somewhat sleepy city of half a million to a booming metropolis of 1.4 million. It was not the city that Alice remembered -- it was considerably larger, busier and nosier. It's hard to put into words what an African city feels like for people who haven't been, but the three of us found Tamale overwhelming, even with our month-long experience in Hohoe (which, for comparison sake, is much smaller at only about 50,000). The traffic feels like it's everywhere, taxis moving all around, honking, brakes squeaking as well as cars and truck pulled up here, there and everywhere on the sides of the roads and on the sidewalks; people are everywhere as well, selling, sitting, bartering, walking.
One of the reasons for the boom in the city, we were told, was the war in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire; much of the traffic that travelled through there -- mostly trucks with goods for the contries that lie inland -- now travel through Ghana and specifically through Tamale. Tamale was the only time we were approached by aggressive panhandlers and Alice's friend Coleman told us that most of these people had been displaced from places like Cote d'Ivoire and Mali.
Still, it was very nice to picked up at the airport by someone we knew and ferried into a town that Alice knew (at least a past incarnation of it anyway). Coleman had made arrangements for us to stay at a guest house close to his house.
My time on the library computer is about to run out so I'll sign off for now and try to write more later.
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