Ghana

Having just barely made it off the Volta Ferry, Bo and I headed for Mole National Park. Its main attraction is its heads of elephants, which congregate at certain drinking holes here in the dry season. Little did we know, as we approached the park, that those same elephants would eventually chase us away from their drinking spots.

Getting from Yeji where the ferry left us, Bo and I used all day getting the 300 km to the park. Starting at 7:30 by crossing a river, onward with first a coach then a minibus, before making the final few kilometres in a taxi. We arrived twelve hours after we had taken off, just as the sun was setting over the bush.

Standing tall on the top of a cliff, Mole Motel have been the primary place of accommodation in the park since the 1960’s. I haven’t had too much luxury during my previous national park visits in West Africa, but lounging by the pool with a view of elephants on the plains below is pretty much a highlight. And the expense? 13 US$ a night for a dorm bed. Before this turns into a commercial for the Motel, I should probably note that it’s pretty rundown in that built-in-the-60’s kind of sense.

And while sitting by the pool and watching elephants from afar is all well and good, going out searching for the elephants on the plains is a lot more fun – and excitement. So, for 2.5 dollars per hour per person, we headed out on a safari walk to get a closer look at the elephants. The animals have mostly gotten used to visitors, and they are somewhat relaxed about us hanging around. To be honest, the group of elephants we found seem much more concerned about throwing the right amount of dirt on themselves and wash in the big waterhole were the congregate. It was easy getting within 20 meters them. Awesome!

Though not every elephant loved our hanging about. At the end of the walk, we came across two young male elephants, who did not like our presence one bit. I’d just managed to get a frontal photo of one of the two elephants when they made a small charge at us. It was more of a threat than a real charge, but it quickly sends us head over heels – running for dear life. The armed ranger who was with us, got so far shouldering his rifle, preparing a warning shot while we retreated before the elephants stood down. Not happy with the speed of our retreat, the did follow us for a while to make sure that we were leaving.

With that level of excitement, we wasted another afternoon at the pool…

The next day we left Mole, not so much because of the elephant chase, rather because Bo is running out of time before he needs to get back home. But our animals adventures in Ghana wasn’t over just yet. In the far, far north, on the border with Burkina Faso and another day’s journey from Mole is a small border town named Paga. The town is home to a couple of sacred crocodile pools. Somehow, the crocodiles have an unspoken agreement with the ponds’ caretakers that they get a chicken if they don’t eat the dumb tourists who come by, posing for photos with them.

Having paid the entrance fee (not getting eaten isn’t free) the caretaker zipped around the corner to a nearby market to buy the unlucky chicken that had to give up its life because Bo and I wanted some photos with a crocodile. The chicken was then waved in from of the croc, which then crawled onto dry land. Here, Bo and I was instructed in how to pet and hold the tale of the crocodile, while we were both nervous about the animals large teeth and felt pretty horrible because walking around, pulling the tails of poor crocodile falls well into the category of something bad tourists would do. The pictures turned out pretty bad-ass, though.

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Slowly floating down the second-largest human-made lake in the world is a relatively lax affair. The bar is loaded with beers, the captain walks around to greet the passengers, and the big-shot yam trader is sleeping on a foam mattress on the upper deck. Africa is – as always – full of surprises. Also surprisingly, the ferry, MV Yapei Queen, had gotten a new engine. The 430 km used to take anywhere between 36 and 60 hours – now the journey takes 30 hours sharp. Dare I say; it’s not very African of them.

30 hours is still a lot longer than the 10 hours the same distance would take in the bus. But after months of road travel, the alternative of travelling by the Yapei Queen was an unmissable opportunity for covering some distance with comforts not found on even the best of roads here in West Africa. The buses don't have a bar. Nor does most of them have A/C. And none of them has two first class cabins with bunk beds, one of which Bo and I managed to secure by booking a few days ahead. Otherwise, we would have shared the upper deck with the yam-trader. I know, but after ten months here, I’m happy that I don’t have to rough it all the time.

I’ve always liked to travel slowly, and the fact that we ‘only’ used 30 hours was almost too short. We left Akosombo, on the lake’s southern extremity, at 7 pm. Monday and arrived a Yeji in the north at 1 am. Wednesday. Only having one full day to enjoy the ride seemed almost too short. Especially, because sailing down the lake, big as a small ocean, was peaceful bliss. No wind, no waves. Just a mirror-like surface. Just for the sake of giving you an idea I've made a rather primitive map showing the trip. anyone really interested in boats, timetables or geography will probably have to look up the lake... Then again, few probably are...

The Harmattan wind – a meteorological phenomenon where strong trade winds blow dust from the Sahara down over most of West Africa, for months at a time, between November and February – was lying like a blanket of foggy dust on the rugged shores. We almost felt like sailing through a thick soup, perfectly isolated from the rest of Africa. From the rest of the world.

Bo and I used the evenings sipping beers on the upper deck with a couple of other pale travellers. Sharing travel stories and comparing destinations long through the night. My 30 years of age and 88 countries travelled made me both the youngest and least travelled of our group. Let’s just say; the stories weren’t boring.

Arriving in the small port of Yeji at 1 am wasn’t optimal – to put it mildly. Certainly not because we needed to cross to the lake’s opposite shore 7:30 that morning to catch the one daily bus leaning from the even smaller Old Makongo on the other side. The captain was kind enough to let us stay in our cabin until 4 am, but didn’t tell us that the ferry would sail out at that exact time. So when a shipmate knocked on our door at 3:58, yelling, "we’re moving!" we weren’t ready at all. Five minutes later, we’re running off the boat, hoping we haven’t left anything behind. No matter now. Less than twenty seconds after our feet touched the harbour’s dirt, the Yapei Queen pulls off and leaves us in the dark.

The port – no more than a long pier made of dirt and rocks – is pitch black. A few stalls make a small harbour market, with a few traders sleeping on benches and a transistor radio playing reggae. A little wooden cart is standing off to one side. As we have been told that the small boat that makes the 5 km crossing to the other shore also leaves from here, we simply decided to nap on that wooden cart until daybreak woke us up a few hours later.

The short crossing only took an hour, and our bus showed up at 9.00 but didn’t leave town until a little past 11 because of no particular reason. From there we had a four-hour dusty and bumpy ride on Ghana’s northern roads until we arrived in Tamale, the main city of the north. To be honest, we quickly began to miss the tranquil life onboard the Yapei Queen...

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As we’re walking past the corpse of the queen mother, an official’s angry hiss gets my attention. "Remove your glasses!" Apparently, it’s not allowed to wear glasses as you pay the queen her last respect. Just another cultural difference and traditional taboo that’s impossible to predict for an outside like me.

My family have returned to Denmark. I’ve instead been join by Bo – the founder of Globespots.com, for which I sometimes do some writing – who’ll bee travelling with me for about a month. Together with a couple of German travellers, we’re attending the funeral ceremony of the Ashanti, Queen mother. The second most important position in the ancient Ashanti culture, after the King of the Ashanti.

If you don’t know the Ashanti, here’s the ultra short background. Ashanti means "because of wars" and the kingdom offered the toughest resistance against the British in Ghana during the early colonisation period. So great was this kingdom that their former territory now forms an entire region in central Ghana, simply called the Ashanti Region.

The death of the queen mother is a once-in-a-generation experience. So it’s a lucky coincident that the five-day ceremony fits perfectly with our trip. Thousands of people had gathered on the palace grounds and in the surrounding streets. Most wearing all black – including our two German friends who had have special clothes made in the market earlier that day. Some combined black and dark red (the royal colours), and a few came in whatever black or red clothes they had. Both Bo and I struggled to find anything that could go with our black t-shirts, but most people seemed to forgive our brown pants.

A ceremony like this one – we found out – tend to be rather rowdy. One thing is the heavy drinking. The funeral is held a few months after the queen mother’s death. So the moarning had been replaced by something more fitting a goodbye party, which I guess fits well with a funeral. More problematic was the dancing and competition. Let me explain.

All the regions local chiefs attend this funeral. With full entourage. These entourages, complete with weapons for noise-making, tend to compete in creating the loudest and wildest presentation of their chief. One thing is the firearms for making noise, but the dances and shouts mostly arrive from old worrier and war dances that are very aggressive in nature. Having a bunch of armed bodyguards competing in being the wildest loudest and most aggressive, doesn’t necessarily create what I would call a ‘nice atmosphere’. It was rather a spectacle.

Having mostly untrained local bodyguards to act as crowd control didn’t improve the situation further. Local dancers would approach us white people and make a dance move where they would rather aggressively head-bud a money bill. If we were meant to donate money to the dancers, I don’t know, but being singled out by these guys weren’t fantastic.

At this point, some local guy felt pity for us and used most of the rest of the funeral on showing us around and trying to explain us things. Including getting us into the lines that would walk around the dead queen mother’s body as a sign of respect. No shoes, no jewellery (including watches), no hats and apparently no glasses. I’m just happy that I’m only 0.5 myopic – so it wasn’t a problem to actually see the body. Had I been near blind it might have been a problem not to accidentally step on one of the many members of the royal family who was sitting on the ground around the corpse.

Rowdiness and the aggressive vibe aside it was an enjoyable experience. Only one real low point was that both Bo and I suffered an attempt to pickpocket us. This is the first time in my ten months here in West Africa I’ve experienced it, but crowds like this are prime locations for thieves, so I’m not surprised. Both Bo and I are experienced travellers, and none succeeded.

I’m mostly a bit offended by how stupid “my pickpocketer” though I was. He got my zipped pockets opened and tried to go for my phone. I feel his hand around my pocket, grabs it with my left hand and pushes him away by planting my right hand firmly in his chest. Accompanied by a loud, “keep your hands out of my pockets!” You should think he would get that message, but no. A second later he tried to open my zipper on my small camera back strapped to my belt. Again, I manage to push his hands away and just before I turn around some locals shout out to me that he’s a thief and he loses himself in the chaos.

However, he was wearing a blue and white jumper. In a crowd of all black. He was the easiest guy to spot, and I manage to spot him across the crowd. I simply refuse to get pickpocketed by someone so amateurish that he doesn’t even dress to disappear into a crowd of people all dressed in black. If you want to pickpocket this white guy, you simply need to make at least a minimum of an effort!

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2017 began with celebrating New Year’s Eve on a Ghanaian beach called Kokrobité. In other words: I soaked in alcohol for three days. Most notable from those three days, a couple of Canadian girls, that I’m simply going to call Really and Serious to hide their real identities, thought me to drink something new. Something called Triple Gin & Lime. And it’s pretty simple. Take three shots of gin and one shot of Rose’s Lime – you know, that yellow sticky stuff that is usually used to give cocktails a lemony taste. Then pretend really, really hard that is a proper drink and not just three shots of gin with yellow poured on top.

It tastes horrible. At first. After two or three of these death traps you begin to think that it’s actually a proper cocktail. This is a warning sign because it only makes you drink it faster. Which will, of course, only result in you getting shitfaced even more quickly. Go ahead. Pretend that three gin shots with some yellow sugar is a drink and see how fast your night is going to end. On the 31st Really, Serious and I started this show pretty early in the morning, and I’m real proud to say that I do remember the midnight fireworks. I don’t remember much after that, though.

Thus, I think that is it fair to take a short vacation from the hard traveller’s life. So, I left Really and Serious to soak in more Triple Gin & Lime and left for a fancy hotel in Accra. It’s not my first “vacation” on this trip. I spent about two weeks in both Freetown and Bamako lying around, doing nothing as a break from travelling. This time is different, though. In Freetown and Bamako, I was still on my shitty traveller’s budget, still couchsurfing and sleeping in a dorm. It was still budget travelling, just without the moving anywhere.

This time I’m doing it properly. Primarily because I’m getting a visit from my parents and my sister for two weeks. I’ve apparently been away for too long, and when I’m not going home to visit them, they have to come down and visit me. Which is, to be honest, very sweet of them. This means a massive upgrade of my living standards. Which is also why I was heading to “a fancy hotel” in Accra. Fancy hotels instead of dorms and bordellos. Air-conditioned restaurants instead of street food. And a rented car to get around in instead of the overcrowded buses.

Instead of taking a break from travelling by not moving while staying on my small budget, this time I would keep moving, but upgrade the travel budget massively thanks to the family visit. Something most people would actually be able to recognise as a vacation. Together we would explore Denmark’s colonial and slave-trading history on the former Gold Coast, cruise on the biggest human-made lake in Africa, visit West Africa’s largest market, see colonial forts and castles and, walk through the tree tops in canopy walkways.

My family’s visit had been arranged quite some months ago, and Ghana is certainly the ideal location. It’s the most developed country in West Africa, probably has the most prominent tourist attraction, and is Anglophone. Not surprisingly Ghana is often described as “Africa for Beginners”.

It’s also a quite strange feeling. Going from trashy, backpacker type to upper-middle-class vacationer. Though the word “backpacker” doesn’t really work here in West Africa outside Ghana. All that sitting around hostels, drinking with other western backpacker’s, which is, essentially, a huge part of backpacking – whether backpackers want to admit it or not – isn’t available here in West Africa.

I’m not going to lie. Staying at hotels that cost four daily budgets a night feels pretty damn good. But it’s nothing compared to being able to eat proper food! The travelling life had become somewhat routine after ten months, and this luxury break can hopefully do something to reset the excitement of travelling. Because that is essentially where the magic happens. I was rereading one of my first blog entries from my adventures in Central Asia the other day. My first experience on a Russian train. The sheer excitement and curiosity I expressed in that blog, is far from the feelings I have about West Africa after ten months of travelling here. I need to return to that!

But the time for this early and innocent excitement is probably over for me on this trip. Simply because I have learned how most things work here in West Africa. All the wonder and some of the excitement is gone. It’s pretty naturally. Travelling for a year in the same region, where the countries are relatively alike, means a certain getting used to everything. That is not to say that the travelling has gotten boring – not at all – but it isn’t new anymore.

Changing everything up, with two weeks of luxury, is new. And with a little luck, going back to the shoestring travel will afterwards hopefully be like coming home to an old friend once again.

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Roaming around West Africa for a year isn’t cheap. It’s not particularly expensive either. Once my twelve months here are over, I’ll have burned just about €12.000. Sure that’s a lot of travelling, but those twelve grand are the only money I’ve spent in a whole year. And since they have started to run short, I figured I might as well write a little about how I saved them and what I’ve burned them on.

Getting your hands on travel money isn’t too difficult. Most of my stash was built by saving money through smaller jobs I had on the side of my studying and volunteering back home. Granted, with free education and a monthly scholarship from the government (it’s good to be Danish) it’s been easier for me than for most. But mind you, I manage to do this without anything near a full-time job salary.

I eat cheap; I try to cut down on transportation cost. I never shop stuff I don’t need – I can’t remember when I last bought new clothes that weren’t second hand. But most importantly, I haven’t made any big investments like the purchase of a house or a car that I’m struggling to pay off.

The last bit of money comes from writing for GlobeSpots.com and selling some of my best travel photos online.

Both of these added incomes are simply a matter of me travelling a lot. I got the GS gig by meeting the editor on a hostel in Uzbekistan, where we shared some shish kebabed goat’s testicles with another traveller (no joke). Haven taken thousands (if not tens of thousands) of travel photos during my last decade of travelling, I’ve used an endless number of hours taking editing photos. Followed a somewhat evolutionary path, I’ve gradually used more and more time getting into taking good shots. Eventually, I’ve gotten good enough to sell the very best ones.

Having thus secured this massive amount of wealth, how have I managed to blow it all?

€12.000 in 12 months neatly equals €1.000 per month – or 33€ per day, which is a pretty decent backpacker’s budget in most of the non-Western world. In places like Southeast Asia and India, it’s an absolute fortune. I won’t break it down in details, but about ten percent have been wasted on visas. Maybe even more. Sure, Senegal and Gambia was free, but Mauritania was a 120€, Liberia 150$, the two visas for Guinea were 45€ and 120€ respectively (don’t buy your Guinea visa in Liberia).

Other than that, there’s ‘the rule of thirds’: a third of my money goes on accommodation, a third on food and the last third is split between transportation and during fun stuff. The last third is divided because days that are heavy on transportation is usually less heavy on museums, national parks, party nights and so on. Travelling with public transportation in most of the world, getting a few hundred kilometres easily takes a whole day. Then you’re there for a few days before spending another full day going somewhere new.

As for accommodation, cheap's hard to come by in West Africa. Europe and Asia have cheap dorm beds everywhere. I’ve slept in less than ten dorms after I left Morocco – they are not here. When there are no budget travellers, there are no dorms. And there are very few travellers of any kind here in West Africa. Instead, it’s single rooms, and the cheapest are rented by the hour for stuff other than sleeping. That makes accommodation expensive. Couchsurfing in large cities helps, but that will be evened out by 15€ rooms in the major provincial towns.

But isn’t food really, really cheap in Africa? Yes. It is. And to be honest food might not be a full third of my budget, but it’s not a fantastic as you might think. Cheap food has almost no variation. Anywhere. In all of West Africa. It’s usually limited to omelettes, rice with sauce spicy enough to melt concrete or fried fish. Sure, in few places it’s possible to get regional alternatives, but the dirt cheap, street food options are very much limited to this – and then to women selling fruits and vegetables.

And I’m simply not build to eat the same thing day in and day out. I need variation. At least, get me some fried chicken, some spaghetti, or some grilled fish. The problem is that to get these simple variations into my food plan, I often have to splurge on a 3-5€ meal… Sure I could probably nitpick my eating priorities. Or spend more time searching out better food places. But travelling should be fun too, so I really can’t be bothered. It’s hard enough to travel through Africa alone, and eating something other than street food once in a while have become my most cheeriest luxury.

Ten months into this, I would go insane if I had to eat more rice than I already do. I haven’t studied it carefully, but my estimate is that more than half of my lunches and dinners include rice in some form or another. A few countries have even had rice soup as the typical breakfast at the bus station before those early morning buses too. I’ve had plenty of days where rice was the main part of all my three daily meals. Sigh.

The “fun” part of the budget is somewhat limited. It’s mostly blown on expensive visits to national parks where there is little to see, but monkeys. Or for guides to climb mountains. And transportation is a rather necessary part of travelling, so I won’t bother getting into that category.

The last big expense is alcohol. I could probably make a separate budget post on that, but usually, I divide it between the food and the fun posts. As a rule of thumb, anything more than three beers goes on the fun part of the budget – three beers or less goes on the food part. Isn’t budgeting fun?

This is, of course, a matter of rough estimates. The point is that it’s relatively easy to blow through €12,000 in a year’s travel. Interestingly, as I’m getting closer to the end of my adventure I have less money to spend (funny how that works – spending money without making money means that I gradually have less money). But staying longer and longer on the road means that I have to use more luxury money on nice stuff like good food or alcohol as a coping mechanism in a desperate attempt to avoid going crazy.

On that rather sad conclusion, as a small end note to this post, I can announce that I’ve finally booked a flight home to Denmark. But don’t worry, I won’t stop writing right away. I won’t be flying until I’ve made it to Niger. More precisely, I’ll leave West Africa on March 11, landing in Copenhagen the following day.

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