Yel Kaye – Travel Blog, Writing and Photography

After not writing anything here for half a year, I am finally doing something noteworthy enough to start writing again. I got to Accra four days ago, and will be heading back to Burkina via Togo in a few days. At the risk of being horribly cliche, the last few days have confirmed the following: I really love West Africa. I had 47 hours in transit, but smelling the air as I stepped off the plane made it all worth it.

I’ve been hanging out with Alison, an old university buddy, who is working for JHR here in Accra. We left on my first morning and headed west, to a beach town past Takoradi near the Ivoirian border. It was actually quite the epic journey getting there – tro tro to Cape Coast, tro tro to Takoradi, tro tro to some junction, and then a half-hour taxi ride down a windy, bumpy road to the beach. When we got there it was unreal – a beautiful little resort right on the beach. To the east the beach stretches for at least a mile, and to the west is a fishing village next to a bluff. The resort was pretty empty, except for a few odd characters, including a hyperactive rasta who babbled incoherently about peach and love, and a Hungarian backpacker who had run out of money and was now frantically trying to find work aboard a cargo ship to get back home. We spent our days on the beach and walking around the area (with the hyperactive rasta as a guide), and the evenings drinking copious amounts of Star beer and whisky and listening to reggae or people playing the djembe. The bartender, George, took us drunk Canadians down the beach to see this creature light up beneath the sand when stepped. It was a ridiculous sight – four Canadians and three Ghanaians stomping furiously on the sand in the dark, laughing hysterically and screaming whenever we saws a speck of light under our feet.

We came back to Accra yesterday, and went out at night to celebrate my birthday. We went to a (mostly expat) bar. It was a night place, but it was weird to step back out onto the street and remember that yes, I am in Africa.

I have bee to Accra before but now I am seeing a lot more of it. I can’t say that it is my favourite place in Africa, but I can see that it is probably more livable than Ouaga (which I still love more, though.) One thing that is quite disconcerting is the sheer number of non-African. There are a zillion white people, and a huge Lebanese expat community. Accra seems to be the volunteering capital of the world, since there are a ton of young people doing short, one-monthish project in and around the city. (“Voluntourism” is what a lot of people call it. Not that my measly three month volunteer project in Burkina Faso was much better, but the vast number of white people “saving the world” here is astounding.) Anyways, I’m not trying to say that Accra is a less authentically “African” city, but it’s just weird compared to Ouagadougou, where we played the challenging “spot the white person” game.