Ando can officially sleep anywhere.

Africa is either really cheap or really expensive to visit because it takes a month to be able to interpret your environment enough that you can get around on your own. If you don’t have a month, you need an expensive guide to interpret your environment for you. One Ghanaian friend who had lived in Germany for several years said it very simply – your world is user-friendly, while mine is friendly.

Safety – above anything, safety is expensive. It often feels like life here in Ghana is considered less valuable than the cost of installing seatbelts or paying police officers properly so that they stop accepting bribes from commercial vehicles that overload their trucks and kill 170 people in the month of November in my region alone when their brakes fail or when they overtake weaker vehicles.

Comfort – when you take the entire cost of running a vehicle from point A to point B, and divide it between the maximum allowed occupancy of the vehicle, the cost would be too high for most Ghanaians to afford. In order to make travel more cost-effective, tro-tros – often Chinese-made vehicles that seem to have a per person space allowance based on the average size of people in China, rather than a more realistic Ghanaian allowance – often even add another 1-2 people per row beyond capacity. Our 5 hour tro from Wenchi to Bui National Park had a 28 person capacity, though we counted 40 people inside the tro, plus another dozen or so on the roof. Plus the 3-bag per person minimum that seems to accompany Ghanaian travellers.

Signage – being a local really means something in Africa, and travellers find this most frustrating in terms of the total lack of signage and consistencies such as street names or addresses. Even when road names do exist, locals never know them and have instead their own names, such as “the junction” [which one?], “next to the orange tree”, or simply “not far”. Above and beyond anywhere I’ve ever travelled, Ghanaians have the least consistent sense of direction, always making ambiguous and general statements about everything. Add to this the fact that nothing is ever written down, it’s sometimes a miracle that travellers can ever reach their destination [though the journey is more than half the fun]. It can be extremely intimidating to recent arrivals to be constantly at the mercy of people who are friendly, but in the Ghanaian-style of [aggressively] bellowing things in your general direction, sometimes even grabbing you. It can take weeks to be able to tell the difference between the hollering Ghanaian who’s genuinely going out of his/her way to ensure you safely make it to your destination, and the barking Ghanaian who’s lying to you so that you’ll patronise someone who will give him/her a kick-back fee.

After an entire month of trying to understand how to feed myself and get places without an escort, I spoke to one of my work colleagues about my frustrations.

-Budget, do you generally feel like you understand your world?
-In what sense? Do I think I’m going to heaven when I die?
-No. Like if you’re walking down the street, and a crowd of people suddenly burst into the streets screaming and dancing, do you feel like you know why? When cars are driving in either direction on either side of a divided highway, and then there are other cars driving in either direction on the unpaved shoulder of the highway, do you understand where your car must go? Do you understand what all those hand gestures coming from taxi drivers mean?
-Yah. I’d say I generally understand what’s happening in each of those situations.
-Okay. So I shouldn’t just give up trying to understand your world?

Somewhere along the way, I either stopped trying to understand my surroundings, or I actually did start to understand my surroundings, at least enough to be able to feed myself and see most of the country. Let Ando – a dear old friend who came to spend her Christmas holidays with me in Ghana while she’s living in Morocco for 2 years – be the judge.

Ando's photos [I'm still waiting for Pat's] are at: www.photobox.co.uk/lgudaiti@alumni.sfu.ca
Chronology:

1. Accra – The capital, though almost entirely lacking in anything of tourist or urban-planner interest, though enormously interesting to sociology types. Ando’s arrival, my malaria hospital recovery, Ando’s first of many bucket showers, Ghanaian-Chinese food.
2. Krokrobite – a beach town just outside of the capital. Disappointing drum lessons, but the first peace I've had in at least 3 months.
3. Cape Coast – The Boston of Ghana, hosting the highest university per capita rate in the country, a colonial-era urban fabric, winding roads and old buildings, and another visit to the hospital for me.
4. Kakum National Park – Ghana’s most touristique national park, with a Star Wars-inspired canopy walkway.
5. Elmina Slave Castle – One of the most impressive of the dozen or so slave forts dotted along the Ghanaian coast, this Dutch-built slave “castle” was the last stop for hundreds of thousands slaves who survived the journey to the coast and then either made it onto ships for the New World or died at the fort.
6. Kumasi – the Capital of the Ashanti kingdom, considered to be one the most resistant of the African tribes to colonisation. Kumasi, according to my urban-planning ass, is one of the few Cities of West Africa, named the Garden City of West Africa by the Queen when she visited in the 1990s.
7. Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary – a delightful monkey sanctuary situated between two villages that consider the monkeys as being sacred, even burying expired monkeys in their own cemetery.
8. Bui National Park – When the government built the Volta Dam in the 1960s, the hippopotami living in Lake Volta had to go up the Volta river to the Black Volta where 200 of them currently stay about 20 km from the Cote D’Ivoire border. Their new home is slated for its own dam though, construction reportedly beginning in June 2007, at which time the hippos are expected to pack up and move again, though this time to Cote D’Ivoire or Burkina Faso, both of which the Black Volta crosses. We were fortunate to see 25 of them panic and run into the river as they heard us approach. Hippos are so high-strung.
9. Koforidua – My [current] hometown, situated in the mountainous jungle and isolated from the main Accra-Kumasi corridor. Ando pounded her first fufu and enjoyed the lovely company of my Ghanaian friends here.

Ando did a super job. It took the rest of us at least a month to stop complaining about all the waiting, the heat, the humidity, the dryness of the Hamatan, the constant noise, suffocating pollution, being covered in dust all the time, swarms of blood-sucking insects, exhaustion from relentless attention, persistent barking of children, total lack of toilet and washing facilities, lumpy beds, dirty sheets, waking up to roosters at 4am, sheep at 5am, goats at 6am, Ghanaian house calls at 7am, and constant leg/neck/ass cramping from sitting in overloaded vehicles lacking adequate shocks for the dilapidated road conditions. Ando didn’t complain. Partly because Ando managed to sleep through much of it.

I’ve seen Ando fall asleep in the middle of a rambunctious and lively jazz concert. I’ve seen Ando fall asleep in mid-sentence while sitting upright in a wooden chair, only to wake 15 minutes later to finish her sentence. But, most impressively, Ando managed catch up on sleep while sandwiched between 6 people in a row meant for 4, inhaling exhaust fumes from the floor and dust from the window, while our decaying vehicle precariously stormed down a road fit only for a tank.