The Return to Accra

We wake up at 3:30 a.m. Friday morning under a cool full moon to say goodbye to the elephants, monkeys and warthogs of Mole National Park. Apparently, they aren't much for goodbyes. I don't see any of them anywhere. Only a huge orange Metro Mass Transit bus the size of two elephants standing trunk to butt. It is lurking outside the Information Center. We ride it off at 4:23 a.m.

We spend the day tracing a huge Z across Ghana. The road home is always easier and quicker than the road there. We watch the sun rise over clusters of small circular huts with grass roofs, fences of vertical wooden branches separating the fields of corn, goat and cow from the village. The chickens and guinea fowl roam where they please.

We arrive in Tamale before 9 a.m. Tamayalele, as Rafik had explained, means place of the kola nut. When the colonialists arrived, the locals often said they were going to Tamayalele. The colonialists picked it up as Tamale. Already, the heat is building, like in an oven that has begun to pre-heat to bake the day's bread. We buy a ticket on the next scheduled bus to Accra, which departs at 7 p.m. It is an expensive but relatively comfortable 12-hour ride. It would save us a night in a hotel, though, I rationalize.

Soon, seven of our fellow German and Austrian passengers from the morning's bus emerge to buy tickets. They must have asked the question of the ticket lady differently. They must have asked for the “next” bus to Accra. Because lo and behold a bus is arriving at 11 a.m. from Bolgatanga, near the Burkina border, with empty seats. And it is headed to Accra. So, we change our tickets.

The bus takes us from Tamale back through Kumasi. We stop outside of Kumasi for banku and okra stew. Banku is a soft ball of pounded maize and millet, I think. The okra stew is thick featuring three chunks of meat that seems to be beef wrapped around cartilage and coated in skin. I eat it with my right hand, freshly washed in soap and a bowl of water that is customarily provided for people who order fufu, banku or other foods eaten with the right hand.

We board the bus again with full stomachs to continue tracing the end of the alphabet in the Ghanaian dirt as it changes from red to brown. Annette convinces the bus driver to put in our 20 in 1 DVD. We watch One Love (another bad Kymani Marley movie with a good soundtrack) and City of God, dozing in and out. By 11 p.m., we find ourselves in a line of trucks and buses on a dirt road, averaging 20 km per hour. We spend a long and bumpy hour on this road before the lights and well-signed paved roads of Accra emerge before us. The bus finally drops us at Nkrumah Circle in Accra close to 1:30 a.m.

We walk the one kilometer to the New Haven Hotel. It is Friday night. Accra is quiet. Other than honking cab drivers looking to pick up these two foreigners with backpacks for a hefty fee, there isn't much selling. The staff at the New Haven Hotel seems to have amnesia. The reservation I made by phone around 9 a.m. this morning is nowhere to be found. There is one empty room. It is for a man named James, who reserved weeks ago. Given that he isn't here and it is 2 a.m., it doesn't take much to convince the sleepy staff member to give us that room.

We hit the bed after 2 a.m. to sleep off our longest day of travel yet.

We wake up to an Accra that seems different than the one we left two weeks ago. Travel around Ghana toughened us up a bit, I suppose. We were deer in headlights when the tro tro dropped us off near bustling Kejetie Market, supposedly the largest in West Africa, in Kumasi only ten days ago. But, within days we learned to navigate it. Now, the puzzle of the tro tros of Accra seem easy to navigate.

After a prolonged hotel breakfast of toast and tea, we catch a tro tro to Nkrumah Avenue and another to the Ethiopian Airlines office. I am in a foul mood and prepared for a fight.

After visiting travel agents that quoted us ticket prices over $700 a pop to South Africa, we went online. This was a week ago in Kumasi. We found tickets on Ethiopian Airlines for $500 each to Johannesburg. After the server bumped me off multiple times, I completed the reservation to find that I could not pay online. I could only pay in person in Accra. And I had to do it within 48 hours, or else the tickets would be canceled. I tried to call their main office in the U.S. and Ethiopia via Skype but the connection was bad. I even had my dad try to call Ethiopian Airlines in the United States to make payment. But all he found was a brick wall. So, I called Ethiopian Airlines in Accra multiple times this week. Mostly they didn't answer the phone. But when they did, one agent told me not to worry, the ticket would still be available. Another told me the opposite. And a third told me they are open until noon on Saturdays. So, like most things, this would need to be sorted out in person.

We are third in line. There are four desks with computers. Only two are occupied by agents, but the woman occupying the desk to the right disappears shortly after our arrival. After a grumpy 25 minutes, Annette and I take a seat across from the male agent. He asks us to hold on while he deals with a young man with two bags of bread. He puts the two loaves of bread in a larger bag and pays the man a few cedis. I explain that we are here to pay for a ticket that we booked online. I hand him a scrap of paper with the six digit reservation confirmation code underlined. The phone rings. He answers it. He taps at his computer, writes some things down on a piece of paper, reads letters and numbers through the phone. I am not sure if they are dates or prices.

After five minutes, he hangs up and returns to the sullen customers in front of him. “The system has canceled this reservation because you did not pay within 48 hours. It would cost more money if I re-book it. But there are seats available on the plane. So, you should go across the street and try to retrieve the booking. If you cannot retrieve it, make a new booking. It should be the same price. Then come back to pay.”

I confirm what he said and take off across the street, anxious to get the flight finalized. I ask directions to the Internet Cafe and find it a block away. 50 pesewas for half an hour. That should be enough, I think to myself. I am bumped off the website a few times. I try to book for Thursday and find the price doubled. So, I go back to the date of the original booking – Saturday. Sure enough, it is still available. The price is the same. I leave Annette to use up the last twenty minutes of Internet time and go back across the street.

I sit in the chair I left, ignoring the line. The agent is on the phone. I hand him the confirmation code. He accepts the credit card. Within fifteen minutes (and him answering the phone twice more) we have the flight booked. No fight necessary.

With our important business and our reason for returning to Accra behind us, Annette leads me to continue on her quest for a silver filigree ring to replace the diamond wedding ring she left behind in Mississippi for fear of damage or loss. I follow.

Sometimes, I feel like our time in Ghana is simply retracing Annette's steps from her previous visits six years ago with the Ghanaian Dr. Dorr's ethnomusicology class at Ole Miss and seventeen years ago with her family. She found the silver then in the Art Market near Nkrumah Park. So, we walk there to see if it still exists. It does. But there are only three choices, not enough for Annette to make a big purchase.

We find our way across the street to Tema Station to catch a tro tro to the University of Ghana in Legon. The campus is supposed to be beautiful. And the bookstore is supposed to be the top of the pops here in Ghana. We find a half-full tro tro and grab seats. Items for sale wander by on heads as we wait. Water. Toothbrushes. Meat pies. Plantain chips. Healing ointments. After twenty minutes, the tro tro is full and we take off for Legon.

Within five minutes, the back right tire blows. It sounds like an explosion followed by the persistent pounding of the bent tire rim against the pavement. Several woman start chanting Jesus' name. The driver swerves between an off-ramp and an on-ramp. For a moment, I wonder if we will flip. But he gains control and opts for the on-ramp. He drives much farther than I would have – maybe 300 meters.

We stop in the right lane of a four-lane divided highway, on an overpass. Passengers pile out to the guardrail. The rim is badly bent. The tire is completely flat. We watch, around twenty of us. A bald spare tire emerges from below a seat. Two tire irons. A reflective triangle to divert traffic. But no jack. Two tro tros stop. Each with a red jack. The second one also provides a huge tire iron to provide enough torque to break the bolt that has undoubtedly been rattled, dusted and rusted beyond the weight of the driver jumping on it with tire iron attached. Eventually it too comes loose. A seat cover is placed underneath the tro tro to prevent the driver from lying on the ground while he pumps the jack. The blown tire is remove to reveal a hole the size of my foot on the inside wall.

There is a nice breeze on the overpass, which competes effectively with the sun. A police escort of five black Toyota SUVs passes in the other lane. I will learn later on the news that this may have been President Atta Mills returning home from a visit to Christ the King school nearby.

After thirty minutes or so, we are back in the tro tro bound for Legon. Despite my asking the boy who takes the money, it is a woman in front of us who tells us when to get off. Just in the nick of time too. Because the tro tro was pulling off again past the University of Ghana.

We wander the leafy campus. It is a welcome sight. Despite the fact that it is Saturday, students are everywhere. We find the bookstore as a gentleman is locking it up. Too late to enter. I am in the midst of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, anyway. And planning on trading it for something else in South Africa. We find a bathroom, a cold Fanta and a taxi to Lobodi Beach for red red and fish of the quality Annette has been searching for since we ate it last here. The beach is covered in tables with chairs clustered under the afternoon shade of umbrellas. It is more beautiful than I remember. And the food is much better than I remember. The beach is busier. Even the service seems better. Same with the reggae blasting from the restaurant. We eat a leisurely late lunch with a couple of big Star beers. We find a tro tro that drops us off a block from our hotel and spend the evening resting and using Internet.

Tomorrow, we will wake to the sound of the preacher across the street talking in tongues and travel to Aburi Gardens and on to the Volta Region.