Accra

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it or not, but I pretty much hate Accra. Let’s play a game to get a better feel of the place. Imagine a large city, such as Houston; now narrow all the streets, squish in the entire city, multiply the number of cars by four, multiply the number of pedestrians by ten, add thousands of hawkers, spread a few tons of trash throughout the place, sprinkle in some goats, chickens and dogs, make sure that the traffic is always rush hour/parking lot and for some reason everyone is racing, traffic signs don’t really matter and every single driver is playing chicken with the next. The trucks like the one below with guys sleeping on coconuts drive as crazy as the small taxis and motos....just fyi. ;) I really love Ghana, but Accra, not so much.

Back to the real reason of this post, and I‘ll make it short. George and I had to go to Accra to get a police report/certificate (everyone keeps telling us it’s a different term) for his visa processing. We got to our tro-tro early, but we had to wait for it to get full and then we were off to Accra, about a 2 hour ride. As usual, George knows someone who could help us. His roommate’s brother is a policeman and works at the Accra headquarters! This was such a blessing for us. We ended up not having everything that we needed for this police report, but our new friend helped us out tremendously. After finding a place for me to park it (can’t let the people who decide the price see my skin color), he walked G through everything and found a way to move forward even without our missing item and will collect the report and hold it for us until we are back in Accra. The fee still ended up being 4 times more than it was supposed to be, but we should get this paperwork on time because of it (can you imagine what it would be had I been standing there?).

After this complicated victory, we decided that we should celebrate with hamburgers! The air conditioned restaurant was a nice break.

After walking around just a little, we headed back to the tro-tro station and back to Cape Coast. Let me tell you, back in the day, tro-tros were these old, hardly held together vans that typically broke down at least once during a trip, probably had a door closed by a rope and were almost always a mish mash of different vans and different parts to make one very interesting tro-tro. There was no A/C, most likely no music and you just prayed that the windows opened. Now, and I don’t know how this happened, Ghana is full of very nice, new tro-tros. Either an interesting Toyota mini-bus or George’s favorite, the Ford. There are lots of 15-passenger Ford vans, just like my family had when we were kids. These are quite the improvement, they have A/C. they don’t break down and nothing is held together with rope or tape. However, because the fear that their vehicle will fall apart has been taken away from the drivers, they drive like maniacs! Side note: there are about 57 rumble strips between Accra and Cape Coast, the drivers do not slow down. By the time we arrived back in Cape Coast, my back was sore! I also apparently got food poisoning from my meal…..but that’s all part of the adventure, part of our story.