The road to Zebilla

11 October 2013

The Road to Zebilla

First, a word of apology.  Readers will have been on the edge of their seats waiting for the next instalment of my blog, and are due a word of explanation for the delay.  Put simply, the internet connection here is a bit of a challenge, and unfortunately the blog has lost out to email and facebook.  Jane has managed to post a couple of times, and these will give you a sense of how we are faring.  See [link]

Looking on the positive side, the delay does mean that some of these thoughts are a bit more mature than they would have been three weeks ago.

We spent our first week in Ghana’s capital, Accra (pronounced a bit like “bazaar”).  It’s a friendly and vigorous place but it’s a pretty charmless, sprawling city, probably typical of its type.  There is almost nothing of historical interest (unlike, for example, Marrakech).  It is low-rise; if there is an architectural style (but I suspect there isn’t) it’s “functional”; it has a couple of busy ring-roads and a lot of traffic; there aren’t many big shops (though we were told that Africa’s biggest “shopping mall” is in Accra and it was pointed out as we were driven from the airport to the hotel); and there is lots of evidence of building work – much of it in the form of partially completed structures where work might well be waiting until the developer can afford the next load of concrete blocks.  There isn’t much by way of public buildings, the notable exception being rather grand the tomb of Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana’s campaign for independence and was its first leader.  A couple of banks have big buildings which look as if they contain a European-style office environment, but the buildings we went into (VSO’s own offices, and a doctor’s clinic) are considerably more basic (and wouldn’t be deemed adequate by most Europeans).  Health and Safety professionals probably risk their sanity if they visit…

Intermingled with this, many parts of the city have almost totally un-made streets; the street drainage takes the form of open gullies rather than buried sewers (which you could easily fall into when walking at night); and somewhere – we didn’t see where – Accra houses its share of an estimated 5 million slum-dwellers (that’s about 20% of the population). 

The population seems quite comfortably to inhabit the city world and its rural antecedent simultaneously – people pedal their wares on foot at busy roundabouts and road intersections, goats and sheep, chickens and guinea fowl can be seen roaming apparently free, and people fry food by the side of the road and sell it (and seem to do a roaring trade) just as they do in more rural communities. Don’t get me wrong – I reckon you could get to like Accra, and it certainly isn’t the worst place I’ve ever stayed.

We left Accra by bus after a week in a comfortable, air-conditioned hotel.  Departure was 16.00, for an overnight trip arriving in Bolgatanga (capital of the Upper East Region) at about 7 the following morning.  It was a good quality bus, competently driven, and full.  It took the best part of 2 hours to get out of greater Accra, and as it is dark by 7pm we didn’t see all that much of the countryside.

We arrived in Bolga in one piece, both having slept (but me more than Jane I suspect).  I’ll describe the road at a later date – suffice to state at this point that my suspicions about the continuity of the tarmac were totally vindicated in the first 40 miles (rather sooner than I’d expected!).  From Bolga, we were collected by the Ghana Education Service’s car and taken the last hour to Zebilla in the comfort of a 4WD truck, with our mouths hanging open at the state of the road and the skill of the drivers.