West Africa Part I: Ghana – America's Finest Ambassador

Introduction

: In the spring of 2013, I was traveling in Central Asia. It was there that I met this Canadian dude who told me if I ever had the chance that I’d one day hafta travel around West Africa. He didn’t specify why, he just said that, “You’ll definitely see some shit.” So, although I didn’t make any immediate plans to go and see this area of the world based on a vague assertion of the aforementioned stranger, I never really forgot about it. It’s always been in the back of my mind. During my research over the years, I found that the public transportation sucks in all these countries and that the most convenient and economical way to get around West Africa was by joining an overlanding tour (more on exactly what overlanding is in the next caption). So, the way this particular cookie crumbled, almost a decade had passed before I took any concrete action towards visiting West Africa. I started seriously looking into it during the summer of 2022 and ended up committing during the spring of 2023 with a company aptly named Overlanding West Africa. The segment that I signed up for (shown in the image above that I’ve copied from OWA’s website) was 40-something days long and was scheduled to depart from Accra, Ghana, in late-February 2024 and arrive in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in mid-April passing through Ivory Coast, Guinea and Liberia along the way. I guess this company’s routes regularly used to go through parts of Burkina Faso and Mali, but shit’s just too risky as of late with all the Islamist extremism in the Sahel region, so those destinations had been taken off the menu.

: So, what is overlanding? Well, simply put, it’s when you pack twenty passengers into a truck like this and drive from Point A to Point B, either camping in the middle of nowhere or staying at unhygienic guesthouses in towns and cities along the way. This particular overlanding truck is named Aminah which in Arabic means “faithful” and “trustworthy,” and I can attest that those two things she proved to be during this particular journey.

: This is the inside of the truck from the photo previous. At the front of the truck are the two group leaders. Standing in the passenger section in the blue shirt is Annabel who was the tour leader and then the guy next to her sticking his upper body into the passenger section from the driver seat in front is Jason, who was the driver/mechanic.

: On days when we weren’t staying in big towns that had restaurants, we’d do our food shopping at local markets and sit out like this to prepare and then eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Aminah was fully equipped with all cooking equipment and chairs and tables and tents and whatever else a group might need to have this sort of self-sufficient traveling experience. The way the whole cooking thing worked, there was a rotation of six different cook groups that’d be responsible for doing a dinner one day as well as a breakfast and lunch the following day before the next group in the rotation takes over. I think each cook group ended up having to do their duty about five or six times during the Accra to Freetown stretch.

: In addition to being part of a cook group, everyone on the trip also had one (or several) truck jobs to attend to. Some of the jobs included sweeping out the truck or loading and unloading tables and chairs…stuff like that. My job – which I was pretty happy with – had been unloading and loading the back locker at every place we spent the night. The back locker contains all the tents and everybody’s suitcases and backpacks and those sorta things.

: When I wasn’t busy loading or unloading people’s shit, I’d use the back locker to try and stay in shape

Accra to Mole National Park

: Most businesses in Ghana had religious names. This was actually one of my favorite aspects of the country. It helped keep things interesting during those long sweaty stretches of driving from one destination to another. Here you can see an ad for a restaurant in Accra called Our God Is Able as well as God Is King Plumbing. A few others I remember seeing had been God’s Way Bar, Clap For Jesus Enterprise, and a company that sells eggs called The Blood of Jesus Company.

: In Accra, there’re a few shops that specialize in making “fantasy coffins” for people to be buried in. I forgot this kid’s name, but he spent about fifteen minutes showing me around this shop. The visit can been seen in the video at the bottom of the page.

: You were an alcoholic when you were alive? Why not be buried in a bottle! You always wanted to go on a cruise but never had the opportunity to do so? How bout getting stuck underground in a nice wooden ship!

: What sorta box would YOU like to spend the rest of eternity in? I was told that each of these custom-made coffins costs around 50,000 Ghanaian cedis, which is around $3,000USD

: Writing about this trip six months after the visit, I’ve unfortunately forgotten this man’s name as well, but he ran this little stand selling drinks near the hotel I was staying at in Accra. When I went to buy a couple bottles of water from him after a morning of exploring the city, he said that he didn’t have change for the smallest denomination of bill that I had available to pay with, but that I could take the waters no problem because he trusted that I’d come back later and pay for them when I had smaller bills. I was taken aback by this level of confidence he’d put in a total stranger like me to make good on my word to return and pay, so I decided to take full advantage of that and totally stiffed him and…nah, I’m just fuckin around. I hate owing people money, so the first thing I did when I got back into the hotel was ask the staff for some small change, then went back out and squared up with the guy right away.

: Out of curiosity, I called this Bad Breath Solution phone number and there was this recording that told me the best way to get rid of my shitty breath is to suck my boyfriend’s dick BEFORE he bones me in the ass, not after. Again, just kidding – homosexuality is actually illegal in Ghana.

: Peacock at Osu Castle

: Posters for sale on the outskirts of Accra

: Sign at a place called Cedi’s Bead Factory where they take used bottles of all colors, break them down and form them into beads that are then used to make all sorts of bracelets and necklaces

: When I was in high school I remember some kid a couple years older than me being named Philip Ajarapu. At first, I didn’t see the “o” at the end of the word “Shit” there and was thinking that someone had done just that – filled up a jar of poo. But I was mistaken. It’s shito, and shito is a spicy fishy hot sauce that is very popular in Ghanaian cuisine.

: An award dedicated to the Tafi Abuife Community for being an “Open Defecation Free Community.” I wonder if the community is constantly being monitored on CCTV and if/when someone inevitably takes a dump outside instead of in the toilets they now have, then some representative from this PLAN organization will come in and strip these people of their plaque.

: This was an interesting facet of the trip. A lot of the towns we visited had very low-hanging power lines that needed to be lifted up for Aminah to be able to pass underneath them. And here you can see that kid using a big stick to hold the line up while we limbo’d on through.

: And unlike in the previous photo, there weren’t always local people conveniently available to hold up the power lines for us as we passed underneath them. It was something that we had to do out the window of the truck, and each passenger would pass the stick holding up the lines to the passenger behind him/her until the whole vehicle had passed underneath.

: A couple residents from the Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary

: Our guide James posing while we hiked up to go visit Wli Waterfalls

: Even though we’d all eventually get wet when we went to go swimming in the waterfalls, James insisted here that he carry all of us across this river because he didn’t want any of us to get wet and be uncomfortable during the hike

: And even though I weighed probably fifty pounds more than him, he wouldn’t take no for an answer

: The falls of Wli are the tallest in West Africa. To get some perspective of from how high this water is falling, zoom in at the bottom of the falls to see a dude sitting on the rocks and another person down in the water below him

: Baby pineapple as seen on the hike to Wli Falls. This wasn’t the most interesting fruit seen on this hike however, that honor belonged to…

: …these little guys. I think they’re called katemfe fruit and they contain a protein called thaumatin that tastes super sweet. James picked the seeds out of them and offered em to me and the other tourists to suck on while we hiked. It was a very interesting flavor/sensation.

: As per usual, one day while driving between here and there we stopped for a piss on the side of the road out in the middle of nowhere. The guys all just pissed out in the open on the side of the road while the majority of the women found bushes to squat next to…except for one. One of the women, a British/Australian woman of about seventy, didn’t want to pee right next to everyone else, so she walked kinda far away from the truck and for whatever reason decided to piss along the edge of that shitty little pond in the photo. And as this was happening, those two guys in the photo happened to be driving past on a motorbike. They pulled to the side of the road, parked their bike, pulled out their machetes and started marching towards us. They didn’t seem care about the rest of us doing our thing, but definitely took offense to the old woman pissing near their pond. She saw them charging at her and didn’t bother to pull up her pants before attempting to flee, trudging away with them and her underwear down around her ankles. The potentially disastrous situation was brought to the attention of Jason who ran over and got between the men and the woman and, using his friendly demeanor and goofy sense of humor, managed to diffuse the situation before it could result in a decapitation.

: The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice

: How strong is your dong?

: I was sitting at a table by the side of the pool at the Mole National Park restaurant minding my own business when outta nowhere this baboon jumped onto the table, ran across it and absconded with this bottle of Heinz Salad Cream which it proceeded to consume the entirety of after it’d ran around the corner and started eating it here where there’d been no people around until I went up and began to film it

: It was after the stolen salad cream incident that I noticed the staff of the restaurant keep this slingshot nearby, undoubtedly to fend off these aggressive food-swiping baboons that run amok around the national park

Fuller Falls, Kumasi and Kakum National Park

: Although Wli Falls were more visually stunning, Fuller Falls were much more enjoyable to sit in. Under the falls at Wli, the way the water would pelt ya in the face, it was really hard to breathe – what I imagine waterboarding to be like. This here was more like getting a massage.

: I don’t know if I set it up on top of one of their nests or what, but my tent at Fuller Falls was completely covered in these here millipedes

: One of many termite mounds in this area of Ghana. This David Attenborough clip does a great job of explaining these things… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGaT0B__2DM&t=199s

: Great deals and a great deal more at the Blessed Womb mattress outlet

: Wakes ya up and gets ya hard

: The Thankful Height business center in the city of Kumasi

: An agency that teaches you to speak English like a Polish person: “Don’t worry, I feeks the roof. No prublem.”

: Giddy up

: Uriney goodness in every bite

: An ad for a drink called Gringo next to a place called White Man’s Car Deco…y’all racist as hell

: I’d eat that minge

: A pussycat begging for a taste of my minge outside Kumasi City Mall

: A glimpse of the Kakum National Park canopy walk

Cape Coast, Elmina and Beyin

: Lunch for sale on the streets of Cape Coast. I coulda eaten this, but I preferred to go to a restaurant for some…

: …chicken and peppers with some couscous-like stuff that I think was called gari

: Instead of posting obituaries and death notices in newspapers as is common in the US, in Cape Coast they print ‘em up and hang ‘em on public walls around the city.

: Cape Coast Castle – one of about forty commercial forts where enslaved Africans were held before being shipped across the Atlantic and sold in the Americas

: I don’t know how African women manage to balance so much stuff on their heads

: I took a photo of this photo in a museum part of Cape Coast Castle because it seemed to me – like the man in the photo – that lot of dudes in Ghana had umbilical hernias

: Window at the castle out of which a voyeuristic slave trader would clandestinely look at others below while pleasuring himself. No need for a black light…plenty of evidence still remains on the wall below the window there

: Some art and books for sale at Cape Coast Castle

: In the town of Elmina

: Design over a tiny dark room inside Elmina Castle into which, we were told, they’d throw rebellious slaves who were then left in there until they starved to death

: Fresh fish served at Ko-Sa Beach Resort

: Why not?

: Beach in the town of Beyin, not too far from the border with Ivory Coast

: In Beyin, almost everyone set their tents up to sleep in this area here along the beach. I, however, did not, because the night before my tent got completely infested with termites and on this night I fumigated my tent with insecticide and was letting it air out a bit before using it again.

: Instead of my tent, I rented this shitty little room for the night for like twenty bucks. This is where I spent my last night in Ghana.