21 October 2001

Business Names of the Week:
Confidence Beauty Saloon
The Apollo Theater (a bar)
Don't Mind Your Wife Chop Bar
The Alisa Hotel (see below!)

Tro-Tro Names of the Week:
Stop Crying and Pray
No Food for the Lezy Man (yes, the "lezy" man)
Good Broth
Home Burger

Thank God for the French. The Alliance Française sponsored another evening of great music this past Wednesday. I heard the African Sound Project, a jazz quartet with three percussionists and a saxophone player. Of course, they all played several traditional instruments, too. The musicians were absolutely possessed by what they were playing, and it all seemed improvised, which was all the more impressive.

It has become noticeably warmer. The wind blows hot air and I am coated with a slick of sweat even thirty seconds after a cold shower.

In the fanciest part of Accra, Labone, close to the French and German embassies, there is a hotel with my name on it and I had planned to stay there this weekend.

For days, I have been smiling to myself when I thought of how much I would enjoy seeing the face of the hotel receptionist when I presented my registration card for the Alisa Hotel. I imagined tiny soaps and shampoo bottles with my name on the labels. I made a mental note to be sure to take the stationery. (And you wondered how I qualified as a geek?)

But on Saturday morning, I toured the hotel before checking in and found no towels with my name in gold thread, nor did they have Alisa products. A shame. Still, the place was posh and lovely. It is not a chain owned by a foreign company but rather a private hotel owned by a Ghanaian. The owner’s mother was named Alice Samaran. He wanted to name the hotel after her, so he combined her first and last names. Voilá, Alisa!

I decided not to spend the night at "my" hotel, since it was a lot of money to spend without even getting out of greater Accra. (Room rates are over a c-note per night.) I will go back to swim, though, since the pool allows "day trippers" and it’s beautiful. (Most of the expensive hotels allow pool users who are not hotel guests, but there's a price.)

Instead, I traveled to Ada Foah, a town on the coast east of Accra—almost to Togo. The police from the U.S. embassy helped me to haggle with a cab driver in order to get transportation. I could have taken a tro-tro, but I was not up for such an extended journey. The driver started at 400,000 cedis and came down to 70,000 cedis (still a more than fair price) after much elaborate bargaining. It’s an art.

Two hours later, I found myself on a coastal road, full of potholes, with the radio blaring Ghanaian music and the rickety cab nearly falling apart as we drove along. The towns became further apart and the green of the countryside opened up on both sides. There were small fires burning beside the road, and an occasional table where watermelons were stacked in precarious pyramids.

I lodged at the Paradise Hotel, which sits on a strip of land that separates the Volta River from the Gulf of Guinea. The Paradise is relative paradise for me, but it is a stark oasis of plenty amidst the clusters of huts that constitute the villages of Ada Foah.

I checked in and ate some rice with vegetable kebabs at a table next to the river. The tide was low, and down the shore the fisherman tied up long, wooden boats while women and children bathed in the water beside them. I felt positively lost and positively happy in my remote anonymity.

In the late afternoon I hired a boat to take me up the Volta a bit and then back down to where the river meets the sea. My guide told me about the tropical storm of two years ago which wiped out most of the structures on the islands. The villagers rebuilt, but the area has not recovered completely. They have tried instead to focus on dealing with bilharzia, the disease that is endemic to the region. On one stretch of the river, several chalets owned by wealthy foreigners (an Englishman called "Mr. Gene" is one; another man from Lebanon has a palace on his own island) and companies in Ghana.

One of the islands used to be known for the crocodiles. Now that the estuary is wider, though, and there is more noise from human beings, the crocodiles have fled.

I slept peacefully in the quiet hotel, which was a welcome respite from the noise of mornings in Accra. Still, I woke at dawn.

After finding a cup of Nescafé in the hotel lobby, I walked across the village outside the gates of the Paradise Hotel and up along the seacoast. It was dawn, but already a few children were performing some chores. When they saw me, they ran to me and yelled, "Give us money!" as children usually do here. I gave them a few cedis and walked on.

Looking out at the horizon, I felt someone looking at me. I turned and found one of the children had followed me to the water. He approached me and asked, "Where are you going?" I told him I was just walking by the water. He walked along with me and told me that his name is Richard and he is ten. I picked up a shell at one point, which prompted him to begin an eager search for the best seashells he could find. He piled them into my hand as I walked along. He also found dead fish and fish heads to show me, grinning as he held them up. Then he began to whistle, so I whistled along with him as we walked. I wanted to turn back after some time, but he stopped me and said I could see turtles if I walked further.

As the morning unfolded, more children ran to the water and found me and Richard walking along. Richard fended off the more aggressive ones who were ready to go straight into my pockets to get any money I had there. Some of the boys had been trying to surf with narrow bits of scrap wood. The older boys wanted my address, so I took a huge knife one of the small boys was holding and wrote "Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA" in the sand. It made them smile because I had done it with the knife.

Not many here speak much English. Instead, the local language of Ewe is spoken. Richard translates for me, since he spent a couple of years in school. He no longer goes to school, though, since his family doesn’t have the money for school fees.

When we reached the end of the strip of villages along the land that separated the two waters, we climbed up the sand drift and Richard pointed, excitedly, at a black lump among the debris washed ashore. "The turtle!" he screamed. The turtle was a giant sea turtle that had climbed up the shore and died there two days ago. Richard stood over it, then put his toe in one of the eye sockets of the blackened, rotting animal. He looked up and smiled while he balanced on one foot. "That’s where it had eyes," he explained. Then a friend ran up and joined him in an attempt to roll the corpse over onto its back. They couldn’t do it, which I was glad for, since the bugs beneath the turtle were thick and wormy.

We whistled more as we retraced our steps down the shore, and now then more children joined us and whistled, too. When we reached Richard’s village, he ran ahead to the line of people helping to arrange the fishing nets on a long fishing boat. I went back to the Paradise and ate eggs and drank more Nescafé.

I had arranged for the cab driver who brought me to Ada Foah to retun and pick me up again on Sunday. He arrived late, and in a different car. His own car had died out the day before, but he didn’t want to leave me stranded, so he hired another cab to take him to Ada Foah to pick me up. All of this became dreadfully expensive, but I suppose he could have just let me wonder and sit in the lobby, so I appreciated his efforts. The new cab, though, was a tiny Daewo Tico. Even smaller than the Geo Metro, the Tico rode about five inches from the gravel. It was terrifying, since it felt like some of the bigger potholes could have made us flip the Tico. We made it, though, although I was certain we would have an accident somewhere along the way back to Accra.

Photos from this trip »