More Pictures from the weekend

Here are a few more pictures from my weekend in Butre.

Looking back towards Busua

Crabs

Village Pulling in Fishing Nets

Most Epic Weekend of the Summer

I apologize for being such a slacker blogger. I’d like to say that it’s because I’ve been having so much fun these past few weeks I haven’t had time to blog, but that would only be mostly true.

I just got back from an incredible trip to Western Ghanaian beaches with three of my friends. It was a trip of extremes. In the span of 24 hours I experienced the highest point of my summer—and the lowest. Don’t worry I am alive and well, but it turns out things can get pretty hairy when you try to travel in West Africa and you don’t know what you’re doing.

Let’s start with the bad since that happened first and it’ll really just amplify how great the great was.

So excited for a trip!

We left the hostel here in Accra at 9:30 to catch a 10 AM bus leaving for Takoradi. We pushed it so close because it looked like two of the four of us were recovering from malaria (I was fine) and we needed to make sure that they were good to travel. We would have been late for this bus if there had been a bus leaving at 10 AM—the state transport doesn’t update their schedules online apparently. We waited for the 12:30 bus that didn’t leave until 2 PM. It was a four-hour journey to Takoradi and now it looked like we wouldn’t make it before nightfall. A great start to the day.

The bus took over six hours to get to Takoradi—six hours of tight seats, baby screams and a general lack of comfort. This travelling took so much longer than expected that when we arrived in Takoradi around 8:30 PM we had hardly eaten anything all day. Safe to say, we were not in a good mood. One more critical detail is that for the last two hours it had been raining pretty hard with no sign of letting up.

We took a tro-tro to a junction about 25 km away. One bright spot about this was that travelling had been very cheap up until this point—the bus had been 9 cedi ($6) and the tro was just a cedi (65 cents). We got to Agona junction around 9 PM and looked for a taxi to take us to Akwidaa—a small fishing village where we would cross a footbridge and go over a hill to arrive at our intended destination, “Ezile Bay”. Ezile Bay was going to be great—bungalows on the beach, surfing, a restaurant, a bar—what more do you need?

We never made it to Ezile Bay. The taxi drivers union made it impossible for one to get a reasonable fare and we got so flustered and irritated that we forked over 40 cedi for this guy to get us the 10 km we needed to go. Outrageous. He said the roads were bad. I didn’t care—just get me the hell out of here.

The roads really were that bad—I can’t believe this guy even agreed to take us, no matter the money. It was kind of fun at first. It took the taxi a few tries to get over the first hills, but as the rain continued to pour down and the dirt road got worse the three of us in the backseat had to start walking up the hills ourselves while the taxi heaved and sputtered up the incline. It was still funny when Jelena completely wiped out and got covered in mud.

Next Morning

It got really not funny when we got to the hill where our luck ran out. There were no lights, there were no stars in the sky, the rain was coming down, and the taxi rolled into a ditch while backing up—he had no taillights. We had to push him out, cover ourselves in mud, and I was starting to feel lightheaded from it all. We stood up at the top of this hill watching this taxi fishtail out only halfway up, seeing nothing but rain and darkness around us, thinking of the strange men in the little villages nearby—things were not looking good. Not only was I unsure whether the taxi could get back up the hills on the way back, but I thought the engine would roll over and die pretty soon.

After pushing the taxi out of a ditch one last time after a failed attempt at turning around, we headed towards a bail out Busua—a nearby beach town. I really felt bad for that driver. I mean, we destroyed his taxi—there were several inches of mud under our feet, on the seats, bugs flying in the front seat, most like a jungle than anything else. We made it to Busua around 11:30—well after dinner hours and finally found a “big room” with four sleeping pads on the ground for us. 40 cedi for the room? Fine I don’t give a shit please leave us alone. We went to bed that night tired, hungry, muddy. We failed to see the humor in the idea that out of all our days in Ghana this might have been the most memorable. Nothing was funny at that point.

Don’t worry it gets better! 

Big Rock

As terrible as the travel was, the location was that great—maybe better. I mean, this place could not have been more picturesque. We hung out at the Black Star Surf Shop with the white sand and the rolling surf and the warm water and the great food and the Apples to Apples they had there. It’s hard to work off such a horrible travel hangover, but this place really did it.

The place we were staying was not ideal so in the afternoon we headed towards a more ideal spot. Ezile Bay was now out of the question. We made some friends on the bus who were headed to ‘The Hideout Lodge’ in Butre, which turned out to be the next town over. All we had to do to get to Butre was walk two miles down the beach, get over a hill and we were there.

Kickin It

Coming down the hill was quite a sight. Butre just popped out of nowhere. We walked through the thousand-person village, across a rickety bridge over a river flowing into the ocean, and one hundred yards down the beach was the Hideout.

The Hideout could not have been better. It was straight out of my dreams of a remote getaway to a Ghanaian beach. We stayed in a cheap four person bungalow, ate great cheap food, drank rum out of a coconut, bodysurfed, read a book, went on some walks, just everything.

I could not have asked for a better last weekend of this trip. I’m headed home on Friday and while I’m looking forward to a lot of things back in the States I will miss this place.

Two Stars