Travelling

Hi,

Well the last few days have been spent mainly travelling from Accra to Tamale. We set off on Saturday for the first leg of our journey to Kumasi. We caught the VIP coach which was rather posh even by British standards, the seats were huge and comfortable as well as reclining slightly, with a foot rest to match ! ! We were on this bus for about 6 hours which gave us a chance to see the changes from city life through the small towns and sometime rural villages. Everyone chasing the bus trying to sell you anything from bread to screwdrivers, of course from a very heavy basket carried on their head. The roads are very interesting in Ghana as they range from tarmac roads to long distances of extremely pot holed sandy, dusty roads with 100m sections of tarmac interspersed.

We stayed the night in Kumasi and left very early the next morning on a minibus to Tamale in the Northern Region. The scenery was quite different as we left the city behind, a lot greener, drier, we saw more small community living, mud huts, farms, people going about the day chores. Sunday is a very church focussed day for most Ghanaians, church starts at 7am, you see people running in huge groups, keeping fit before church from around 5am, when we left at 6am there were huge groups of people already out shopping and buying and selling food. Tamale is a bustling town where you can get most things you could want. I’m staying here for a week with a lovely volunteer called Ellie, she’s also heading up to the Upper West but has a conference later this week in Tamale so it wasn’t worth the travel up to come back again. One of the current volunteers that brought us up, took us out for dinner and we meet up with some of her local friends for a drink.

We’ve had a lovely day being shown the sights around Tamale by another volunteer based here, we have even managed to negotiate a taxi in and out of the town by ourselves, we even shared a taxi with a Ghanaian family on the way back ! !

Tomorrow we hope to go out for lunch with a friend and maybe have a bit of a chill . . . .

I’m looking forward to getting to my house in early October and meeting my new housemate, Adrienne, before starting work.