(May 27, 2011)
After spending the night in Takoradi, we caught an early bus (like 5am-ish) to Kumasi. Once we were in the city we got off the bus into… chaos.
This is actually downtown Accra near the main market, but same idea.
It’s hard to describe the bustling energy of urban Africa. Take an urban city in the US like Washington DC, with its traffic and buildings and industy, without a lot of the pavement and street signs, with 50x more people walking- in the street, between cars, next to the streets, add animals- goats, chickens, sometimes sheep and the stray cat or dog, add a lot more exhaust, the smell of animals, sometimes the waft of sewage depending on how close you are to the gigantic drains all over Ghana, and add the noise- beyond the normal engines and conversations- people hawking goods, offering you taxis and buses, selling animals, constant honking from cars, and the bustle of hundreds of people talking in one area.
It’s hard to describe the bustling energy of urban Africa. Take an urban city in the US like Washington DC, with its traffic and buildings and industy, without a lot of the pavement and street signs, with 50x more people walking- in the street, between cars, next to the streets, add animals- goats, chickens, sometimes sheep and the stray cat or dog, add a lot more exhaust, the smell of animals, sometimes the waft of sewage depending on how close you are to the gigantic drains all over Ghana, and add the noise- beyond the normal engines and conversations- people hawking goods, offering you taxis and buses, selling animals, constant honking from cars, and the bustle of hundreds of people talking in one area.
It affects all of your senses at once except taste, unless you choose to partake in some of the goods being offered. Then you may get rice, beans, stew, cookies that are more like biscuits, various meat on a stick, pastries, etc. All that I tried were good, and miraculously, almost all seemed to agree with my system.*
After disembarking into the semi-chaos, we needed to find a place to stay for the 2 days we planned on being in Kumasi. Diana’s methodology of figuring out taxi fares is to ask several people, not necessarily the drivers, what the fare is to various places, to figure out what we should be charged. In the process of doing this one guy was almost dragging us into (stopped) traffic to get us a taxi. He wasn’t the driver, but he was going to find us a taxi and expected us to be tipped for it. So he told us a fare, and we said that’s way too high. Then a driver said, no, this, and it was half as much. So we agreed and started to get into the taxi and the first guy is demanding a tip- we apparently picked the taxi he wanted us to, except for half the fare. And Diana is trying to explain that we don’t owe him anything, he was trying to gyp us, and as we wait to merge into traffic he’s standing next to the taxi yelling at us that we are bad people because we didn’t tip him. I was really frustrated, and thinking, I want to yell back at you that you are a bad person. But I didn’t, because that really wouldn’t have helped anything. And not all taxi drivers are bad at all- we befriended several in various cities throughout Ghana.
Next edition: Manhiya Palace, the Kumasi Market, and bedbugs
* Without going into more detail than you probably want, all of us interns got upset stomachs every now and then, but nothing really bad. My worst experience was a ‘dodgey tummy’ in the words of Angelina who is from the UK, for about 5 days, and then it cleared up. I never identified anything that made my stomach upset, and considering that when I went to Jamaica for a week in 2001 I wound in the hospital for a couple of hours because I couldn’t keep water down, I consider Ghana a success for my GI system.
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