Home » Ghana » African Adventure to Ghana - Summer 2003 (part III)

My summer of 2003 was a very exciting one. I went to Jonquière, Quebec to learn French for 5 weeks, and with only a few days to prepare (including a party at my friend Paul's cottage in between) I was off to Accra, Ghana landing July 1 (Canada Day, and also Ghanaian Independance Day). After that, within 3 days I was back at Ottawa to complete my Economics degree, so it was a very action-packed summer.

African Adventure to Ghana - Summer 2003 (part III)

Andrew Wozniuk
2006-04-02 10:47:42

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up walking to Larabanga (which took over an hour by foot) to try to catch a ride from there. As we got to the village we ran into the kids that rented us the bikes because they came to look for us since the bus didn't come. We waited around there for a bit and then were able to catch a Tro-Tro to Damongo and then finally to Tamale. This time our journey (half of which was down dirt roads) which was less that 150km only took 4 hours instead of the 8 it took on the way up.

When we got to Tamale we had most of the day to kill again so we went back to the area that was selling arts and crafts to take up our new friend on his drumming. Turned out he wasn't there, but we found his brother who tried to look for him. He couldn't so he did the drumming for us (which also included a few lessons on African beats). It was supposed to be just a small little 30 min thing but ended up as a 3 hour drumming party where different friends would show up and play and sing along. Our artist friend eventually showed up and joined in on the party. It was really a crazy and fun experience which really made the weekend a real treat. The friendliness and openness of the people to strangers was so nice that I will really miss it when I go back to Canada. The whole trip from Accra to Mole and back to Kumasi was a lot like "The Amazing Race" with things going wrong all over the place and making things difficult. It was quite the adventure. We finally caught our bus to Kumasi and arrived at midnight.

Kumasi is a really cool city because even though the standard of living is lower than Accra and the amount of education is lower, it seems more built up to me (because of their being more buildings and how they are situated). It actually reminded me a lot of a European city or one from Quebec. Kumasi is the capital of the Ashanti region and the Ashanti Kingdom is one of the few kingdoms left in the world. There was a Fetish Priest that put a sword in the ground and put ...