Tamale

The bus from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso was the most modern coach we had been on and the journey seemed smooth and quick compared with all our previous travels in West Africa. After only a couple of hours we reached the border with Ghana at Navrongo. This big and busy border crossing was bustling with energy with many cars, pickup trucks, bus vans and several service buses transiting in both directions.  There were the usual stalls selling food and drinks to the hundreds of passengers milling around.  The border formalities took only about two hours to exit Burkina and enter Ghana.  On both sides of the border the currency touts were busy selling Cidis, walking around with huge bricks of bank notes.  But as we had no idea what the exchange rate was we couldn’t even begin to bargain with them.  During the wait for our passports to be returned we bought our favourite flame cooked lamb, drank a couple of bottles of soft drink and chatted amicably to our fellow passengers, under the shade of a tree.  We also waved to the two Australians we had seen in the STC bus station in Waga, at first light.  They explained that they had gone immediately to another bus company which ran buses to the border. Now they were hoping to pick up a Ghanaian bus or bush van to take them on.  We wished each other good luck and headed for our respective group of travellers.  It’s one of the nice features of travelling on public transport that you often bump into the same travellers from time to time.  In Ghana the immigration people asked to see our yellow fever certificates.  This was the first West African border where the asked to see them so we proffered them with pride.

As the bus trip went on, the boy, with the two women, was sick and lay down in the isle.  This meant that when we stopped, to buy water melons, or for a break the passengers had to step over the prostrated boy. Each person treading carefully over him glanced down with concern.  As with all travel in West Africa we got later and later.  When we eventually reached Bolgatanga in the afternoon the sun was high and we drove into the concrete bus station and stopped.  Everyone had to leave the bus and it promptly disappeared, with our luggage, including the goats, but without explanation. So we settled down with the other passengers to sit and wait patiently in the shade. Waiting patiently in the shade was another talent we had perfected in West Africa. We were quite good at it now. The bus finally swung back into the bus station later in the afternoon. In fact it was about the time we should have been getting into Tamale. But at least we were off again.  The road to Tamale was long and straight with a good tarmac surface. We watched the yellow brown sandy scrub dotted with thorn bushes and the occasional baobab tree slip steadily by. This was basically the same terrain as we had been travelling through for the previous four weeks. When we eventually reached Tamale in the early evening it was getting dark.  The bus of course stopped again and it looked like it was going to stop for a long time.   It felt good to get out and stretch our legs. So we walked, with our rucksacks, the one kilometre to the Relax Lodge Hotel in the gathering twilight, asking directions from friendly people.  We eventually found the hotel in a big compound off one of the side roads. The restaurant in this Indian owned hotel offered Ghanaian, Indian, Chinese and International food and it was very good. 

During our evening meal, in the very pleasant restaurant, we saw a young English woman talking to her parents. From their overheard conversation we thought she might also be working with VSO, so we introduced ourselves. Ros was a British VSO based in Ghana, near the Burkina border, working in the education programme.  Her parents had come out to see her for Christmas and they were planning a sight seeing tour of Ghana.

The Relax Lodge Hotel was a series of single storey bungalows in a large compound with a well kept garden.  The rooms were large and well appointed with big comfortable arm chairs and English language TV, not French.  After two years without TV it was strange how choosy we could be about what was on. Still it was nice to see the news in English. The main attraction in Tamale was the Mole Game Reserve, about two hours away, where you could stay in a lodge overlooking a waterhole where elephants and other big game came to drink.  Chatting with Ros over breakfast she said it was well worth a visit. She and her parents were heading north to see where she lived and we were heading into town to try to find a bank to change our Euros into Cidis. Being near Christmas, and Ghana being an enthusiastically Christian country the banks in Tamale were very busy with huge long queues stretching outside.  We went into one to ask about the procedures for queuing and waiting.  The friendly security guard, Alex, told us that this bank couldn’t change Euros and directed us to the nearby Standard Chartered Bank, where we changed 300 Euros for a block of 3.1 million Cedis in a carrier bag. Now we really felt ready to explore Ghana properly. Tamale was a delightful regional town catering for the widespread agricultural community. Things were a bit slow but the people were wonderfully friendly. We chatted to street vendors selling fruit near the park. They were surprised that we lived in Gambia and that we had spent several weeks travelling across the region.

This article is part of a series describing our tour of West Africa
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