1st days in Ghana

We left Akwaaba house for the airport at 4:30 on Saturday afternoon. We made it there with few hiccups, but some mild frustration at the rain and the fact that our giant backpacks weren't well suited for public transit. 48 hours later, we are nearing Tamale, having gotten up at 5am to catch this bus from Accra.

I'm not going to lie, the road is bumpy and the rest stops make me regret any time I refused to go in a gas station, but who cares? The bus has air conditioning!

This one detail trumps any other on my mind right now. I hadn't even known I was capable of sweating this much! I could literally watch the beads form on my skin. The morning heat in Accra was even more intense than last night when we landed. When the door to the plane opened, it was like the world had instantly become a sauna. It was strange to breathe in air that warm and heavy.

I was woken up in the middle of the night by some pretty intense heat rash on my face. That's right. My face! I cannot express to you how itchy heat rash is. Eventually I fell into a less-than-restful sleep with a wet facecloth over my cheeks. When I woke up to even more heat and enormously swollen feet this morning, I seriously questionned my decision to come here.

Now after over twelve hours of air-conditioned transit supplemented by a beautiful countryside and busy markets with great food, I think I am back on board! Ghana's bananas and mangoes are phenomenol. The fried yams and planatins are also unreal. Everything is spicy! I just love it! Plus, some new friends from the U.S. tell us that we'll get used to the heat.

I keep looking out the windows for animals, but I haven't seen any. That doesn't really matter though, the scenery is interesting enough. Everything is intenseley green and occasionally a mountain or two has popped up. The sun is low in the west now and we just crossed a bridge over a an inlet to the Volta Lake. There was one fisherman still out, while the others had brought their canoes in to shore. In the dimming sky, you could only see his silhouette out on the water. It could have been a movie.

The roadside is dotted with little communities, In the really rural areas, there will be stick huts with thatched rooves. In other places, it's mud-brick houses with the same thatching. Still other communities seem to be dominated by aluminum constructions and storage containers painted with some ad or another. These ones seem to be market communites, with lots of people selling goods or food. Every surface in them screams Vodafone, MTN or Coca-cola. Whole homes and shops are decked out with corporate logos and bright colours! It makes me uneasy. I'm not sure why.