After a long recovery, Kale and a girl we'd met from UFS named Molly (who had planned to travel alone, bad idea), set out for Tamale, the major hub of Northern Ghana. We were told to head out an hour early to catch our bus at the downtown circle. We found a cab, told him 5 Ghana Cedi and were on our way. About 10 meters later however, he was asking for 25, which is completely absurd. We got out on the side of the road, now only 30 minutes before our bus and waited for another taxi.
Another one finally came, and we trudged through the morning traffic. We got a phone call that we were missing check-in for our bus and had to go to a different station. Fortunately this driver knew of the other station as well and we back tracked and did end up getting there early enough to sit around for our bus for an hour (kind of inconsistent with the early check-in requirement and late buses...)
We splurged on a kind of nice bus for our 12 hour drive to Tamale. It had big seats that were still partially covered in plastic, air conditioning, foot rests/reclining capabilities, and of course some resident mosquitos--one I squished with someone's blood all over everything, gross!
The bus also had a TV and a nice sound system, unfortunately. They blasted awful Ghanaian soap operas the whole ride at maximum volume. Return of the Ghost 1, 2, and 3 among many others were instant classics, combining romance, infidelity, cash, and "humor." They only took a break to play one real movie--The Ghost and the Darkness--a film about man-eating lions in Africa, well-played!
For what might have been a 10 hour drive, we stopped every 2 hours at rest stops that were waiting for us with hawkers literally jumping up and running to the doors at the sight of us. They also had fees for the bathrooms at these stops, and when I finally had to give in, I had to choose between a communal female urinal (a trough where about 15 women were using it together) or a foul smelling, fly infested hole in the ground. I went for the latter and tried to hold my breath, plus no TP even for 40 peswas.
We met an Obruni on the bus named Anna from Holland, she was returning to visit an orphanage she was a teacher at in Tamale a year before. People are incredible.
As we got farther North, the huts became more round and plain with thatched roofs and unpainted mud walls. There were more mosques (the North is primarily Muslim), more cows and goats, more bikes--and bike lanes! the only ones in all of Africa, higher termite mounds, and more severe punishment for theft (ie death--the UFS students in Tamale witnessed this as a man accused of stealing was thrown off of a rooftop bar).
We heard walking at night was dangerous, so we got a cab to a hotel that looked like an abandoned haunted house, and immediately upon sight of this, headed to a different hotel.
The next morning, bright and early we took a cab to the Metro Mass Transit "station." I put that in quotations because there wasn't much of a station: there was a small wooden box from which you could buy tickets and rows of seats outside in the dust surrounded by goats.
We spent the rest of the morning exploring Tamale. We found what our map called a 'palace' which was really several of the circular huts connected by low, mud walls. We then searched for a long time for the Zongo leather tannery, asking many people for directions and getting many answers.
We finally got there and it was slightly disappointing. Just some skins hung up to dry and a bunch of people sitting around. Kale clicked a photo. We got called over and yelled at for taking a picture without asking, and then offered the full tour for 10 cedi each. That's a lot. We really had no interest.
We stopped by the STC bus station to get our exit tickets for Saturday to Kumasi. We saw they actually had an afternoon bus on Friday and wanted to get out of Tamale as soon as possible. The woman said the bus might not go, we kind of wondered how it was that you could buy tickets to a bus that might not exist. Every time we tried to verify this with her, we got different answers. She didn't appreciate all of our questions.
We then went to explore the market since I wanted to get some souvenirs. The market was filled with cow carcasses rotting in the heat, which don't make for the best gifts. It took 4 people to find someone who could understand what I was looking for. A young man offered to lead us there. We followed him for a very long time and started growing wary of where he was taking us. Molly asked what I was expecting, the thin passage to open to an art oasis? And then it did. Hah.
Then back to the hotel and off to the Mass Metro bus.
There was lots of yelling at the bus station, and with the varied accents and many languages, we weren't sure when or if ours had or would be called, especially when the ETD is somewhere around 2pm.
We found some other obruni volunteers from Canada and the Netherlands and between the 5 of us were able to determine when our bus was leaving. Let me tell you about this bus. You walk on and the seats look as if they were all mauled by tigers, there is dirt everywhere, no air conditioning, our bags were not latched below because the latch was broken but secured by a thin string, AND to top it all off, the middle aisle folded into another line of seats, so when the bus was full, there was no way to exit in case of an emergency....
We bumped along for 5 hours as the sun set, stopping several times including once at dusk to pray. We finally made it to Mole National Park later that night.
