bugsonmyboard

After I’d finished sliding around in the mud near the Ghana border, I looked up to see oddly familiar wires overhead running parallel to the roadway. An electricity grid!  Ghana is a substantial step up in development and stability in comparison to most of West Africa.  With prosperity comes electricity without gasoline and diesel generators thumping away in every building. Air-conditioned buildings and an affordable variety of foods were more common.  I saw 125cc motorbikes with fewer than 3 people on them. I heard rumors that there was even a shopping mall in Accra.

My first stop was Basua Beach, where I found some nice sandbars and a small gang of friendly local surfers. This was the pattern emerging as I moved from country to country in West Africa: a beach that is the center of the surf culture with nearly all the surfers in the nation living there (usually about 20).  As in other places, hardly anyone ever surfs anywhere besides the local beach mostly due to the cost and inconvenience of getting somewhere else. In Ghana, local surfers paddle right up to you and say ‘Hello, what’s your name?” It makes me laugh to think of someone doing the same thing on a crowded day at Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz.  Maybe I’ll give it a try when I get home.

Right on Basua Beach sits a surf shop of sorts called ‘Black Star’ that has some basic wooden rooms to stay right above the shop.  I tucked for a week of surfing with the local crew and learning what it was to be a surfer in Ghana.  Several of the surfers rode the fast breaking waves at Basua really well, quick and light on their feet, racing down the line to bust a big turn before the wave closed out.  In waves like this, half a second too slow on your takeoff and you don’t make the wave. The surfers here have somewhat greater means than other places in West Africa and seem to have enough surfboards, wax, and leashes. I happened to be at Basua for a long planned music festival that provided plenty of fun after the sun went down.

Room with a view.

Venturing out from Basua I found a cape with several craggy points and reef breaks that caught about the double the amount of swell as Basua Beach. The reefs served up head high empty waves with decent shape, though a bit slow moving, and a few too many rocks protruding to the surface in the middle of the lineup. Out on the cape there were eco-lodges run by Canadian and French Expats that had used the local material to buile some very funky huts.

Hauling in the fishing nets is a family affair.

Always Coca Cola.

When I had my fill of surf, I rode east from Basua Beach and to find the castles of Elmina and Cape Coast.  These are two of about  30 forts in Ghana that were originally built as trade settlements and became key stops on the Atlantic slave trade route during the 17th and 18th centuries.  Europeans were originally attracted by the prospect of trading gold and timber from this part of Africa, but as the slave trade boomed, the castles were used to hold slaves before they were loaded onto ships bound for the Americas. For Africans, these castles in the sand were gates of no return. The Dutch seized Elmina castle from the Portuguese in 1637 and drove Swedes from Cape Coast Castle in 1663. Slave trade continued under the Dutch until 1814 when the Anglo-Dutch treaty put a stop to Dutch slave trade. In 1872 this region, then known as the Dutch Gold Coast, including the all the forts and castles became a possession of the British Empire. Independence from colonial rule of the British in 1947 gave rise to the modern nation of Ghana.

I’d been dreading arrival in Accra as I was about to launch back into the red tape nightmare of procuring visas for countries that didn’t want to give them to me.  Like Ghana, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) both have policies not to grant visas outside of your country of residence.  This poses a real problem for folks like me traveling overland as any visa acquired back home would have been long since expired on arrival. Angola is the major potential showstopper of the trip – a tourist visa is notoriously difficult to get and there is no easy way around the country.  Stories abound of travelers in years past having to figure out ways to ship around Angola or ride the infamous road from Kinshasa to Lubumbashi all the way through the Congo.  In the dry season it’s an arduous route and in the wet season it can be nearly impassable, with scores of trucks getting bogged in the mud and sometimes being forced to pitch a camp for months waiting for the rains to stop before anyone can move anywhere.  Needless to say, I am keen to avoid a long trip through the Congo jungle mud pit. Additionally, there have been reports over the last year of some epic barreling left-handers on the Angolan coast. Fortunately a fellow motorcyclist living in Luanda volunteered to write me a letter of invitation in Portuguese to submit with the Angola visa application. Luck was on my side, and in just a few days I had the infamous Angola tourist visa in my hand!

Riding into Accra I found a mess of hopelessly clogged streets.  I didn’t mind the slow moving traffic because it gave me an opportunity to scan the roadside vendors on the way in for someone selling tools.   I managed to replace the essentials of what I’d lost when my toolbox latch failed near the Ghana border: some wrenches, allan keys, pliers, a screwdriver.  Its not the ideal overland toolbox, but it sure feels a lot better than nothing. Driving in Accra is a bit like the best of both worlds on a motorbike –relatively wide, well-maintained roads, but while car traffic is much more organized than other capital cities in West Africa, there still seems to be no rules whatsoever for the motorbikes. You ride wherever you want, and the lanes are wide enough to shoot through most of the traffic that seems to clog every single road in Accra at all hours of the day. Motorbikes constantly blow straight through red lights with police sitting right on the corner. Motorbikes don’t have to stop at toll booths and there are little trails across the medians of all the big roads that you can ride right over if you make a wrong turn. It’s awesome.

My time in Accra was shockingly clean and comfortable.  At Basua Beach I’d met the only other foreign surfer there – a Peruvian named Bruno. He invited me to stay at his place in Accra where I passed my days in an envelope of cool, dry air, lit up the night with the flick of a switch, slept in the most comfortable bed I could imagine, washed my clothes with a machine, and enjoyed my first hot shower in 5 months. Bruno’s wife Catherine works for the US Foreign Service, which provides them level of accommodation that makes me feel like I’m back in California. On the road I spend most of my time exceedingly hot, damp, and filthy.  It can pull you out the moment with daydreams of what used to be normal.  A brief reprieve like I’ve had at Bruno’s place is rejuvenating and reminds me that I’m still willing to trade those comforts for the daily wonder of what’s around the next bend.

I even had a good place to work on the bike and mount some new tires acquired via a fellow traveler who had the tires shipped out but had to return to the UK.  I rode right up to the arrivals desk at the airport to find two brand new Continental TKC 80’s with my name on them.  The moments of kindness and serendipity seem to just keep coming. I did manage to damage the valve of my front heavy duty tube in the process of wrestling the tire onto the rim and had to take it off again to install my spare standard thickness tube.  The whole process involved mounting the front tire a total of 3 times.  Fun.  There was so much sweat pouring off of my face that it soaked the bead of tire.

Leaving Accra, I ran into 8 miles worth of gridlocked traffic.  No problem though, I just rode on the shoulder for 8 miles right past everyone.  So rad.  When I got to the front of the line, I found what was causing the backup – a string of 10 black shiny SUV’s raced our way with a full compliment of motorcycle police.   I asked someone on a motorbike next to me what was happening and he said that the president was coming. Sure enough, out of one of the SUV’s trotted the man that I’d seed smiling down at me from campaign billboards all week in Accra, coming to bless the latest roadway project.  That was pretty rad too.