Easter Weekend with Team Ellis

On Thursday afternoon, Jane and I set out for a reportedly great beach spot west of Accra. We took a taxi, a bus, a tro-tro, another tro-tro and a canoe before we finally reached Ellis Hideout.

While waiting 45 minutes for the second tro-tro to fill up, we made lots of friends and mistook plantains for bananas.

A fairly spacious tro-tro.










A river I paddled up and a monkey that landed on my lap. Potential culprits of my mysterious but relatively mild fever/headache/aches?


ROADTRIPPIN'

It began like so many other roadtrips I’ve taken: four girls (three American, the other French). We could go when we wanted, stop when we wanted, eat when we wanted. In the land of tro-tros, a private car was quite a luxury. The car meant freedom.

It had taken Manon 5 ½ hours to get to Busua in her roommate’s car on Saturday, where she met up with me and Jane. From there, we all headed to Ellis Hideout in Butre, another nearby-ish village. Jane and I had taken a tro-tro to the village and then a short canoe ride across the point where the river joins the sea the day before. The path by road, however, was unexpectedly long, through green hills and palm tree plantations, and we were low on gas.

That, however, turned out not to be an issue. The front of the car bottomed out because the dirt road was deeply rutted. It started to drive funny and smell slightly and smoke a bit. A hose was hanging down from the front that had become disconnected. We still didn’t know how far it was to Ellis Hideout, so sent a boy on the roadside to go tell Lion, the Rastaman owner whose dreads most definitely put him in the lion family. He pulled up in a 4x4 in no time at all: the Hideout was just around the corner. A few more boys had materialized and with their help, we pushed it there.

[The boys were given a ‘dash,’ which can mean bribe, but also means a tip. I hate dashing. People shouldn’t do helpful or nice things just because they expect to get money out of it. But this is a tangent I will return to at another time.]



A taxi driver that had brought some tourists there reconnected the water pipe and added some more gear oil. It was (supposedly but hardly) going to easily make it back to Accra.

On Monday, we left the beach a few minutes before 11 am. (I always check the clock to calculate how long things actually take, but then consult it at so many points that I often forget what each time in my mind marked.) We had gone about a mile when the car started acting up. Luckily, Lion was behind us, taking some American study abroad students to the hospital because they were sick. He left his brother Daniel with us to help. Jane and Megan went back to the Hideout to get more gear oil and Daniel rigged up the hose with wire to reinforce it.

I had developed a fever, headache, and achy body the night before and was still not feeling well. Manon and I lied in the shade of a young palm tree while I recited “ilhumdolilah” and “bismallah” and “Allah Akbar” (Arabic for Thanks be to God, In God’s Name, and God is Great) in cycles of 33. I also asked St. Christopher (Catholic patron saint for travel) for some help and even wondered about the effectiveness of asking God to bless and protect the car in the blood of Jesus Christ (which, until 3 weeks ago, never would have even crossed my mind).

Manon and I decided we had been cursed: The day before we had told some women at the nearby village that we would come buy fried egg sandwiches from them in the morning, which we ended up not doing. Caribbean voodoo actually originates from ‘juju’ here in West Africa and can be powerful stuff.

An hour and a half and several dashes later, we were on our way (the boy who had presumably swum across the river to get the oil since he returned wet, a messenger sent to bring Manon and I water, the brother). The gas gauge was in the orange, but somehow we made it the 10+ km to the nearest petrol station.

Jah! Rastafari! (We’d been hearing these all weekend at our rasta Hideout and it was a non-denominational car.)

Jane and I had bought bus tickets for Monday in advance since Easter weekend is a big travel time and we didn’t know Manon would come with a car. We decided to try our luck at getting a refund, even though there were signs that clearly stated you had to return the tickets two hours before scheduled departure and we were rolling in two hours after. No rules in Africa helped us out and we got the refund (the man sold our tickets before he’d even given us our money back). When we tried to dash him, he waved it away. (Amazing!)

Our luck had changed.

Only it didn’t last long.

We stopped in Cape Coast for a late lunch (4:30) at a café affiliated with an NGO called Globalmamas. Another roadside stop to get pineapples (maybe not so special since the bus on the way had stopped so people could buy bananas, strangely enough. I also have a memory of a San Francisco bus driver stopping to buy watermelon…). A pit stop for the toilet and some ice cream. Smooth sailing, particularly with the nicely paved, Japanese funded highway.

Then, suddenly but not so surprisingly, traffic. (This was the same road with major congestion on my way back from Fetteh a month or so ago: girl left by her bus when she got down to walk, a bus nearly tipping over, a guy trying to punch a tro-tro driver because he’d cut him off.)

The highway was meant to be two lanes (meaning one in each direction). When I was in the patient, behaving tro-tro from Fetteh, together with my fellow passengers, we hated the cars that sped around the main lane of traffic. This time, however, I was in the cheating car and happily so. Many cars darted into the opposite lane because there was, mysteriously enough, no traffic coming from that direction. Why became clear soon enough, when the traffic stopped moving entirely. There were at least 5 lanes of traffic headed toward Accra and none coming out. The police had stopped the cars and were somehow trying to find a sensible solution out of the situation.

Traffic didn’t move for at least two hours. Some boys were dancing in the middle of the traffic a car or two ahead of us. Megan, who has been in West Africa for about 4 years, decided she wanted to get out and dance, too. The rest of us, all under two months old in these parts, were reluctant. The men around behaved themselves though and she was a hit. Everyone was smiling. The back of the tro-tro in front of us popped open and as she slide back into our car, more and more young men showed up to join the dance party. There must have been at least 30, all with incredible bodies and great dance moves. At least there was something to look at while we waited in the traffic! A teenaged boy, wearing a button down shirt as a loose skirt with nothing else on, appeared from somewhere. Another had on a woman’s bathing suit and some shorts.



We all smiled. Only in Africa would there be a traffic jam dance party.

Eventually, we got bored enough to all get out and dance for a bit (and I was feeling well enough at the time). We made it clear that we wanted space and ‘no hands.’ It was mostly heeded. If one would get too close, another guy from the crowd would tell him to back off.

Jane had been telling people all weekend that her name was Jessica. When someone then asked me mine, my mind said, “Say anything but Jessica,” but my mouth said, “Jessica.” Jane hadn’t heard me say that, so she also said her name was Jessica…opps.

After a song and a half, we got back into the car. One young man, Michael, chatted with Jane for some time though the window and later showed us to where a woman was making egg sandwiches on the roadside (but I had no appetite). By this point, we were soooo ready to be home. Finally, traffic began to inch forward.

But our car wouldn’t start.

The engine didn’t even turn over. (At least, this is what I heard Jane say. I realized I have no knowledge whatsoever about cars!) But the headlights would turn on, so we didn’t think it was the battery. We put more gear oil in. The water pipe was still attached. Jane called her mechanic friend and he said maybe it was a fuse. She changed the fuse (I didn’t even know the fuse box was below the steering wheel) or somehow fixed it with wire.

A young man from the car to our left started shouting at Jane to get out of the way, enough though she was not in the path of his car and he could have only moved forward 4 feet max anyway. He started shouting, “F%Y*# you!” and Michael began shouting back. I even felt like shouting, he was so ridiculously out of line. Luckily, no fight broke out.

Then, a blue tro-tro tried to squeeze by us on the right and hit the car. It dented and scrapped it a bit, leaving a blue kiss of paint. Megan ran up to the tro-tro, which had managed to advance three car lengths and shouted at him. We got the license plate number, but I’m not sure if anything will come of that.

Eventually, we pushed the car through the traffic to a side street. Michael was still helping, trying to find us a battery, etc. His ride ended up leaving him behind when he stayed on to help us. We finally pushed the car a block to the Mobil Station (I shouldn’t say ‘we,’ since I was just sitting by a building, watching everything happen, drinking water, and once again feverish) and decided to hire a taxi to take us home (120,000 cedis=$12) since it was midnight. Michael found us a taxi, we loaded our stuff up, dashed the man at the station to watch the car overnight, and we on our way: the four of us in back, Michael in the front.

Jane and I told him we had lied about our names, afraid he’d be mad. He wasn’t. He said he understood and that, in fact, that’s what we should have done since there were so many men around and we had to be smart. We gave him our numbers and I was happy to have met another Ghanaian who didn’t just seem to be out for something for his own interest. The next day, however, he called Jane to say that the taxi driver had made him get down in a spot where there was no transportation back to his house (not the spot we had earlier agreed upon with the driver) and that it had cost him 40,000 cedis to get home and another hour. She thought maybe he was fishing for something…When he talked to me, he hadn’t mentioned the money, just the hassle. I’m not sure if he was motive-less or not, but he was a big help. I hate that I’m more untrusting here in than I am normally inclined to be.

Maybe we were cursed.

Maybe it’s just Africa.

But most likely, Mercury retrograde is to blame for turning the trip into a 14-hour fiasco.


SICK
I felt better on Tuesday, but went to the clinic anyway to have a blood test to rule out malaria and typhoid (about $16). Even though I suspect that I would be much, much sicker if it was either and since I’m taking malaria meds and had a typhoid vaccination.

From the typhoid section of the Lonely Planet Africa Healthy Travel book:

“You almost always get a fever and headache to start with, initially very similar to flu, with aches and pains, a loss of appetite and generally feeling unwell. Typhoid may be confused with malaria…”

Also: stomach pains (which I had on and off) and a red rash (which I discovered Tuesday morning).

The results came back today: negative.

Could it have been dengue fever? Similar symptoms…

I cannot go to school today, said little Peggy Ann McKay.
I have the measles and the mumps.
A gash, a rash, and purple bumps…

While you were away: an update from a fellow traveler (a rather Old World Brit):

"With a torrent of oaths and other profanities Lars the viking left Ellis Hideout this morning on his bike for Winneba and points south and east. Phew. Retired burglars are all very well in their proper place - like southern spain for the British crook or Miami for the eastern US. So I have warned Lion to watch out in future for goblinesque nordic men with heavy arm tattooes and mohicans at age 41 and a half years of adolescence. . Is that prejudice by the way - or rather the light of experience granted by the gift of time spent in the world by yr correspondent?"