No Joke

12 Arab men, 2 Ghanaian drivers, 2 American girls and an Australian with surfboard, in a 6-car caravan, go on a day trip outside of Accra, Ghana.

No, this isn’t the start of a lame joke, but how I spent my Sunday.

Jane and I had been planning a trip to nearby Prampram, but my Egyptian friend Sherif told us that if we waited to go till Sunday, he could take us.

We met at 8 am (an Egyptian on time!?!), strapped Scott’s board on top of the car, and went to a second location because some of Sherif’s friends were going to join us…

8 other Egyptians and 3 Tunisians, to be exact. Engineers for a telecom company and a few embassy staff.


Is this GHANA?!

We arrived to Prampram, but didn’t know exactly what beach spot we were headed to. We followed the road and ended up a few kilometers away in Old Ningo, where a Sunday school class paraded down the street, waving palm branches and singing (Palm Sunday). Just after we passed them by, the lead car was told that the beach was back that way. Six cars then did three point-turns in the middle of the road and passed the parade by again.



We arrived to a restaurant on the beach (where a sign declared Your Secret is Your Power) only to find that it was rocky. Some cars set off down the road to locate another beach, but some had to stay put because Mr. Egyptian Embassy had sent a boy for cigarettes…

Again, we asked directions to a good beach from a couple of men on the street, the first wearing a plastic sack on his head (no rainclouds in the sky), the second a hat fashioned out of what looked like a feedsack and shaped in the Newsies style.

Golden Beach sounded promising, but there wasn’t even a restaurant and the only chair-like things were a few monumental stone benches. While we waited for the rest of the cars to arrive, Jane, one of the drivers, and I joined in a game of volleyball that some local teens were playing.


Golden Beach (?!)

The decision was made to go to Ada, another 45 minutes further outside Accra where the river meets the sea. Periodically, the cars in the lead would pull over till the rest of the cars caught up. Halfway to Ada, I could till the Arabs weren’t exactly amused (are we there yet?!). I felt somewhat responsible, though I was going on what the guidebook said, never claimed to have first-hand knowledge, and hadn’t been expecting to be responsible for the weekend excursion of so many people.

We pulled up to a Yacht Club in Ada…but you have to be a member. (Jane saw an American woman from the Embassy there and got me another tutoring job, which will allow me to stay a bit longer here, at least!) So we headed down the road a bit and got to a hotel. The fee was 35,000 cedis (a bit more than $3.50) to use the pool...I’d just been at a hotel pool the day before in Accra, but since there seemed to be no beach, there wasn’t much to be done. Jane and I tried to get a discount, claiming we’d brought them all this business, but the woman wouldn’t budge.

One thing I forgot-or perhaps never managed to put into words before-is that Egyptians don’t need to find fun; they bring their own! It’s been a long time since I played in the pool so hard. Monkey in the middle / team keep away. They were just like little boys. Jane even chicken fought with them (two people sit on the shoulders of others and try to make the opponent fall into the water) and won! One Egyptian who wasn’t swimming kept coming over to the pool and dumping a bottle of water on our heads, then saying we couldn’t splash him because he had his money and phone in his pocket. He kept coming back, toothpick barely sticking out of his mouth, and doing it over and over again. Another group of Lebanese men in their 20s spent hours running and jumping into the pool, so maybe it isn’t just the Egyptians.

We played some beach volleyball and took a boat ride to where the river meets the sea. They made music, drumming on the side of the boat and singing. I could have been on a felucca in the Nile. The only complaint I have is the smoke. At least most Ghanaians don’t smoke.




In the end, Scott said it was the most fun he’d ever had with 12 Arabs. While I’m not sure I can make the same claim, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had with 12 Arabs in Ghana.