Devil makes work for idle thumbs

Hello gentle reader. I trust you flourish. You may have noticed that I have not been here in a while. Or maybe you haven’t. Either is fine. It’s fine because I have been what Winnie the Pooh would call Terribly Busy.

With what?

With this: The Squintarium. Try not to view it in Chrome because it won’t work properly and you’ll be disappointed.

It’s very young still, and technically not quite finished, but I just thought I would tell you about it because I don’t want you to think that I’ve been just sitting around with my thumb up my arse. Which I imagine it’s impossible to do for any length of time.

Still, hell of an image to leave you with, no?

Let’s go up the BT Tower, yes?

It’s quite difficult to get up the BT Tower these days. Not because you have to shimmy up the outside in special sticky spider man gloves and socks, that would be fun. No, because the powers that be have decided to close it to the public and make you enter the only ballot tougher than the London Marathon ballot in order to get a ticket- the Open House Day ballot. Open House, incidentally, has the worst website I have ever seen. It is – like Top Shop on a Saturday morning – unbrowsable.

No matter. As someone who knows someone who supports Freedom From Torture I was given special access to the BT Tower last week.

Freedom from Torture is a charity that works with torture survivors in the UK to help them rebuild their lives. They do gardens, allotments, cooking and creative writing and many other marvellous things that mean they make a real difference to people whose lives have been shattered and who, if we’re totally honest, no one else will help. So, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of John McCarthy we shimmied up the Tower. He was not there and, strictly speaking we didn’t shimmy up anything. But there were some excellent cupcakes and a raffle. I must say that Freedom From Torture do know how to show their supporters some love. And clearly they do some marvellous work.

You can find out more here, because I’m finding it quite hard to adopt my usual flippant tone and talk about them. OK?

Gentle reader, you will no doubt remember that while in Prague I took a comedy lift up to the top of the Zizkov Tower and took very similar photographs to the ones below. Although, the Prague photos do not have a ghostly London Eye appearing in them, so they are less fun I feel. I’ve decided I do like a trip up a telecommunications tower. Unfortunately, the BT Tower was not built in a communist country (no matter what the Daily Mail might tell you) and therefore does not have such paranoid mythology attached to it. It does however have a magnificent views of London. Much better than those on the London Eye. Mostly because the Tower is higher and half the view from the Eye is wasted on the suburbs of south London. No offense, Blackheath. OK maybe a bit.

The Tower was opened in 1966 by Tony Benn (hooray!) and Billy Butlin of the holiday camps, who opened a restaurant at the top. It was closed to the public in 1986 and as a consequence London is the only major city in the world not to have a revolving restaurant in the air. For shame! The Tower, despite being 189 metres tall, was officially a secret until the 1990s. It didn’t appear on any maps, you see. Kate Hoey confirmed its existence in 1993 invoking parliamentary privilege to do so. So, it seems MPs have long been using that to talk about trivial nonsense. Yes, Ryan Giggs I’m looking at you again. The BT Tower is a grade II listed building and the lifts travel at 7 metres per second which means that your ears pop on the way up. It is the only building in the UK that you can exit via the lift in the event of a fire evacuation. Act of Parliament says so.

We got a certificate to say that we had been up and an oversize booklet telling us all about the Tower which I haven’t read yet because, you know, Wikipedia. Here are some photographs. I am having a dispute of marital proportions with my camera at the moment so, on its behalf, I apologise for the quality. And can you believe it comes home drunk, smelling of fags and cheap perfume?

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Queuing in a parallel universe: Hyper Japan

Hyper Japan was back on London on Saturday. I love most things Japanese and therefore armed myself with tickets pronto. I think that this is the second Hyper Japan. I say this because I went last year for the first time. I am therefore assuming that it was the second one. I assume this in the same way that I understand the world to be a construct entirely of my creation. So, you only exist when you enter the realm of my consciousness. Or something like that, gentle reader. Maybe we are all trapped in a snow globe on the mantelpiece of a forgetful child in a parallel universe where cheese is a weapon of mass destruction and it is socially acceptable to wear head to toe tartan. I just don’t know. But that tree in the forest with no one to hear it? There is no tree, silly.

Anyway, those of you who have the dubious pleasure of attempting to follow @typecat might be all too aware that I was not impressed by the two hour queue. Yes. Two hours. I never thought I would be the kind of person to stand in a queue for two hours and there not be a Michelle Pfeffier as Cat Woman at the end of it but we grow, we change, we evolve. Do we not?

We joined the queue knowing that we would be in it for some time and there would at some point be a mercy mission in which one of us would forage for food in local shops. But nevertheless we joined that queue in front of one of those women who make everything sound like a complaint. I had to steel myself to ignore her because two hours of that and one of would have ended up with one of us bloody. To be fair we didn’t at the beginning of said queuing realise that we would be in the queue for two hours. We thought it would be, like, 30 minutes, then the volunteers came down the queue and said if you didn’t have pre-paid tickets you had to go home. Then we felt special and more kindly disposed to queuing. Then another volunteer came down and said we would be hour. An hour, we all murmured, cowed but not yet broken. After all we had tickets, we were special.

Then an hour and a half later we were still in the damn queue, but now furiously tweeting and sounding much angrier than we were. @hyperjapanevent came in for a battering but, you know, fancy overselling tickets to the extent that Groupon people were being offered a refund. You know it’s bad when Groupon are offering a refund. I hate Groupon. That Tibet Super Bowl ad notwithstanding they are an evil company pedalling shit offers. They are also virtually impossible to unsubscribe from. Bad Hyper Japan people for moving to Olympia 2 and then selling enough tickets to fill Wembley Arena.

When we actually got into Olympia I was so exhausted I just frantically bought stuff to make it all worthwhile. Like Piperoids!

That is the whole point of Hyper Japan for me. To buy cool stuff. No one packages a product quite like the Japanese. ALl my stuff is lying around unopened still as I admire it. And I am a big fan of robots also. I am a bit concerned about Hello Kitty though. She offends me in some way I can’t quite be bothered to think about but has something to do with the infantilising of adult women en masse. This year had added Tokyo Fixed. Bike shop of the Gods. Ah, Hyper Japan. Worth a two hour queue and no mistake.

But the best thing about Hyper Japan is that it provides a marvellous opportunity to stand around judging people. And who doesn’t love an hour or two of that? And this fantastic judging opportunity was brought to Hyper Japan by, yes, Cosplay. And Cosplay is the whole point of Hyper Japan to a whole lot of those young people you see around so often.
Cosplay is a portmanteau. Man, I love that term. Let’s use it again: portmanteau. That is to say that it is a blend of two words to make a new word which has both the meanings of the original words. Costume and roleplay. Yes, people older than 12 dressing up as their favourite otaku characters. Sailor Moon for example, but many other Manga and Anime characters appear. Now, if you know anything about Manga or Anime you will probably have noticed that most of the characters are all elongated and adolescent in appearance with perfect skin and huge eyes. They’re an idealised vision of humans as drawn by Hello Kitty, in a way. Not so the cosplay enthusiasts at Hyper Japan. It seems that there are two particular features common to this strange tribe. You have to be overweight. You can be positively plump or clinically obese but the number of slim cosplayers is infinitesimal. Also, you must have bad skin. Acne is where it is at for the cosplayer. Other elements such as cellulite (which as we all know looks fabulous with a very short skin), pasty white skin and chewed fingernails are optional but embraced by the hardcore cosplayer.

I could be snitty about such things, you see, because I had run 9 miles that morning. And there is nothing so smug and irritable as a runner with sore knees.

What I would like to know is where do these people go the rest of the time? I have never in my whole time in London seen a spotty, fat teenager dressed up as Sailor Moon anywhere other than Hyper Japan. I suspect they are all sitting around in their bedrooms in Harrow and Pinner fawning into webcams and trawling ebay for giant eyelashes and authentic hair extensions. Eating and eating and eating. Mind you, it is better than drinking MD 20/20 outside the Co-op.

Also, judging by the horny teens rolling around on the floor in the gaming (and I thought they meant computer gaming!) section, it does seem to be a great way to meet boys. Even if they are all dressed up as Cid from Final Fantasy.

Things, differently

Aw, look I forgot to blog. Yeah, yeah, this breaks all the rules of blogging but you know what? I don’t care. Blog like it’s your job if you want to but I have had other projects occupying me. All writing, just the words are turning up in different places.

Besides, this is the least of our problems.

Heres’s the deal: this whole country is ethically and morally bankrupt. From the media, the political elite and the police to the little men in offices up and down and all around. The capital pee political and the small pee personal, and vice versa, it’s all curled up and died and only the zombified masses can bear to lurch around in the cesspit any longer. Do we get it yet? Has the penny dropped?

Well, wake up I say. Wake up. Let’s pretend it’s the sixties again and drop out. It’s the only way. Leave. Run. Escape them before they kill you from the inside.

Give them your art, your soul, your life’s work and it’s you too, out there in the fog and shit, paddling along with the flotsam and scumbags trying to keep your head above the jism while the stomp over you to get to the edge of the world faster than you. Oh yes, we are all heading to the bleak, blood stained horizon. Unless…

There’s a Far Eastern proverb, which I can only half remember, about how if you sit on the bank of the river long enough eventually the body of your enemy will float past. If you want me, I’ll be on the river bank watching. Don’t make me watch for you.

Enough negative schtick. Their spew is contagious. Let’s put it another way, our way:

There’s nothing here for us people. Let’s get the hell out while we still can. Let’s do things differently. There’s a lot to be said for just side stepping all of their nonsense and getting in touch with what’s actually Important. Not important but Important. Capital eye. Important to you. The real you. Not you the brand, or you when your performing one of those roles you have to perform at work, or in the bar, or with your family. You. To use a topic example: if you get shafted out of your job when they close a £878 million pound generating newspaper to save the arse of some harridan with dirt on them, you might find you’ve become someone you really don’t want to spend time with, and by then? It’ll be too late. You’ll have to.

Last thoughts on my trip to Ghana

So, we have almost come to the end of my posts about Ghana. All that remains is for me to just add a couple of things that I have previously omitted to mention. I have got some stories to tell about the children we met but I’m saving those up. For other things. Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, here we go…

Music

The music in Ghana is marvellous. From a nice chap selling CDs on the side of the road in Accra we bought a hiplife compilation and a copy of the Ramblers Dance Band album Hits Sounds of the Ramblers which has the famous cover of Knock On Wood on it. This is called highlife.

Highlife is a kind of blend of big band, gospel, traditional Ghana beats and a bit of reggae. It’s recognisably African but give a nod to all the dominate aspects of Ghana’s music culture which are broader. Church music being particularly popular. Hip Life is the same but with American hip hop beats and rapping added to the music, with less big band. There is still the same reverence to God but it sits alongside more urbane sentiments such as requests for sexual favours and discussion about the size of one’s little fella. Dutty Wine is probably the most famous of these tracks. Or Dirty Wind (as in wind your body down) in proper English, which is not half so evocative of the dance hall as dutty wine.

To put one of these CDs on is to be transported directly to Ghana. Sadly, the number one single in Ghana right now is Born This Way by Lady Gaga. Oh, I’m sorry. I just rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my head and I had to crawl under the table to retrieve them.

Kaneshie Market

Kaneshie Market is a big market in a building not dissimilar to a multi storey car park. We bought some great fabric there for not much money. They also have lots of seamstresses and tailors there who I suspect can transform said material into marvellous fashion items. Outside there are masses of people selling fruit and vegetables, meat, fish and animals. It’s a proper local market. There is another market which is a bit more tourist-y but we were the only white people at this one. It’s not at all like the Souks and all the people are really friendly. We bought some fabric from a woman who was really shy about her English so the woman from another stall helped her, and us, out. These are the people that Global Mamas helps to support so it’s really nice to buy from them direct. I recommend a visit to Kaneshie Market. I saw it from the bus on the way out of Accra and it thought it looked amazing enough to squeeze in a visit to. I was not disappointed. Get a taxi, it’s in the south west on the way out of town to Cape Coast.

New Haven Hotel

The New Haven Hotel is in a north western area of Accra just north of the ring road. This makes it very handy for the STC station. So, if you fly into Accra in the evening you can get a taxi there and then you are ready to get on the bus in the morning. The rooms are really cheap and not bad. Decent bed, fan. Unfortunately, we only had a little water when we were there which isn’t ideal when you’ve got off a flight via Togo, but was unusual in Ghana so I’ll assume this is a one off. I recommend for a short stay.

Anomabo Hotels

In Anomabo there is a beach resort which is a real treat to stay in, very smart huts virtually on the beach. But on top of a hill nearby is a marvellous place called Deva View, which has a very dismissive mention in the Bradt Guide which it doesn’t deserve. You get a 360 degree view of the cost and countryside as you are high above everything. The food is delicious. The rooms are amazing. They are enormous and decked out in a really quirky way. The guy who showed us round was delightful and it came as no surprise that the house was built by some eccentric who fell in love with the area and built it to his own specifications. After his death it was converted into a five room hotel. In short, it’s cheaper and better than the Beach Resort. In fact there are some pretty good places around Anomabo, we ate at teh Bikram Beach House which was being done up and rustles up a good meal. Always a treat.

St George Hotel

It was not a treat to stay at the St George. IAvoid, avoid. It gets quite a good write up in the Bradt Guide but it’s enough to make you weep, it really is.

The plane of doom

The only other thing I feel I must share is that on the flight from Brussels to Heathrow there was a gigantic bang and the plane dropped about 2 miles. No, not really it dropped about ten metres. Maybe. Its’ really hard to assess these matters. People screamed. Not me though, I was half asleep and thought it was part of a dream. Oh, and I am very brave.

Thanks Ghana, it was great, great trip to a fabulous country. Now, I want you to close this blog and go to a travel website and book yourself a trip too. Becuase I am pretty confident that you won’t ever, ever regret it.

Oh, and here are my photographs

Rainforest rambling at Kakum

Kakum National Park is a 375 square km national park located in the Central Region of Ghana. You will find it about 30km north of Cape Coast near the small town of Abrafo. The whole area is covered with virgin tropical rainforest. It covers 350 square kilometres park and has been a national park since 1960.

Kakum National Park contains rare animals, including the endangered Mona-meerkat. Whatever that may be. There are pygmy elephants, forest buffalo, civet cats, a lots of birds, and over 500 species of butterfly. And gigantic ants. Enormous they are. I dread to think what the spiders look like.
We stayed at the Rainforest Lodge just inside the park gates. There are two Rainforest Lodges, as you will know regular reader, so make sure if you are staying at the cheap one you get dropped off at the Park itself. It is a bit of a bitch getting between the two if you are at the wrong one. If you arrive that cheap one and you have booked the posh one, man, I would like to see the look on your face when you open the door. Send me a picture please. Speaking of which…

The Rainforest Lodge is serviceable. There is a bed, a shower, a toilet and there is also a gecko above said bed. What is a bit unnerving is that there is no member of staff there through the night. So if you are a woman travelling alone you might want to bear that in mind. Not because I think anything would happen to you, but it can make an active imagination run riot. Also, that we had a gecko in our room when we got back from an epic trip for food? Now, I don’t mind geckos. But I am not sure if I want one over the bed while I am sleeping. What happens if they forget to hold on the ceiling? I do not wish to wake up with a face full of gecko. Also, if a gecko can get in then just think how many mosquitoes can. Shudder.

On the very, very positive side, if you stay here you will probably be woken up in the middle of the night by monkeys. Bonus. Particularly as it will be the sound of monkeys, not monkeys landing on your face that will awaken you.

If you are thinking of going to Kakum my advice is this: either just go for the day as it can be done easily or if you wan to stay overnight go the whole hog and camp in the park at one of the campsites. You can sort it all out when you get there at the ticket office/ information centre. They are very helpful and will provide you with all the equipment. Be organised about it though, there’s not much to do once you get up there as you can’t go wandering about the park without a guide, and there is nothing to eat nearby after about 3.30pm. But it is really, really worth the trip to see it. It is beautiful.

At the park you can go on a canopy walk which is terrifying. They have built the walkway according to this formula:

Ladder + rope + plank = canopy walkway

It’s really, really high up. They are, obviously and rightly, big on conservation at the Park and they got some of the parrot trappers to help build the walkway because they were the best tree climbers in Ghana and were regularly nipping up the trees to great heights with no ropes, nets or concerns for personal safety. The parrots are apparently very happy with this arrangement. This kind of ecologically sound thinknig has meant that many of the communities that live off the forest are now finding new ways to do things. It’s a fraught relationship at times but it is working. And it has to really becuase the huge amount of rainforest that used to cover Ghana compared to how little does now is scary.

You can try and forget the near death experience while on a Nature Walk with a gamekeeper which is excellent. We had Bafoe for our guide and he continued the tradition of excellent Ghanaian guides, following Oscar at Cape Coast Castle. We didn’t see any animals, because they run away when they hear the noisy humans coming. But we did meet a lot of remarkable trees including one covered in pointed nodules so that elephants didn’t use it to scratch themselves. Because if there’s one thing you don’t want it’s an elephant using you as a scratching post. Also, when a gamekeeper asks you to knock on an ebony tree he is doing it to demonstrate how hard it is, so some restraint is in order or you will get sore knuckles. All in all a great excursion.

Oh, and at Kakum I saw a massive centipede. It was so big I almost trod on one of its feet.

Hanging with the crocodiles at Hans Cottage Botel

So, our Ghana Adventures continue. After hanging out at the highly recommended Stumble Inn our intrepid explorers ring Alex the Joint-Favourite taxi driver and get him to take us to the Hans Cottage Botel, just north of Cape Coast. Famous for its crocodiles.

The Hans Cottage Botel gets mixed reviews and it’s certainly going to get one from me. Why? Let me tell you a story.

That afternoon at the Botel, we had happened upon a strange group of men. Four white men. One, the American, looked exactly like Father Christmas. They were dressed for an expedition and they had many, many exciting containers. I happened across one of them as he was coming up the stairs with a bag full of guns. I was a little perturbed that he went into the room next to ours but hey, holiday brain doesn’t dwell on these things too long. Unlike London brain which tends toward obsessing in these circumstances.

We were coming back to our room after dinner and their room, next door, had the lights on and the curtains open. This was almost directly in my eye line as I wrestled with the key to unlock the door, so it was virtually impossible not to notice the small deer that was huddle down by the television. Yes, a small deer. In a hotel room. There are two incongruities here. The first being that you do not expect to find deer in hotel rooms. No matter how cute they are, no matter how large their eyes and ears you simply do not expect to find them in a hotel room. The second incongruity being that Hans Botel is practically in Kakum National Park, where hunting is prohibited.

So, the people with guns, they were hunters.

And the deer? Bait.

In a hotel, in a National Park.

Odd, isn’t it. Illegal hunters? I don’t know. To be fair they could have had a licence but it is prohibited to hunt in the wildlife reserves so….

The more I thought about this, the more this troubled me. I think the issue was not that they were using a live deer for bait, which is certainly what the man who worked at the hotel thought my problem was. I do find that extremely unpleasant but I am not going to argue with big men with guns. I would prefer to campaign with a charity. It was more that I felt it was unacceptable to do that in a hotel. Hans Cottage Botel is not cheap and to think that a deer might have been leaping around the room doing whoopsies on the bed was not pleasing. Then I started thinking about how it was unacceptable having guns and ammunition in a room which was very easy to break into. Then I started thinking that the men next door were killers. Then we had to move rooms. Damn you, London brain.

Bizarre scenes ensued. We went over to the reception building, which at night seemed to be a youth club of sorts, but with more heavy petting. Once they had peeled themselves apart we were “assisted” by a very bumptious young man there who idolised the hunters. I know this because I saw him trying to be friends with them over dinner. Sadly, I also saw them being rude to his face and laughing at him behind his back but he didn’t notice. He was too captivated by their machismo, I expect. This man decided to tell me a marvellous tale which was punctuated with him accidentally almost telling the truth, which is partly why I think there was something suspicious going on. His female friends were more understanding so they moved us. I think they sensed I was going to cause rather a rumpus if they didn’t. I like to think this is because I used my special reasonable voice which tends to frighten people into bending to my will.

I am not saying that the Hans Cottage Botel is supporting the illegal hunting trade. I am saying that they let hunters keep live bait in their hotel rooms. The man confirmed this. This fact is undisputable. You may decide for yourself if you think this is acceptable. But if you wake up in a deer’s whoopsie don’t blame me.

Tragically for our young hero, they moved us to a room with the noisiest fan in the whole of Africa and I couldn’t sleep. On the plus side we discovered a Mexican soap opera called Mi Pecado which is utterly, utterly fabulous and has an actress in it who is on crack. Literally. Eye boggling the like of which I have never seen.

Back to the Botel. Here are some photographs. Compare if you will these pictures with those on the official website. It is hilarious example of how the camera may never lie but photoshop certainly does. It’s worth hunting out the tennis court pictures because they are very amusing. The crocodile crept out of the lake when we were eating lunch, was awesome. They are amazing creatures. Absolutely terrifying, but amazing.

So, what with the deer whoopsies, the decay and decrepitude and the price tag I would not recommend staying at Hans Cottage Botel, anecdote generation notwithstanding.

I would recommend having lunch there, on your way to Kakum perhaps. I was kind of ambivalent about the crocodiles, which is the big attraction. The lake is man-made and the crocodiles were bought in for the spectacle so although they do live in an almost natural environment it is akin to a zoo in way. The impression you get reading about Hans Cottage Botel is that it is a natural habitat. The bird life is amazing though. There are thousands of weavers nesting in the trees on the lake and they swoop back and forth feeding and building nests. As it gets dark hundreds of ibis and heron settle in the trees. The light reflects from their pale feathers and at first glance they look like hundreds of lanterns. It was a breath-taking sight and one to cherish. One to linger after a late lunch for.

Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads by Ai Weiwei

Even before he was detained, actually I prefer the term kidnapped, by the Chinese government Ai Weiwei was one of my favourite artists. I use that term in the broadest sense, not just to refer to his Fine Art, because he was also a writer amongst other things. A truly creative man. Add this to my intense dislike of the Chinese government and you can imagine how outraged I am by his kidnapping. Oh, I’m sorry I mean detention.

I will try not to litter this post with anti Chinese government sentiment but it is my blog and I’ll say what I like. And they disgust me.

Other disgusting governments are available. The UK’s government is vile. See also America and Syria and Libya and… you are right, we could be here all day listing terrible governments. I am also able to separate the government as a monolithic identity and set of ideas and doctrine from the Chinese people. I do not have any problem with them. Unless they are two particular Chinese people on the Guardian message boards. But I suspect they are actually the Chinese government. Anyway, Chinese people I salute you. Unless you are in the Government, of course, then we will have to talk.

What? Oh, I do apologise you are right. This is a post about Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads. How terrible it would be if Ai Weiwei became so closely wound with his kidnapping detention that it was the only way we could talk about him and his work.

Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads is formed of twelve large bronze heads on sticks (I tried vainly to find a better word there I promise) standing in a semi circle around the fountains in the courtyard at Somerset House. It’s the first ever contemporary art sculpture to go on display in the courtyard of Somerset House. And it’s also Weiwei’s first major outdoor public sculpture installation by the artist in London, so firsts all round.

There are 12 bronze animal heads, one for each of the Chinese zodiac signs. They are re-creations of the traditional Chinese zodiac sculptures which were displayed at the fountain of Yuanming Yuan, an imperial retreat in Beijing. Do you see what he did there? I like this aspect of Ai Weiwei’s work. I think this refers to the Chinese government willingness to causally dispose of Chinese cultural heritage in order to grow the brand of China. I cannot fathom why they would want to forget where they have come from as it can only serve to weaken their identity in the future, but then again I can’t imagine why they would torture thousands of Tibetans for no particular reason but there you go. It takes all sorts, doesn’t it?

I was born in the year of the Rabbit and I was pleased that Ai had made it look a little bit like me.

Don’t believe me? Well, here are some quite odd photographs that I took. The light was very unusual and my poor little knackered camera has a bit of a struggle in the light. All light. Not much light, too much light, funny light. Problems. Anyway, see the rabbit likeness for yourself.

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Here is what Weiwei himself had to say earlier this year about this exhibition:

I am fascinated by making public art. ‘Public’ does not just refer to the museum public; it’s for people passing by and using communal spaces. I think the public deserve the best. In the past, only a pope or an emperor had access to the artworks they commissioned. I want my work to be accessible to everyone. As Yuanming Yuan was being built, Somerset House was being constructed and for me this means that the Courtyard is the perfect setting for Circle of Animals.

Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads is on the Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court until 26 June. Admission is free and you can go between 7.30 and really, really late. Like after bedtime. Ekon Esun is chairing and curating the programme of talks so I’ll be giving them a wide berth. Which is a good example of me cutting off my nose to spite his face.

I haven’t been to the Lisson Gallery exhibition yet, hopefully I’ll get there very soon.

Transport in Ghana 2: Taxis and tro-tros

Right. The timer has gone ‘ping’ so here we are. If you have no idea what that means I beg you to go to yesterday’s post and read up. Actually you don’t have to but it would be nice wouldn’t, what with me slaving away over hot copy and you not reading it being the alternative. And how will you know about toilets and STC buses, eh? A mine of information it is.

OK, ready?

Taxis. OK, there are two types of taxi in Ghana. One’s in Accra and one’s not in Accra. Let’s quickly touch on the ones in Accra and then move on to something more cheerful. When in Accra never ever get in the taxi without first agreeing a price and never ever expect the taxi driver to be able to find anything other than a massive landmark. Else you will end up paying 10 cedi to have no idea where you are. I don’t know why this happens, it just does. Maybe they did work experience in Marrakech.

I have a plan in my head when I go away about what I will do if I receive unwanted sexual attention so that when it happens I am prepared. Now, I also have a plan in my head of how to deal with taxi drivers.

This will not be necessary outside Accra though where the taxi drivers seem very nice if easily confused between Rainforest Lodges. But that is confusing. You can also take the number of a taxi driver and then call them and they will come and get you. I don’t know why or how this works but we had two taxi drivers on speed dial. Alex from the STC station in Cape Coast and Star Boy from Anomabo. Yes. Star Boy. Alex was tall and muscular and had a laugh like Frank Bruno and Star Boy was kind of scrawny. He didn’t laugh like any famous person I have heard laugh. Admittedly this is not all of them. Alex drives a very boring burgundy salon but Star Boy has followed the lead of many a Ghanaian taxi driver and customised his vehicle with some slogans. Many things in Ghana, for example taxis and shops, have religious slogans. Our Redeemer Electricals. Faith and Hope Hairdressers. I saw a tro-tro with Little By Little on the back and a taxi with ‘But for the grace of God’ on it which I thought slightly inappropriate. Star Boy however had ‘Star Boy’ written on the back of his taxi. We had noticed it the day before and prayed that he would be our designated taxi driver. When you get your own driver you do get some interesting insights because you can ask them questions you otherwise do not get a chance to ask. We asked Star Boy about the volume of traffic and he was very forthcoming with information about it being the weekend and how everyone had dressed up and was on the way to a wedding or a funeral or some celebration of something.

All drivers in Ghana seem to honk their horns almost constantly. It can mean ‘hello, my friend’, or ‘look out I am behind you’, or ‘hey stupid’, or ‘learn to drive you are a danger to your fellow road users’. I paraphrase of course. It is an educative way to get about and not very expensive. It is sometimes the only way to get to around.

Once you are used to getting about in Ghana you will inevitably happen upon a tro-tro. This is basically a bit of a shonky minibus. You can fit about 18 people in including the driver and his sidekick. The sidekick opens the door and lets people on and off, takes the money and remembers where people want to go. Tro-tro’s are excellent. All you do is wander along the side of the road and then loads of them will appear out of nowhere and wave at you. There is of course a great deal of honking. There are also hand signals which apparently indicated where said tro-tro is going but I couldn’t work them out. Pointing upwards over and over means I am going far. And I think drawing a circle means town centre. But there are others. I bet some of them mean ‘Please stop I need to toilet, definitely not urinate’ and ‘please get your chicken off of my knee’. Sadly we did not travel with livestock. So, I jest.

Contrary to reports about how bad they were, we did not dice with death once in a tro-tro. We did have a terrible journey in the dark from the posh Rainforest Lodge to the deserted, gecko in your bedroom Rainforest Lodge (where I got woken up in the middle of the night by monkeys whooping – cool!) The road was full of potholes and our taxi driver, who was about 12, was swerving all over the road to avoid them. It is only by some miracle that we are not upturned in a ditch in Ghana being eaten alive by mosquitoes as we speak. Although I would hope I would have been rescued by now. I would have thought an obruni lying in the bushes would be fairly noticeable. Also, no lap top in the bushes. It opted to stay in London. Hidden in my underpants drawer. Sure, it’s a kind of a short straw but it chose of its own free will.

We did, however and to return to the point, have a near death experience in an express minibus. We got Star Boy to take us from Anomabo, where we were staying to the right place if we wanted to be getting the fabled express minibus to Accra. We didn’t wish to wait four hours for the bus you see. It was very handy that Star Boy took us to the station because I suspect we would never have been able to find it otherwise. Anyway, similar to a tro-tro but much more spacious and bloody freezing. Air conditioning you see. I had the misfortune to sit next to a great fat woman who kept fall asleep on me, but at least I was not freezing. Man, she was fat. And warming. Anyway, it was in this minibus that we nearly had two fatal accidents, both through reckless overtaking. This driving would explain all the signs along the road warning of the dangers of just such overtaking shenanigans. They have had to resort to saying exactly how many people at died at certain points on the road. 32 in one place. A bus, we thought. And then in a much louder, comforting thought; a bigger bus than this one. Or two of these ones, I whisper-thought to myself.

That about rounds it up. Final thought: don’t hire a car and drive yourself about. You will go nuts within about 20 minutes. If you can get out of the airport, of course.

Join us next time. gentle reader, where I might not talk about Ghana, I might instead share my pictures of Ai Weiwei’s exhibition at Somerset House. I simply haven’t decided.

Transport in Ghana 1: STC buses (and toilets)

So, there are a few transport options available to you in Ghana and they all involve four wheels. There is no rail service, which my regular reader will know is a shame because I do like a ride on a train when I am overseas. Ah, Bulgaria. How beautiful your communist-era rolling stock.

I sampled the delights of four of the four heeled transportation devices, these being STN bus, Express Minibus, Taxi and most exciting of them all – a Tro-tro.

Let us begin with the STC bus. It is a coach.

Ah, I found that hilarious for some reason so we had a small break in writing there, during which I was bent double literally howling with laughter.

Anyway, this coach, right? It’s supposed to having air conditioning? Not so much. But no matter. The STC bus station is a marvellous place. It’s basically a big concrete building and some bus stops.

There a cafe and a shop also. The cafe is the most frightening and marvellous place. There are two girls in there who will make you have banku. This banku is the most disgusting and vile food you will ever eat. It comes with a glutinous fish stew which, literally, has the consistency of something that has been decomposing long enough to have reached the half liquid half solid state. You will have to eat a reasonable amount of said food or you will be the source of great concern. I think this is what gave me the upsets of the stomach.

I did have a very exciting trip to the toilet here. Just for a number one. I asked one of the girls where the toilet was and she asked me if I needed to urinate. I thought this was a bit forward but agreed that yes, just a urination was in order. She then took me past another secret bus station where there were hundreds of people seemingly waiting to transport their livestock somewhere. We also passed the Accra Fire Station and a lot of ancient fire engines. Then we arrived at some nice wooden huts with washroom signs on the door and a strange edifice made of breeze blocks, with a symbol of a woman pointing one way and a man the other. Why I had not realised the implications of this arrangement I will never now but when asked about urination or toilet I re-confirmed my desire to urinate and found myself ushered into a…well…I am not sure how to describe it. A long trench in the ground, with bathroom tiles. Here is a drawing.

There. I had a little bit of trouble with the urinal as my knees are not up to a deep squat having run over 1,000 km in the last nine months, so basically I peed up my leg and over my shoes. Nice. If I want you to take anything away from this story, regular reader, it’s not that I have urinated on myself without the presence of jellyfish but this: while in Ghana, if someone offers you a urination or a toilet – take the toilet.

Right, back to transport. The STC bus takes three hours to get from Accra to Cape Coast. I can’t tell you what time they go at becaue I don’t know. We left sometime around 12.30. There are other buses at different times I think. On our bus we had a very angry man who was constantly in a state of intense rage about something. He had come to Ghana from another country and was happier with how things were in Cote d’Ivoire. I am not sure if this meant he was from there. If he was I would be surprised because this was the time that there was a lot of fighting in Abijan and he would have been well up for a rumble, I suspect. Angry Man was offset by Anxious Girl. Wow, she was tense. She was very concerned that she be let off the bus in Cape Coast town centre and kept leaping up every two minutes after Winneba to make sure the whole bus knew she needed to get off at Cape Coast town centre. The Ghanaians did not respond very well to Anxious Girl. I think they were a bit baffled by the anxious vibe she was giving off. They kept trying to reassure here but she wasn’t convinced and then it became really annoying because the bus was going to Cape Coast, but it was going to the STC station which is not in the centre. She it was hard to work out what she was talking about once you analysed it. Which there was ample opportunity to do. Angry Man was not a fan of Anxious Girl. Whatever was going on with her, it was epic. When she got off people were backing off to get out of her way such was her frenzy.

Anyway, we were much more chilled and relaxed and with no fuss at all the bus stopped and let us off at Cape Coast STC station. A man got our bags for us and a taxi driver asked us where we were going. Now, my regular reader will know that I have been to Marrakech and there you will find the most unpleasant, cheating, thieving collection of taxi drivers I have ever encountered in my life. Anyone who says different didn’t get the taxi drivers that I got. In fact these taxi drivers have so besmirched the reputation of Morocco that I refuse to get a taxi in any part of the country should I ever return. Which is very unlikely. I mention this because when said taxi driver asked us where we were going we immediately felt hassled and oppressed. But there was no need because this was Alex, our joint-favourite taxi driver in Ghana.

Who I will tell you about tomorrow. Aw, do not worry gentle reader, I have put on timed publish thingy so it will be here….