Wednesday 1 March 2006

Ghana is hot! And sticky. But there are thousands of fruit bats in trees along one of the main roads into town - and even on the roundabout - which is pretty cool, and agama lizards with orange heads. And vultures, who must be here because it smells. The air is warm, thick, sweet and filthy. Breathing it in is inhaling the tropics: seductive but treacherous.

The trip over was good. I didn't feel too hungover, but never managed to completely shake the dehydration. Europe was covered by a blanket of cloud, with just the snowy summits of the Alps peeking through. The Med was a bit rough, but still insanely blue. Then the dark hills of Algeria, which gave way to the vast sandy expanses of the Sahara. Amazingly, there were people living down there, in the desert; not in oases, but in tiny dark dwellings surrounded by curious rings of sand, and occasional darker brown circles where they'd irrigated with a rotating boom.


The sun set, and Africa slipped by below in the darkness, not a light to be seen. Until we neared Lagos, and gas flares then a great conurbation of lights appeared. I slept most of the way from there to Accra, but what I saw of it as we landed was similar - another big coastal city.

I spent the first night in a pricey hotel (for me)... a huge room, my own bathroom and a tv. It was too late to find anything more reasonable, so I tried to luxuriate in it and forget it was $50. (It sounded worse in cedis... 450,000.) I stood on the bed to look at the aircon unit, and the ceiling fan was suddenly whirring very close - almost took my head off. It wouldn't have been a great start: "naked man found decapitated in Accra hotel room".

Having survived the ceiling fan I decided to get my hair cut properly, and having started down the road of trying to look like a respectable member of African society, bought a watch and a sim card too. I had a fairly productive day: changed money, found a dodgy place to stay for a fifth of the price of the other one, met up with Augustus at the Ghana Wildlife Society and arranged to meet Lars Holbech at the University tomorrow. Augustus let me lock my valuable stuff in his office, so I feel a bit less vulnerable than when I was wandering about with laptop, binoculars, camera, mobile phone, gps units, laser rangefinder and hods of cash... All out of sight, but a definite bonus just waiting for an enterprising mugger.

I had a good wander round Accra too. There is a vast market in the centre of town, with thousands of little stalls, through labyrinths of streets, selling everything from bras to live crabs. For dinner, I had a big bowl of fufu and grasscutter, eaten with the right hand... Fufu is mashed up yam, and is thick and sticky, a bit like dumplings. Grasscutters (otherwise known as cane rats) are big kinda cute rodents (ok, so I think most rodents are cute) and are the commonest bushmeat animal in Ghana. As far as I know, they are still fairly common, and efforts are being made to farm them rather than just keep hunting them from the wild, so hopefully eating one wasn't a bad thing... It was quite tasty, in its spicy little sauce.