Tales from Ghana 2

Tales from Ghana No 2 – The surf beaches and Juju.

Busua - Western Region.

Busua is the best surf beach in Ghana. Watching the locals surf is a delight. They are good and the waves are just right for the intermediate surfers. The town is also a working fishing village with colourful boats and daily catches of different fish and lobsters. Here it is possible to buy a big lobster for 3 or 4 USD straight from the boatman. It is 5 hours from Accra by car. Longer by bus and taxi. If you can afford it, you can opt for the 30-minute Passion Air flight from Accra domestic airport. I will do that next time. The Executive STC coach was cheap and comfortable, with A/C and a Nigerian movie playing at the front about a group of armed men holding some politicians hostage and staff hostage and demanding a ramson for their release or they would kill them one by one. The film ended in the usual army/hostage takers shoot out. The journey was 6 hours so another film cam on, again Nigerian, and I soon realised that it was the same storyline with different actors and a different setting!

There are a few places to stay in Busua, some by the sea and some inland in the small and very African village. All are small, low key hotels and lodges run by European women with Ghanaian husbands who have been here for years. All the beach land is sold. Busua Inn is run by a French lady and is filled with African artifacts, masks, and statues, which are collectables to Europeans but meaningful and spooky to the locals as they are connected with JuJu. The French food at Busua Inn is a delight.

There is one big wooden house right on the beach run by two French guys. It is beautiful: Spacious rooms. A sundeck and balconies looking out over the golden sands and blue sea. The best spot on the beach. We enquired about staying there and asked for the room price. “250 cedi per night for a room” (around 45 USD). “Does that include breakfast?” I asked “No, we don’t do food”. “Can we get tea or coffee in the morning?”. “No, we don’t serve drinks”. “Do you have a bar where we can get a beer or soft drink?”. “Non, no bar”. I was getting a bit frustrated by then and asked, “do you at least have a kitchen where we can prepare our own food?” “Non, this house has no kitchen, Monsieur we are Architects. We make houses out of wood and they last for years and years, food takes hours to prepare and 10 minutes to eat, and then there is the washing up, bars attract people want to stay up to 1 or 2am, when we want to go to bed”. “Oh” I said and noticed that everything was very dusty. “We don’t clean either” said the larger of the two “cleaning takes hours of effort and then an hour late it is dusty again”. I could see his point but decided to stay at an Ecolodge at the far end of the beach. Ashanta Waves. They had a bar and an evening menu of fish or lobster and local stews of eggplant, plantain, okra and other local vegetables. There are many young Aid Worker volunteers staying here and many are vegetarians. On that evening there was a party eight German girls who worked at an NGO clinic in the town and were celebrating a birthday. This was their restaurant of choice despite the distance.

In the morning Esther made us a wonderful breakfast of home-made pancakes with local honey, pawpaw, mango and pineapple. The rooms were spotlessly clean, and it was half the price. The garden is wonderful; full of coconut trees, palm trees, a lawn with shrubs and a huge silk cotton tree which must be hundreds of years old as the middle is hollowed out with an entrance. Inside here, being an Ecolodge, they had installed a shower for those who choose to take the cheaper rooms which have no en-suit bathroom and shower.

The proximity to the forest in our room was concerning, palms were right up against the window and the forest stretched out beyond. This was lizard territory and the possibility of one getting in and hanging from the wall or ceiling of the small room was high. Luckily, the room held firm and we had no such encounters. The only wildlife incident that I witness was all three staff trying to get a Green Mamba snake out if the silk cotton tree with 3-meter poles (they are very poisonous) and running away at intervals. I don’t know whether they got rid of it but no-one used the shower for a while and the staff were find and back to their normal boisterous self.

Next door there is Scorpion lodge. This is slightly cheaper and has simpler rooms and food. The lodge is names after the dog, who is very friendly and getting old now. He just snuggles up under the table when any guest arrived for drinks or comes down for breakfast. These two lodges are right on the lagoon and you can walk straight across at calf height at low tide to get to the main beach, past colourful wooden fishing boats and fishermen mending their nets. At high tide you must cross a rickety bridge with metal sheets serving as the floor. It crosses the small stream that feeds the lagoon, and it has several treacherous holes which you could easy fall into and cut or break your leg. After negotiating the bridge, you pass through the village with all its traditional life: inquisitive kids, babies and toddlers running around, women pounding plantain for fufu and cassava for banku, or washing in open tubs or preparing the catch of fish for sale, and men listing to small radios or repairing nets and fishing gear.

As a clean surf beach with friendly family hotels and lodges and beautiful scenery and fishing village life, I cannot recommend Busua highly enough. It is paradise.

Keta – Volta Region

In Busua we were told that Keta beach in Volta Region is the best surf beach in Ghana, it is where they hold the surfing championships and “it is only an hour from where you live” they said.

We went and it was two and a half hours’ drive from Tema, close to the Togo border. The beach was beautiful but the waves were very small. The two hotels had a surfboard or two in storage and no-one was surfing. Maybe the conditions were wrong. This was a place where people went in the evenings to watch the sunset over the Atlantic Ocean, sitting on the carcasses of old fishing boats. In the daytime it is a working fishing beach where they land flatfish, barracuda, and shark. One fisherman told us that they go out to sea for 4 to 6 days and travel about 45 miles out to get the fish. This is dangerous work and each crew member only get around 10 dollars for the entire trip.

Kokrobite – Cape Coast region/Greater Accra

Kokrobite is a different kind of place altogether. Only 45 to 60 minutes from Accra it is the closest surf beach to the capital and consequentially very busy at weekends. During the week it is quiet with just the locals, a few Rastafarians and some Europeans who decided to settle and make business here. Mario has been here for 20 years and him and his wife run Kokrobite Gardens, an Italian restaurant and guest house which has the best Italian pizza in Ghana. Raymond has invested in two hotels and can be seen walking around the village in just a pair of shorts and trainers with a very red face and chest.

On your first visit, Kokrobite seems like paradise, and it is, on the beachside, but the reality of the town is different. The waves are 1 to 1.5m. Mr Bright (an Englishman who brought the sport of surfing to Ghana) has a surf school here and many Europeans working in Accra gravitate to this spot. He started out at Busua but then relocated to Kokrobite where there is access to the international schools in Accra for his children.

Mr Bright’s surf school is inside Big Millie’s backyard. This is an institution in Kokrobite, with many rustic rooms, a bar playing reggae all day, a pool table and plenty of seating. There is also a live reggae band every Saturday night and drumming, dance and acrobatics displays every Sunday afternoon. At the weekend big SUVs arrive with rich locals and Europeans and the business thrives. Millie is a small, sprightly woman who is now 80 and recently widowed. She has handed over management to a team run by a Spanish lady but is still around the gardens, sitting and gardening and keeping an eye on the business.

Two buildings further up the road there is Dizzy Lizzies, owned and run by Lizzy, a Welsh lady and her Ghanaian husband. They serve top class local food – Tilapia, banku, light soup, red-red sauce and plantain. They also have two very reasonably priced rooms which are clean and spacious.

On subsequent visits people started to warn us about security threats in this town because of its proximity to Kasua; a poor suburb of Accra, known for criminals and Sakawa Boys (the juju type and the internet scammers). We considered relocating to Kokrobite but his is a place to come for the day or weekend and stay in one of the European/Ghanaian Lodges, which have 24/7 security, and then go back to relative safety, not a place to live year-round in an unsecured house.

This advice was proven the day after we left Kokrobite after the second visit there was news of a 10-year-old boy who had been killed by a 16-year-old and accomplice for “rituals”. Unfortunately, this happens in Ghana from time to time, with orders coming from rich and powerful in Ghana, Togo, Benin or Nigeria, who believe that this “JuJu” can bring them even more wealth and power. Unfortunately, these activities and beliefs still go on in West Africa. Ghana is a very safe destination with hard working kind and generous people, but as in everywhere in the world, tourist resorts attract criminals.

John Vallis April 2021