One big unknown before setting off on my trip to Accra, Lomé and Porto-Novo was what the vegetarian food situation would be like in West Africa.
The distance between Cape Coast, the former capital of the British Colony once known as The Gold Coast, and Accra is only 148km (92mi), but it can easily take 3.5 hours to travel the road between the two cities by shared taxi.
Dozens of languages are spoken in Accra, but the two you will most often come across are Twi (in Greater Accra) and Ga (in Jamestown, where the Ga people settled almost two centuries ago).
It’s not that museums and monuments don’t exist in places like Accra, but rather that they lie under the radar, like items on a scavenger hunt waiting to be tracked down. You have to work a little bit to learn where these places are and how to get there.
After my time spent in Accra delving into Ghana’s rich, modern history, I realized just how inadequate my schooling was in regards to anything Africa.
West Africa was one of the regions of the world I was most excited to visit. I had my heart set on backpacking through Ghana, Togo and Benin, but I admittedly had very little frame of reference for what travel would be like in this part of the world.
Beautiful feline at the Skopje Zoo Skimming over my previous entries in this blog, I have to wonder if people ever ask themselves, “Does Ben ever do anything just for fun when he travels? Is he always so...intense?” Yes, it’s true. I don’t shy away from the dark…
What is Macedonia and where, if at all, does it exist today?
Every capital city has a claim to fame. There’s some statistic the tourist board can proudly proclaim to attract visitors.
The woman slowly leaned back in her chair, took out another cigarette and exhaled a mighty plume of smoke before repeating what she said thirty seconds earlier: You no go Skopje.