Kumasi, Ghana

Found wifi after a long break, at the Vodaphone 'shop' near our camping spot at the Presbyterian Guesthouse. We arrived here last night just after sunset after driving on good roads all day from our previous overnight bush camp. Our satnav brought us into Kumasi the most direct way, but it was chaos passing through West Africa's largest market. All the other traffic was taxis and buses and an overturned cart which had spilled its boxes all over the road was an added hazard and made it very slow going. It was with relief we drove through the Guesthouse gates into the calm, relaxed tree filled grounds, where we intend to stay for the next 2 or 3 days before continuing to Accra for more visas, and then stay on the coast.

We reached Mole National Park at 5pm on Friday, 10th after a long, dusty, corrugated piste from the turn off the main Tamale - Kumasi road. Beside the Motel was a campsite which we had to ourselves for 2 nights, and the 2nd night was spent parked at the end of the airstrip for Sunday morning's balloon flight. On the 4th night we shared the campsite with our previous Dragoman group and it was good to meet up with Mike, Ant and friends from Pendjari.

On the first morning at Mole we went for a 7am walking safari around the watering hole (crocodiles but very tame compared to our previous experience) and then out on to a wet area where we were very lucky to get up close with a group of 7 male elephants of varying ages and sizes who were mud bathing. We spent a long time just watching them before heading out into the forest to see bush buck and cobb antelope and lots of birds, returning past a viewing platform where there were lots of baboons and a grey headed kingfisher. In the afternoon we followed a Park vehicle and armed Ranger on a driving safari just to see if there were any possibilities of flying from within the Park. Again we were lucky to come across a mother elephant and her child in the road. She was being very protective and was quite agitated and even the Ranger, Osman, told us later he had been quite scared as if she had decided to charge there was nowhere for our 2 vehicles to go to get out of her way. Osman became a real friend and helped us greatly. When we got back to the Information Centre, he came with us to the airstrip where we met his boss Ali to consider whether to give us permission to fly. After several phone calls, Ali said we were cleared, provided a 'Guide' accompanied the first flight and he was willing to offer his services! With that, Ali and his charming wife, Joanna, left on their motorbike leaving us to set up the basket and settle for the night. At 6am Sunday, Osman and a driver with his Nissan Patrol arrived to help us inflate. The wind direction had swung through 90 degrees so we ended up draping the balloon over tall grasses and small bushes instead of along the airstrip, but all went well when Ali arrived for his flight. The lower wind took them back towards the Park but higher up it was quite fast and directly towards the village of Larabanga and the road. That should have worked well as we followed in the Nissan and were close when Chris descended. However, he was enjoying the flight so much they went up high again and finally found a small clearing to land in with no road to it. A farmer borrowed Chris's machete to hack down enough trees and bushes to deflate the balloon in and the driver did the same to reach the balloon. The farmer turned out to be very useful in helping to organise the repacking of the balloon, loading it onto the top of the Nissan and keeping the hoards of children out of the way.

My first session on the computer is rapidly approaching (it took a long time to log in to the blog), so I will have to finish the story in a following post.  I will keep going for as long as I can.

The permission for a second flight was no problem, as Chris wanted me to fly too, and after meeting Ali's boss on Sunday and refuelling all 3 tanks with butane from the Motel cylinder, we were told we could fly from within the Park, even from beside the elephants' bathing area. We did another drive around a different part of the Park with another Ranger, where I was shown red-breasted bee-eaters flying in and out of their holes in a sandbank and viewed the area from a tree-top platform, and we found lots of savannah areas where it would be possible to land and be reached from a track. We went to bed that night with the arrangement to meet Osman and the driver at the Information Centre on Monday morning and decide on the best launch site having let off a little balloon for direction. To be continued .....

On the way to the coast...

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After 4 wonderful mole days and 2 flights we are on our way to the coast.

5th Country Flown

5th country flown, many Elephants at Mole. We are staying at least one more day for Sue to try eating more rodents. Many adventures to report when we have net.

Mole Park

We have arrived at the Mole Park to be met by Hogwarts in the car park and the prospect of exciting animals tomorrow.

Tamale, Ghana

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Our posts are getting a little out of sequence as we have been travelling. The photos from the air in Benin have only just been added, so we are getting a bit behind. When possible we will add the photos of the bigger mud castles in Togo. Today we arrived in Tamale from Yendi and we are staying here for the next couple of nights at least. We have found an ideal place to park in the grounds of the Tamale Institute for Cross Cultural Studies, which has a guesthouse as well and the Jungle Bar terrace close by. The receptionist Abigail and one of the tutors, Sylvester, have been very helpful and friendly and within 30 mins of arrival Abigail suggested their on site housekeeper should do our laundry, so we have given her everything we have for washing and it's already out on the line.

One of the really enjoyable parts of our travelling is that we are meeting such kind, friendly people wherever we go and they in turn introduce us to others.  Our host in Yendi last night was Don. We chose to stay at his guesthouse as we had both air conditioning and fan in the room and were able to have a shower without emptying all the things we store in our own shower in the Enterprise. We woke in the night feeling very cold and had to use our own bedcovers to warm up. If the temperature in the Enterprise drops under 26C at night we feel quite chilly! We have been keeping up with BBC News whenever we can and see that the UK and Europe are having a very cold spell.

The Harmattan wind has indeed arrived and blows quite strongly at times, but not every day is windy so we hope for a break to make a flight in Ghana. The downside is that the atmosphere is left full of dust from the Sahara and visibility is very poor. Tamale has an airport, but it is probably too large to allow us to fly there, we have yet to investigate. A longer flight than in Togo would be nice. Chris has a list (somewhere) of small air clubs in Ghana so it might be possible to find one of these. Between Yendi and Tamale there are vast 'cotton deserts' where the harvested cotton crop has been burnt off leaving large areas of waste ground, but they are not inviting places to take a balloon to.

A very happy birthday today to our grandson Alexander who is already 6 years old. How time flies by. I have another treasure for you Alexander - an intricately woven weaver bird's nest which I found on the ground amongst the rocks of the Sindou Peaks in Burkina Faso. I think it blew out of a tree before it was finished as it appears unused.

The TICCS where we are staying does not have wifi so we are using an Internet Cafe for the first time in our travels, which is just across the road and very convenient. We are using the fast server here to investigate fully onward travel from Ghana. We would like to go via Cote d'Ivoire to Liberia so long as the travel situation is relatively safe.

Sun up in Somba and Where's a road to land near?

From Benin to Ghana

I am writing this on Tues 7^th Feb in Yendi, Ghana from the Yahaya Iddi Memorial Lodge (decent accommodation, so says the sign!), virtually on the Greenwich Meridian. Into a country at last where they speak English. We had intended reaching the main northern town of Tamale today but the dirt roads have been so bad since the border at Tatale, where it took 2hrs 30mins for Chris to persuade the Customs to allow us to enter the country with the vehicle, so the journey was much longer than expected. The longest border crossing so far. Our intention is to travel the further 97km to Tamale tomorrow, stop the night and find somewhere with wifi and then visit the Mole National Park the following day, staying at the Mole Motel.

Since my last long entry we have had adventures. Chris’s presentation to the students at the Centre de Formation Liweitari in Nati went extremely well, with talks on gas pressures, the power of hot air, a typical balloon flight and practical demonstrations with liquid propane, burner power and a small paper balloon, it took over 3 hours. We had our last night at the Retreat and left Nati on Friday morning, visiting Amel who had our permission from the Mayor to make an aerial ‘ballade’ from the bus stop as soon as possible on Friday morning! We are sure he had his own agenda and was trying to manipulate our flying programme.

We travelled the 45km to Boukoumbe on a fairly good piste through Tata Somba country and steep wooded hills which was very interesting and picturesque. Entering Boukoumbe Chris purchased a wonderful Somba hat adorned with sheep’s horns and cowrie shells which rivals his Naga hat from Burma. There were no signs to the Togo border, so we found a small track going in the right direction for the final 5kms. All would have been well had we not had to drive down a step in the rock to cross a bridge, which knocked the tap off the waste water outlet. No problem, soon repaired. No official at the Customs Post, so we drove straight through and were 20 metres into Togo when the fresh water tank dropped off! Chris was about to crawl under the vehicle when the Customs man turned up on a motorbike, took in the problem and returned to Nadoba and came back with a mechanic. After a couple of hours in the dust and water under the Enterprise, the tank was back in place and we continued on our way, through the mud brick castles of Kouttamakou, a Unesco World Heritage Site and across the Keran River to Kante, where we spent the night in a room at the Auberge Campement with fan and shower as it was so hot in the vehicle (36C) and we were short on water.

We spent 4 nights in total in Togo. Saturday we were in Kara, the capital of northern Togo where there was a big launch of a new 3G mobile phone network in swing. We saw lots of people with musical instruments, and part of the town was shut off to traffic. We had a very nice lunch at the ‘best’ restaurant in town, Le Douceur, under the shade of a paillote surrounded by plants. I had a head cold (probably brought on by dust) and did not feel like staying in town, so we drove out on the ‘rocky road’ towards Ghana and found a very pleasant nameless restaurant/bar/hotel on the outskirts of Kabou where we parked for the night and had a meal of spaghetti couscous with giblets! Surprisingly delicious and caused no ill effects. In fact we liked it all so much we braved the bad road for a second time and repeated the experience last night, filling up with water there on both occasions and had the vehicle washed without asking this morning.

In the meantime, on Sunday morning we explored the immediate surroundings of Kabou for possible flying areas. A sheltered valley leading off the main road looked possible, but it would depend on the wind direction as it was surrounded by high tree covered hills. We decided to drive the triangle Bassar – Sokode – Kara through the mountains of central Togo. The road Kabou to Bassar was brand new tarmac with taxi ranks along the route. No sign of any taxis though! After Bassar we were back into asteroid belt territory and the going was slow, but very beautiful, skirting the Fazao Malfakasso National Park and mountains. We arrived in Sokode, a very Islamic city with a very tall mosque minaret, late morning and saw there was an aerodrome. It took a bit of finding but we drove to the airport buildings and parked right under a mango tree to eat lunch.

When the assistant met man returned, he was very excited at the prospect of us making a balloon flight from the airstrip and called his boss who in turn was very encouraging. We told him we could make a flight either that evening or at 6am the following morning. We all had a rest, and then the boss man returned to say the Harmattan wind would be starting in the morning and the wind would be calm enough that evening. We prepared the balloon, and sure enough the wind dropped by the time we had inflated. As it was close to sunset and the little air movement was across the airstrip rather than along it, we knew it would be a short flight, however we had at least 6 mins airborne landing close to the dusty perimeter road. It was very dark for packing away but we had lots of help and then returned to spend the night under the security lights of the airport buildings. There was loud drumming and singing from a nearby village until 1.30am and then at 5am the mosques started chanting and calling in chorus. When the airport manager met Chris at 6 yesterday morning to put our flight details into the log, he noted the last air traffic recorded at Sokode Aerodrome was in 1999! We could not understand how such a quiet airstrip warranted 2 met men and a manager. With only a short flight we had no need to get more gas. We still have some propane left as well as most cylinders filled with butane, from refuelling from Gordon’s tanks at the Centre.

Before leaving Sokode we stopped for an hour at a little garage to get some small adjustments done on the Enterprise and the water tank refitted correctly at little cost. Chris picked half a dozen lemons from a tree. It was an exciting drive back up the International highway to Kara, climbing through the mountains with slow lorries on the steep sections, overturned trucks on the corners, and through the Aledjo Fault, a natural split in the rock, 10kms from Bafilo. Before leaving Kara again we did some shopping to stock up on fruit: mangoes, bananas, oranges and pineapples. Benin was short on fruit. We only found papaya (which Chris isn’t fond of) and coconuts if they can be classed as fruit, so after a fresh fruit famine we are now well supplied.

We have TV in our room – a rare treat. The only TV we have seen up til now was in Banfora at McDonald restaurant which was an interview with the president, who we saw the following day leaving Banfora with police escort. We also watched the end of an African Cup football match (Ghana v Morocco) in a bar in Nati, joining in the excitement of a Ghana win with the local supporters. The football was followed by a religious programme ‘advertising’ upcoming funerals. We were amazed at the ages of the deceased, one lady was 105 and most were in their late 80s. Natitingou was overrun with Catholic churches and schools, Pentecostal chapels and 7^th Day Adventists as well as the Evangelical churches, alongside mosques. The Catholic Cathedral had the tallest spire in town.