Road Trip! (part 2)

The rest of Sunday was spent traveling, more or less. The road north of Elmina was mostly good with a few potholes, and was lined with villages. Incidentally, young goats are really stupid around motorcycles. Chickens are jumpy enough that they get out of the way before anything comes close, and old goats seem to understand the whole "stay out of the road" concept. As we went farther north, the landscape changed into the beautiful lush jungle that is most of central Ghana.



Outside of one of the villages, we stopped to re-check the map at a little out-of-the-way gas station. There's a pump that fills the tap with roughly a gallon of gasoline. We didn't fill up here. And at this point, we were still on the right road.

At some point we came to a T-Junction in a small town. We walked around and got some wakye from one of the small shacks by the roadside. We made two friends who followed us around while we stayed in the town, security guards at the local bank. They were kind enough to show us where the wakye stand was, and also told us which way to go at the T-Junction to put us on our way to Kumasi.


Right outside the town, the passed over an interesting bridge, so I stopped to take a picture (and was gullible enough to look when Andrea shouted "watch out for the train!" Oh well.

We came to another junction, a paved road and an unpaved one. We stopped to ask the people around which way was the best to go, and this may have been a mistake. They told us to take the unpaved road, as the paved one was either closed or in bad condition farther up. So, we turned onto the jungle road. Andrea told me that when someone yells "Obroni, where are you going?" when you're driving, they mean it: "Obroni, WHERE are you going?" it means there's nothing in the direction you're going. Anyway, I think we only got asked that once.

Andrea had a little trouble on his low, heavy bike, but I had a blast, I'm really glad we took the long way. We took frequent breaks because the road was so rough, and I snapped pictures when we did. But in all honesty the entire road was staggeringly beautiful, so I think I got a good sample here with the pictures.

We finally made it onto a paved road, but at this point it was probably 4 or 5, and soon it started to rain. We pulled over once at a bus stop, and probably had ten or so kids hanging around just watching us. We consulted the map and at this point knew we just needed to stop in the next decent-sized town.

The next decent-sized town turned out to be Obuasi, a town built around a gold mine (which we didn't get to see). We arrived soaked and exhausted, and were willing to splurge on the nice lodge in the town. Other than the hotel and the mine, there's pretty much nothing in Obuasi. We tried to find a decent club or something fun to do in the evening; there appears to be only one in the whole town, and it was pretty dead. So, after an uneventful evening, we headed back to the hotel for the night, and that was the end of day two.