Day 3: Accra (January 10, 2011)

I got out into Accra (pronounced Ak-RAH) today and got a better sense of the place, maybe because it's a business day so people were out and about. First was a walk through the "tent city" (although there weren't any tents) that surrounds my hotel. It was grimmer than I first realized after driving through yesterday. I was reluctant to take too many photos, because people live there and I didn't want to invade their privacy-- what little they have -- but I snagged a few. And a few more later on when I walked back to my hotel with a couple of locals I met at the art center/shanty town down the street. While I knew that Ghana was "poor" I didn't realize that meant 6-to-a-room, cooking-meals-in-a-tin-drum kind of poor. The entire city isn't like this, but a fair bit of it is, as I saw on my drive through town.

 

I hired a taxi for a while, first to take me to the bus station to buy my ticket to Cape Coast, then I asked him to wait and take me someplace kind of interesting. At the bus station I encountered one of the few things I really dislike about traveling... not knowing what the F I'm doing, even if -- especially if -- it's something really easy to do back home. Make a phone call? Am I supposed to dial the country code or what? Buy a bus ticket? I can't even find a list of prices. Fortunately my ticket was only about $3.50, so I didn't have a post-buy freakout. And I'm sure tomorrow I won't know whether to wait in line or get on the bus or... Blah! lol. There are a lot of things about traveling that are different from home that I do like: food, what things look like, what there is to see, etc. And a lot of things I'll tolerate: shared bathrooms, strange accomodations. But learning to use the phone and ride the metro gets me frazzled. And I'll get to relearn it all 13 more times. ha.

So, the interesting place my taxi driver took me to is this... place... called, I forget, but it's a sprawling area comprised of vendors, artist workshops and homes. And it looks like a shantytown from the 1930s, complete with shabby yet colorful houses, random barnyard animals and random (controlled) fires. Almost immediately upon entering, a Ghanan (Ghanaian? John F, help me out here!) fellow approached me, all friendly, and I was like uh-oh, a tout! And he sort of was, taking me from place to place within the artist colony/shantytown but he didn't push me to buy stuff every place we went. Pretty soon some other guy joined in; I assume they are friends from the way they were acting, like we all just had this free afternoon to hang out in the sun and the heat and the fine dust particles that are blowing in from the Sahara. Truth be told, I'm glad those two fellows came along to show me around. I would have been comfortable browsing the shops along the front, but I wouldn't even have known there were more in the back, let alone felt comfortable wandering into them, without a guide. I wondered how a place like that supports itself. There were a lot of artists and vendors, and not a lot of buyers. Apparently, people from other countries will come and buy en masse, then re-sell the stuff back in the own countries. So that's how. And of course, the whole place is barely supporting itself, otherwise it wouldn't be a shanty, right?

My first second-ever haggling story:* Before I began my trip, I knew I would like to buy some pretty things for my home along the way, preferably inexpensive, preferably authentic in some way (ie, not mass produced for tourists). A lot of the items in the shantytown appeared to be one-of-a-kind and older, based on the condition of the wood, mostly masks from northern Ghana Some were newer, but sufficiently unusual that I liked them. There was one really cool antique milking stool I wanted, but it was too much and I would have had to ship it home, which also would be expensive. But near the end of my "tour" of the town, one vendor had some smallish and colorful oil-on-cloth paintings, which could be rolled up and would survive a journey home. So I let my touts/single-serving friends know I might get one. I narrowed it down to my favorite and tout #1 started the haggle. This is the first time the whole afternoon he'd actually tried to sell me something, which might have been one of his bargaining tactics: wait until the customer trusts you then they'll buy something! He started, leaning in a bit to whisper, "These are normally 120 cedis, but you can have it for 60!" Me: "I don't even have 60 on me." Him: "How about 50?" Me: "I have 30 cedis, that is all because I bought a bus ticket today." Him, after a slight pause: "Well, OK, 30." Me: "No wait, I only have 20 because I had to pay the cab driver." Him, after another slight pause: "OK 20 is fine." Me, after opening my wallet and discovering I only had 18: "How about 18 cedis? That's what I have." And I got it for 18, which is about $13 US dollars. I still wonder if it is "worth" less than that, since he did sell it for that pittance. But it is hand-painted and I don't feel ripped off, so it's cool. (Although I'm sure framing it will cost at least 10 times that amount, and then I will feel ripped off lol!) Maybe from now on I'll only carry the equivalent of $13, and see what I can get for that!

Will look better on my wall than on my sheet.

The last thing I did before the sun went down (and it goes down really fast here, being nearer the equator than the US, it just... drops below the horizon) was climb down the rocks to the beach to wade in the Atlantic Ocean. The water was so warm I wanted to swim but you're not supposed to swim alone in the ocean, so I didn't. Someone told me today to be safe but not too safe. So I didn't swim, but I did climb up and down the rocks.

* The first time was when Anton helped me haggle over a wooden chair in a shop in Columbus Ohio back in 1999. Today was my first solo haggle, though.