Ouaga to Accra in 22 hours flat

First things first, my Ghanaian phone number is 011 233 276 050 372. Hope to hear from you all!

My last week in Ouagadougou was fairly uneventful. I spent time with friends, did laundry, bought a bag in which to store souvenirs, and lay down every day from 12 to 4 and waited to die from the heat. It was hitting 44 degrees with frightening ease, and the human body is set at 37.5. To add insult to injury, there were power outages for at least several hours every day. Imagine 44 degrees without a fan. Burkina can't produce enough power through its own power plants - mostly diesel generators with a very small amount of hydropower in the south - to meet domestic demand. The Burkinabe government recently signed a deal to buy hydro-produced electricity from Cote d'Ivoire, but this isn't working very well. I think the deal is stupid in both the short- and long-term. It's stupid in the short-term because Cote d'Ivoire is politically unstable and its infrastructure is neglected and vulnerable to attack. It's stupid in the long-term because seasonal rain patterns are changing as the plane heats up, already they're coming later and lasting shorter periods of time. Why would you become dependant on a politically unstable country that uses a power source vnerable to global warming? I still agree with Papa Zida that the best option for Burkina and all Sahelian countries is to invest heavily in solar and wind-power technology and supply renewable energy to Europe.

I got my visa for Ghana without mishap. There was one frightening moment at the end though, when I was walking out the door with my visa. At the door an official looking man called me back, checked my passport and said, "Mademoiselle, my boss needs to see you before you can leave." He ushered me into an air conditioned office and said to his boss with a significant look, "She's from Canada." I concentrated on not sweating too hard. "Ah," said the boss, "I see. You know, I've always wanted to marry a Canadian!"

I bought my bus ticket soon thereafter and Monday, March 1st saw me on my way to Ghana. The bus line was called STC, it's Ghana's state transport company and there are two things travellers should know. First, it runs on time. Someone was 5 minutes late for take off and they almost didn't let him on the bus. Second, you cannot leave your assigned seat and sit in one that is closer to the air conditioning or has a less overweight/more interesting seat mate. I tried to do just that and experienced the trilingual wrath of the conductor, who was determined that I would understand his displeasure whether I spoke English, French, or Twi.

Crossing the border at midday was like walking through an oven. For some reason we had to get off the bus and walk three times, each time releasing precious air conditioning. Foreigners had to go through a few extra hurdles, but this ended up being a blessing because I met Teresa and Leontine whil getting my passport scanned. Teresa and Leontine were Catholic missionaries who had just finished a mission in Bamako, Mali and were on their way to HQ in Accra before continuing on to Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. Apparantly they don't send white missionaries to Cote d'Ivoire any more because Ivoiriens are lashing out at French people as well as at each other, and they won't stop to check a white person's nationality before getting violent. Teresa and Leontine are both black and should hopefully be safe; Teresa is from Grenada and Leontine from Benin. They were the sweetest, kindest people one could imagine. When we learned that Chile had been rocked to its foundations by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake, they shook their heads and said, "We have been warned of exactly this. It is time keep working and pray."

We spent the afternoon driving south through the Ghanaian countryside. At first it looks and feels much like Burkina, with massive baobab trees and small mud-brick villages. But Burkina is the world's third poorest country and Ghana is a middle developed country, and I soon began to notice differences. For one thing, there were bulldozers by the side o the road. All the construction I had seen in Burkina was done with manual labour. Another difference was the houses in the villages. A much larger percentage of the Ghanaian village houses were of brightly painted concrete, distinguishing them from their poorer mud-brick neighbours.

A long and uncomfortable night ensued during which my large seatmate confessed his love for me. At 6:30 am, after 22 hours of travelling, we pulled up in Accra. I realized that I had no idea how to get to the Volunteer Abroad house, where I was supposed to be staying. I tried phoning them to no avail, and so Teresa and Leontine invited me to come with them to the mission house.

The mission house is in a neighbourhood called Kaneshie, which gets a sea breeze even though th Atlantic is far away. The house itself is small, cute, and very clean, which was such a relief after the nasty facilities we'd been using on the road. The other missionaries were just as lovely as Teresa an Leontine. They came from all over the world; Florence, who did the cooking, was from Ireland and treated us to a full Irish breakfast. It was of the most charming and surreal experiences to be sitting at a little outdoor table with a sea breeze in the company of people from five different countries in the middle of West Africa eating porridge, sausages, fried eggs and toast.

With the help of the missionaries' Blackberry, I managed to get a hold of Poppo at the Volunteer Abroad house and he came to pick me up. The first thing he said to me was, "Woooow, you look so much like Hillary! You're sure you're not her?" He had known my sister when she volunteered here in the summer of 2008.

He and I then went on a long and somewhat frustrating adventure to cash my travellers' cheques. We went first to Osu, an upscale neighbourhood where expats and government workers live. They couldn't cash my cheques that same day, so we peeked into Koala - a grocery store for expats with prices that boggles the mind ($80 for smoked salmon) - went to the Internet cafe, and then took a tro-tro to High Street.

The route to High Street took us through Jamestown, the oldest part of Accra. The lighthouse in Jamestown was built by the British in 1830. High Street is also home to old colonial buildings, like the Court of Justice and an Anglican cathedral that looked so much like Christchurch Cathedral in Vancouver that I almost believed myself at home.

My first impressions of Accra are mostly positive. It's a big, crowded, bustling, confusing city. It's not hot, at least not compared to Burkina, but it's humid. The humidity settles upon you like a second, oily skin. You can get some beautiful views of the ocean and the old city, but you have to watch out for open sewage. And there are a lot of nice cars here. The missionaries told me that banks here are encouraging people to take loans and lines of credit in order to buy cars and other big ticket items when many people may never have had a bank account before. It just seems like another sub-prime mortgage crisis in the making. And last but not least, Obama is everywhere. He was big in Burkina, but in Ghana he's huge! I heard a song on the radio today commemorating his visit.