A drive in the country

On Friday, Ralf took Veena and me up into the hills where he lives. Ralf excels at looking scruffy (and in this photo, worried). He was probably explaining to Veena how difficult it is to find a good auto mechanic; a perpetual worry of his.

The outing involved a great ride through the back country of the campus, impossible without his Land Rover. Then a long and interesting ride through a kind of lawless exburbs of Legon/Accra. People just bribe an official and build a house anywhere. It was like the long drives out of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, the city never seems to end, there seems to be no country side.

But eventually, we did get into country spotted with many towns and some mango plantations. Ralf took the long, back way to his place so we drove on the plain past his area, cut up into the hills and then drove back though the hills to his place.

The hills are a bit bigger than hills but not anywhere near mountains. Driving up into the hills was a bit treacherous with many cutbacks as the road wound its way up the incline. At one point we cut around a ravine and as I looked down I saw a path cut through the bushes and a taxi at a sixty degree angle lodged into a tree. As we came around the other side of the ravine, neatly stacked, roadside, were the doors and seats from the car. It was a glimpse and gone before I could take a picture.

It is a few degrees cooler up in the hills. There was also a thunder storm late in the afternoon (it missed us) but it cooled everything down further, and even here in Legon it is cooler today (which is good, because this week was hot). At the end of the day, in the evening, we were having a drink at a local restaurant, sitting outside waiting for Ralf's wife to meet up with us, and I could actually have worn a jacket. 

I can now add the towns of Larteh, Akropong, Mamfe, Dodowa, Mompon, and Tulu (and others) to my list of Ghana sights. 

We stopped at a really great old missionary church. It is still operative, has quite an extensive compound, with schools etc, and the original church is still standing (from the early 1800s). Apparently the missionaries built up in the hills in the hopes of living longer (avoiding Yellow Fever and Malaria) but there is a plaque on the church listing all the early missionaries along with birth and death dates. Ages at death range from 24 to about 35. So you know some of them were not here long before they succumbed.

We also stopped at Ralf's first place up in the mountains. Now that he has a daughter they have moved to a bigger place, but he has kept the old one as an office. It is the ground level outbuilding of a couple he knows. The husband is Ghanaian and now retired from the U, the wife is British, and they spend half the year in each country. It is very sweet with a gorgeous mountain view down into the valley, from a small but manicured yard. Here is the view from the road down to his place (the first driveway on the left, just past the flowering bush).