Day 70: The worst road in Africa
Soutpiel Safari
John & Jenny
Thu 13 Jan 2011 21:22
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Day 70: Thursday 13 January 2011. Mountain Paradise
Hotel, Fume, Ghana. N06 51.048 E000 25.216 Distance driven 308
km
We left home ten weeks ago today - nearly half
way!
This morning we were away from our yam field at 0745 and
back on the rough track. I drove for 3 hours and covered only 95 km, then
handed over to who did about another 70 km before finding the tar
surface that we had been expecting all morning. This was good for perhaps
30 km and then became very broken up, before getting slightly
better.
In Ouagadougou we had met a Belgian NGO worker,
Benedict, who was based in Accra and it was he who suggested this route.
En route, we both wondered what it had to commend it. The scenery for the
first 200 km was very drab, flat and dusty with sparse vegetation and
a series of very poor, scruffy villages along the route. Once on the
tar road the scenery became much greener with much more prolific vegetation
and a lot of banana plantations. As the road rose towards the mountains
the scenery became very attractive.
We had been planning another night of bush camping for
want of any better alternatives and Jenny was fixed on camping beside the Volta
but I doubted that the road we were on was going to give us access to the
river. Almost by accident we noticed a sign for Mountain Paradise, a
former Government Rest House in the hills, so we wound our way up there and were
delighted to find that they permitted camping in a wonderful setting. We were
lucky that tonight a Ghana TV crew were here doing a tourism documentary, so the
owner had arranged a traditional Ghanian song and dance group who performed
around a bonfire.
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