A Million Minutes in Africa

We’re back from our Tour de Ghana. We’ll do a series of blog posts about it, beginning with the first leg.

On Saturday the 13th, we left Accra and headed northwest to the Ashanti region. We stopped in Bonwire to see Kente weavers in action. Lots of kids immediately surrounded us. “What is your name?” they asked. Dan said “Kwame.” (In Ghana, many people are named according to the day of the week on which they were born. Kwame means “male born on Saturday.”) This never fails to provoke smiles and laughs. Usually someone present says, “I am Kwame, too!”

We did see some weavers at work but were not able to watch them without constant requests to look at this or that item to buy. Not being used to such aggressive sales tactics, we were a bit turned off.

Back on the road, we came to a roadblock due to construction work. Jillian asked one of the workmen if the delay would last a long time. He replied, “Oh, we don’t use time.” How straightforward and honest!

Eventually we were able to move forward and continued on to Lake Bosumtwi, where we found Rainbow Garden Village Guesthouse. It’s a peaceful spot with a portrait of Bob Marley hanging above the bar. Before sunset we floated on planks in the bilharzia-free lake. (The lake is sacred to the Ashanti people, and here, using the fishing boats normally used in the rest of Ghana is taboo.) Each of us shared a plank with a local fisherman, who paddled with his hands.

After dinner we relaxed in the gazebo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 3:23 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.