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One year into our Ghana adventure. And despite the power cuts, water shortages, traffic, open sewers, angry landlady, idiots at Vodaphone (etc.), it has been fantastic fun. Ghana is not Africa’s most spectacular country, but it is green, hilly, friendly, safe, developing fast and will prove a happy home for another year.

So on to next year. An election coming up, thrown into uncertainty with the recent death of Prof. Atta Mills. A move for us to East Legon, Accra’s up-and-coming trendy district (or so we are told). A planned trip to Ivory Coast, and hopefully a Burkina Faso–Benin–Togo road trip, logistics permitting. More walks with the Mountaineers and more nights out with our friends. And hopefully no more fufu.

Here are some highlights of our first year.

Elmina harbour

Elmina

This small town is not as famous as its neighbour, Cape Coast, but the fort was more interesting, and wandering around was more enjoyable. Small and colourfully formed.

Beer

In true expat style, many nights ended with a bottle of one of Ghana’s fine beers. Gulder is my favourite, followed by Star, and Club is drinkable too. All best served cold and three (large) bottles is the minimum.

The Volta region

Green, hilly and lots of walks. Need I say more?

Kakum National Park

Ghana’s premier attraction, at least in the south, and fully deserving of the accolade. We stayed overnight in the treehouse and were rewarded with the sight of watching monkeys feed from the canopy walkway.

+233 jazz club

+233

This is our favourite live music venue in Accra. It markets itself as ‘the place to hear Ghanaian jazz’, so it was a surprise to hear ‘Careless Whisper’ as the opening song on our first visit. But it’s a lively place, with musicians of all types from across West Africa. If you want to see a Burkinabe beat out a rhythm using a pair of spoons and some empty tins, this is the place.

Red red at Labadi beach

Food

Not Ghanaian food, obviously; nothing there for vegetarians to enjoy. But Accra has many good places to eat, a bright spot in a city without bundles of cultural highlights. Our favourites include the Tandoor for Indian, Bella Roma for Italian, and La Bouquet or Commodore for Lebanese. (I would write about Accra’s eateries, but this blog does it better.)

Marvels

This minigolf club was around the corner from our flat in Dzorwulu, and was our ‘local’ for the past year. I spent many hours watching football, using their wireless when mine had (once again) failed, and enjoying the waffles with ice cream. Mentioning that I’m a golf club member is also handy in certain expat circles.

Camping at VerandaMountain

A starry night, a full moon, potatoes in the fire, and bird watching in the morning. To be repeated.

The coast

A weekend at the coast is one of the best things about living in Accra. From Bojo Beach on the edge of Accra, to Fete, Butre, Akwidaa and Beyin, every place we have visited has had its unique charms. And there are many more places to explore next year. Hannah’s favourite: Fanta’s Folly for the food. My favourite: Green Turtle Lodge. Because it’s named after a turtle.

Sunset at Mole

Ghana Mountaineers

A breath of fresh air in Ghana, literally and metaphorically. A lively, friendly bunch who love walking up a hill and sinking a beer afterwards. Not sure about the obsession with 5am starts, though.

Mole National Park

It took a while to get there, but it was worth it. Seeing wild elephants from a few metres away was my highlight of our first year in Ghana.

Forts

Egypt has pyramids and Kenya its wildlife, but Ghana’s best-known icons – the slave forts and castles along the coast – were places of misery and suffering. Not the easiest features with which to market your country.

Given this tricky selling point, tours of these historic buildings are done extremely well. At Cape Coast castle, the most famous slave fort, the visit starts in the museum. This has artefacts from the slave trade – chains, shackles, whips, that sort of thing – as well as interesting details about all the trading that occurred in the Gold Coast.

Europeans traded in guns and powder; they would leave their goods on a beach and return to their ships. At this point the local traders would leave an amount of gold or ivory on the beach, before heading back into the forest. The Europeans would then either accept the trade, or return again and wait for more gold and ivory to be added. This wordless bargaining continued until both sides were happy and would take away the goods.

Other displays detail the extent of the slave trade. The large maps demonstrate just how many countries were involved, but the role of different African tribes, who captured slaves and sold them (usually captives from inter-tribal wars), is also fully acknowledged. The Ashanti people don’t come out of this too well, although, as a Brit, colonial slave forts are not the best places to start pointing fingers.

It is during the tour of the castle’s rooms that the grim lives of the slaves are spelled out. Our guide described each room in an understated way, without any melodrama or sensation. But much of the tour makes for uneasy listening, with the little details often the most shocking. In the windowless punishment cell, he pointed out the scratches in the stone floor, made by prisoners going mad as they were slowly starved to death for the most trivial of disobediences. In the male slave holding room, he showed us a line about two feet up the wall; this marked the level of human excrement that had built up during its period of use, discovered as archaeologists dug out what they thought was the floor when excavating the cell.

Our guide at the Castle of St George in Elmina, which we visited the following day, had even more stories to tell. He described– four times in fact – how the courtyard by the female cells was built so that the governor, from his living quarters, could choose which women to take to his bed. He then showed us where the women were made to wash before entering, and even the steps they used up to the bedroom. Judging by the detail, this was his favourite bit of the tour.

More sobering was the Dutch church, built directly over the slave cells, from where both groups would have heard the other during services. And perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the tour was the two punishment cells near the main gate. The cell for soldiers, whose usual crime was coming in drunk, had windows for air. The cell next door had no windows; this was for slaves, who were locked in there to suffocate in the intense heat.

We made a quick tour to Fort St Jago in the centre of Elmina – worth the climb uphill for the opportunity to explore a castle without any guides or other tourists – before exploring one of Ghana’s most colourful coastal towns.

We stayed at the Bridge House Hotel, next to the harbour, and were woken at 5am to the sounds of fishermen preparing their nets, one man beating a rhythm on a bucket while the others sang and worked. This, along with a pungent smell of fish, provided our backdrop as we ate breakfast, accompanied with several lizards and geckos that fought for the bits of jam on toast we dropped.

Elmina’s main activities are fishing and harvesting salt from the nearby lagoon. Given its famous castle and prominence in Ghana’s coastal tourist circuit, it’s remarkable how little tourism has affected the village. It feels very different to beach resorts in Thailand or Goa, where towns seem set up solely for tourists; in Elmina, visitors are welcomed, catered for, and then largely ignored as people get on with their lives. And, as a result, Elmina is a much more interesting place to stay.