Six hours at the Ghana border, and a tracking device under the seat

Of all the borders on this leg, the one we had been least worried about was Ghana. It
is the country everyone tells you is the straightforward one. We had already come
through crossings where the whole procedure was a man with a ledger under a tree.

Ghana took six hours, and almost none of that was paperwork.

The first stretch went on excuses. The computer needed restarting and the IT man was on
his way. Then it was something else. Nobody was hostile and nobody threatened us; they
simply were not going to process us, and they were in no hurry to say why.

The reason, when it surfaced, was the cars. We did not have a carnet de passage, the
document that lets a foreign vehicle into a country on the understanding that it leaves
again. Without one you are not refused outright. You are told instead that a company has
to arrange your transit, and that the company is being contacted, and that the paperwork
will take as long as it takes. For the two cars it came to about five hundred euros. It
is a known arrangement rather than an improvised one: people describe it on forums, we
had read about it before we arrived, and knowing in advance turned out to be worth
nothing at all.

What broke it was the wall. Ghana's customs service posts telephone numbers for anyone
who believes they are being cheated, printed on a board in the hall. We started calling
them, and knocking on the doors of the managers upstairs. Inside twenty minutes we were
being processed.

We drove out with a transit sticker across the windscreen and a tracking device under
the passenger seat. The seat comes off with four screws, a fact we discussed at some
length.

Plan for the day, not the formality. And read the wall.