Ghana: the one country we were not keen to come back to

I should say this before anything else: of the countries we crossed on this leg,
Ghana is the one that settled lowest, and I am not going to pretend otherwise on its
own page. That is a judgement about four days, not about a country of thirty-odd
million people, and the reasons are specific enough to be useful.

We arrived expecting the easy one. Ghana is the country people tell you to start West
Africa with, and we had just come through places with a fraction of its tourism and
been waved along with a shrug.

It took six hours to get in. We went from office to office, and nothing moved until
we found the person senior enough to make it move. We drove out with a transit
sticker across the windscreen and a tracking device under the passenger seat.

Accra did not rescue it. It is crowded and dusty and the traffic eats the day, and
what wore on us was the sameness: street after street of small stalls selling much the
same goods, until you stop looking. Then you reach the ceremonial quarter and it
inverts, into acres of empty parade ground and a boulevard wide enough to land a plane
on. The country gives its past presidents prime land and puts their faces on the money,
and the ground set aside for them is the emptiest part of a city with no room in it.

Then the east redeemed a lot of it. Wli was one of the real highlights of the whole
rally, and Nzulezo, reached by boat through swamp and jungle, was the kind of place
you do not get anywhere else.

So the honest version is not "skip Ghana". The coast and the east earned their place;
the capital and the paperwork are why it came last for us. If I went again I would go
narrow, give the east the days, and budget patience for the rest.