Mole
The second of the organized trips brought us to Mole, Ghana's biggest national park, still filled with elephants, monkeys, deer, lions and more. Although this sounds quite interesting, the whole trip needed to visit the place makes the visit a bit less then worthwile. Although combined with the nearby town of Larabonga, with its amazing mosque, it can be enough to justify the difficult journey.
There
The park is located in the north of Ghana and, traveling from Accra, it takes some twelve to fourteen hours to get there. On the less then reasonable roads of Ghana, a trip like that is as close to torture you can get, before it becoming illegal in most western European countries. When traveling back to Accra, we were so lucky as to travel for a total of 19 hours. That is bad.
And back
And not just the roads are in bad condition. So are the cars. For one, about 95% of all motorized vehicles have embarked on a second life in West Africa, after being left for dead by their former European owners, back in Holland, Germany, France or Denmark, proof being the country stickers on the back bumpers of most cars. One characteristic being the almost always cracked windscreens of cars. Then, they always manage to stuff about twice the legally allowed amount of people into any vehicle. Of course, most probably, this helps wen getting into an accident. The lack of airbags is made up by the existence of people-bags.
Traveling back from Mole we had quite a hard time. As with the previous group of Geeks, with whom Stophe had also gone to Mole, we all had round trip tickets for a state bus traveling between Accra and Tamale, Ghana's third city, some miles above Mole. However last time, when the Geeks wanted to get on the bus coming from Tamale when it past Mole, it turned out that their seats had been sold to other contenders back in Tamale. This meant that Stophe had decided that we would travel to Tamale first, and get on the bus there, to minimize the chances of our tickets being sold. We had to leave at 3am to get to Tamale in time for catching our bus. When in Tamale, it turned out that our seats still had been sold to other people. Using several different services between Tamale and Accra, we eventually arrived home some 19hours after leaving Mole. Mole is nice, but it is not THAT nice.
The leg of the trip from Kumasi to Accra was enlivened by two preachers IN the bus, trying to preach two different gospels, at the same time. None of the passengers seemed to notice. For us, all sitting at the back of a long bus, it was very, very annoying to listen to their constant shouting. This annoyance, probably being increased by the fact that in Mole, since there is not that much to do over there, some of us had embarked on a whiskey-beer-vodka binge the previous evening.