The Coast
So I’ve just come back from a few days on the coast. I spent my days tasting the salty salty ocean, bodysurfing, burning my skin, eating seafood and reading. I saw a fort in a town called Axim. The whole coast is dotted with them, remnants of Portuguese, Danish and British colonialism. Centres of the slave trade, strongholds of foreign influence. The coastal people allied themselves with the British to stop the encroaching Ashante empire. The slaves were traded down from the north (there are slave camps in the Upper East you can visit now to learn about Ghana’s slave trade history). Some disgusting percentage of slaves traded across the Atlantic were traded out of modern Ghana.
The coast is all sand beaches and palm trees. The forest is thick and greener than anything I remember after having been in the north for two months (how quickly we forget!). It looks almost impassable from the roadside. Gold, rubber, cacao are the main resources you find down here, but my favourites are still coconut and fish. A little boy taught me to crack coconuts against the base of a tree to get them open. If I’m ever stuck on a desert island with coconuts, I am now armed with an important survival skill. Climbing the tree and getting them down not yet my forte. The cool 33 degrees was a welcome relief. True it’s more humid, sticky, down there, but the breeze of the water makes it really pleasant. And now I have returned to the searing 44 degrees of the north, where water evaporates so quickly that there’s no point in cleaning up a spill of water unless your toilet is overflowing. A kind of heat that makes your body think the low thirties is cool, and if it drops below 30 you think about a sweater.