Beads

From the motorway at Tema about 15 minutes from Accra, my two visitors and I headed north toward Akosombo. Judy from Washington and Uthman from Kampala were in town for a week to work on a rural telecom project, and I was furnishing their weekend entertainment.

As this was to be only a day trip, we decided to save time and pass by Shai Hills, a savannah wildlife sanctuary with decent opportunities (by West African standards) to spot the olive baboon, kob antelope, and bushbuck. Birds are said to be a better target -- black-bellied bustard, the Senegal parrot, and the double-spurred francolin. Will catch it next time, perhaps camping.



Our primary destination was the Cedi Bead Factory, west from the Kpong junction. The road was fantastic, and we were there in under an hour. Samuel parked the car under a tree as we were approached by the foreman, who also turned out to be our tour guide. I didn't quite catch his name, but I think he was also the owner, Cedi himself. He certainly seemed to know his craft.

Bottles of various colors are crushed, and the resulting find powder is then sifted from larger bits. Different colored powders are layered in molds and then fired to produce several different types of beads.



It was a facinating tour, and quite unexpected. There was no charge, though obviously we were expected to purchase a few items from the gift shop, and of course we offered the customary tip to our guide. I bought a sampler that I intend to display in a decorative bowl in my living room: a speckled fish, a translucent cross, a simple brown ball, and various balls with painted patterns. The patterns are painted on with more of the glass powder, moistened slightly to adhere to the bead, and then fired again to seal.

Cedi also maintains a stock of older trade beads. These tend to be a bit rougher in texture, and noticeably different from those made from bottle powder. They're generally from Europe. Cedi's crew till refurbish damaged ones with a quick firing to restore luster. I thought about buying a strand for a friend of mine who collects, but the price proved to be higher than the amount of cash I'd carried in my pocket. Something for the next trip.

After Cedi Beads, we continued on for lunch at the lovely Aylo's Bay Leisure Spot, with excellent grilled fish and crayfish, cold beer, and a view of fishers in dugouts casting circular nets in the Volta River. Afterward, on our way to dessert, we drove up to the Akosombo Dam for a brief tour courtesy of one of the security guards, and then tea and kelewele (fried sweet plaintain) at the Volta Lake Hotel, part of the Accor (Novotel) chain and well worth its four stars with a view over the lake itself as well as the dam and the gorge below. An excellent day trip.

Cocoloco

I'd not been past Tema on the motorway in quite a few years, and so I was braced for a tedious ride over a crowded, pot-holed, somewhat paved path that has served as the primary route between Lagos and Accra, a road over which some 60 percent of West Africa's intraregional trade is reported to pass. Instead, I was delighted to find a brand new highway, with wide lanes and aprons, well marked, and fast. We arrived at the Ada Junction within an hour, turning right down the more conventional bumpy yet serviceable community road. Another 15 minutes and we'd arrived to the turnoff to Cocoloco.



The Cocoloco Beach Camp Resort is what I'd describe as a backpacker's hostel, similar in many ways to the camping hostels in some of the game parks of East Africa. Accommodations are curiously located across the road from the beach, rather than right on the beach, perhaps because of the occasional heavy storms that tend to whisk away anything near the beach not deeply anchored into the ground. My bedroom was Spartan yet clean and reasonably comfortable, though I'd quibble a bit with the architecture of the place.

The nicest six rooms, including mine, are in a conventional cement block structure, though without jalousies or some other means of cross ventilation short of simply opening their doors and letting in both a breeze and thousands of mosquitoes, they are simply far too hot for a pleasant night's sleep. I managed by placing my bed directly under an open, screened window, catching a gentle, cool convection current from the slightly cooler though increasingly humid outdoor air.



Nonetheless, Cocoloco is a fantastic location within surprisingly easy reach of Accra, and not at all crowded even on a holiday weekend. A friend and I strolled down the beach to the nearby village, dodging literally thousands of skanky plastic bags and the occasional small mound of surf-rinsed human excrement, the beach serving as both convenient trash disposal mechanism and flush toilet.

Near our resort, the beach and the surf were substantially cleaner, so we tried our luck with the pounding surf. It was quite pleasant and calm about 20 meters off shore, but in between it was touch and go as waves some two meters in height would suddenly rear up, sucking out the water beneath them, and then pulverizing anything in their path. Proper timing was key to getting beyond them. I managed my outward journey quite nicely, and lounged for a bit in the deeper and pleasantly tepid water beyond the waves. On my return to the beach, however, I had my face mashed into the sand, and spent the rest of the afternoon picking bits of shell and sand from inside ears and just about every other corner. I carried at least a kilo of sand out of the ocean in each pocket of my swimming shorts. Exhilarating, though not for the faint of heart.

We lounged away the rest of the afternoon in hammocks strung between palm trees, with cold beers, the rhythmic sounds of the surf, and a spectacular sunset as backdrop. Busloads of Ghanaian groups, some from churches, other from businesses in the area, stopped in briefly during the day, joining us in celebration of Farmer's Day. One group entertained us with a vigorous and exciting game of beach volleyball, replete with raucous yet good-humored arguments about balls either over or not over the imaginary line in the sand stretching between piles of shoes.

Dinner with friends at the Cocoloco restaurant was standard chicken and chips, since there was no seafood to be had that particular evening. We'd brought our own bottle of wine, and continued to sip that into the evening while playing a game of dominoes. A group of young German backpackers quietly had their own supper at the next table. Nearby, loud highlife music blared from the resort's sound system while staff danced wildly. We lost all electricity around 8pm, blessing us with the sounds of crickets and a spectacular view of the heavens in the sudden darkness. I suspected the bright red star directly overhead, in the heart of a brilliant Milky Way, was probably Mars, while the bright red star at the horizon was in reality Venus, rouged with Hamarttan dust.

In the early morning hours I awoke to the sound of some poor soul retching in the nearby toilet, probably one of the Germans who'd not yet learned to avoid those little plastic bags of cold water Ghanaians sell in their marketplaces. Later with the sunrise we breakfasted on fresh cut and delightfully sweet pineapple, tea, fried toast, and omelets before paying our tab -- $10 per person for the rooms, basically well worth the price, though I'd have gladly paid $50 a night for a cooler room closer to the surf.