Gold Mine

The drive between Kumasi and Obuasi is over an excellent road, even after the Bekwai junction. We used the phone number in the Bradt guidebook to connect to reception -- the extension for the visitor's center did not seem to work, but reception connected us quickly to another extension.


Mine entrance.

A half hour in advance, we booked our tour of the mines. Follow the road right downtown and look for the "Asset Protection Department" (aka visitor reception) just to the right of the second (last) circle in the double-roundabout just before the railway, taxi, and tro-tro station. (Sounds complicated, but isn't really.) They will direct you through a security barrier and then immediately to the right where you collect boots, helmet, smock, and a guide to ride with you in your car. Also, this is where you pay the fee for non-Ghanaians of 16 cedis (currently about 14 US dollars), 4 for Ghanaians. Worth every penny.


Railway at Level 7.

You can take either a surface tour (recommended for the mobility impaired) or the underground tour. The underground tour (which we took) was a thrill, though I suspect the surface tour (of mine openings, processing facilities, etc.) is more educational, at least from the verbal description we received from our very helpful guide Barnabas.


Barnabas, our tour guide.

Barnabas had been an underground miner initially, but says he much enjoys being a tour guide. He led us to the staging area on the other side of town, where we put on a battery and a light for our helmets, plus an emergency oxygen supply, all weighing about 50 pounds hung from a big orange belt around our waists. Quite clunky. We tried to take pictures, but a security guard quickly told us we could not. Barnabas whispered that we should just put the cameras in our pockets until we were safely in the mine, where we could then use them.


Risking my life for a blog.

Since the lift (elevator) was busy transporting rocks, we drove our car around to the old open-pit mine, down a steep hill, to the opening of the mineshaft. From there we walked down a steep incline for about 20 minutes to "level 7". There was a wind of perhaps 50 kilometers per hour being sucked into the mine by the ventilation system, propelling us down the shaft, and later to blast us in the face as we walked back up.


Maridith drills for gold.

Level 7 is the “training” level. We were on level ground, following a railway line past training rooms filled with students. At one point we paused while Barnabas demonstrated drilling equipment and let us pose for pictures. He also let us hold a rock, weighing perhaps 15 kilograms, which he said contained perhaps $1000 worth of gold. We could make out distinct gold flecks all around the vein of quartz embedded in the stone. When we exited the mine, a security guard used a wand metal detector to make sure we didn’t try to carry out any rocks as souvenirs.


Click on image to enlarge.

Frenchman’s

That’s not his real name, but everybody calls him “Frenchman”. He’s Ivoirian, hence the name Ghanaians and subsequently others use for him. He gained fame in France and beyond in the late 60s as a movie star, photographer, and film editor. I know this because he showed me his quite remarkable scrapbook, which also shows his real name, Paul Kodjo. He spends his time these days working on small industrial film projects in Abidjan (when civil wars permit such enterprises) and running a small farm and guest house near the Ivoirian border in Southwestern Ghana, a kilometer off a side road just outside Ankasa Conservation Area.



I did not stay at Frenchman’s, but instead camped inside Ankasa itself, wandering about with one of the game wardens, looking for monkeys and other mammals. I stopped by Frenchman’s place on my way out of the park the next morning, turning up a side road and climbing to a high ridge with panoramic views of the park. Frenchman has big plans to build lovely cabins with upper-deck terraces overlooking the valley between his place and the park. If he ever pulls it off, it should be truly spectacular.

In the meantime, hardly anyone visits Ankasa, so an investment of such a magnitude would seem momentarily unwise. I checked the registration book at the park entrance – maybe one or two visitors a day right now. Frenchman himself says it would be foolish for him to invest more until the facilities in the camp itself are upgraded, though if someone is willing to subsidize, he’s happy to build.



Of course, if there were more facilities, if there were more to do inside the park, if there were truly knowledgeable guides who could properly interpret the park for visitors, and if the park were not so far from Accra or Abidjan, then there’d probably be more visitors. Ankasa is actually not all that far from Accra, and with some slight improvements to the last bit of road, it could be reached easily within five hours. If the Ghana-Ivoire border were eased a bit, Abidjan would be even closer than Accra.

The rest is a bit more problematic. There’s a lot of talk about new investment, and certainly the park seems ripe for it. An investor’s guide is circulating, prepared by staff of a project funded by the European Union, trying to attract someone willing to put in high-end suites with air conditioning and a nice restaurant. The investor’s guide seems strangely lacking in any indication of why someone might want to stay in one of these high-end suites. A wise investor would surely have to bring along the necessary programmatic elements that are currently missing from the park -- better guides with a corresponding continuing education program for them, more and better maintained trails, lookout towers, canopy viewing perches and tree houses, an interpretive center or museum of some sort, special periodic lectures and interpreted walks, and so forth.



An initial “anchor” investor would have to be someone quite skilled and experienced in the tourism trade, who would know about all of those programmatic elements that would turn a room in a forest, which might as well be in a forest somewhere else closer to home, into a proper destination. If one major hotelier gets it right, then lots of others catering to various niches would surely spring up around it, lured by the major improvements in infrastructure and skills that the initial anchor would have brought to the park. Now it seems as if the niches are generally catered for, but the anchor is missing, so the infrastructure is lacking and the skills are largely absent. There’s just not much point to the casual tourist visit to Ankasa. It’s a bit of a disappointment, not living up to even the modest hype of the guidebooks.

Frenchman himself doesn’t do too well on his guest house, which is not surprising, but the the guest house is entertaining for him, and is an easy complement to his farming and other activities. He gets the occasional visitor from abroad, which sparks good conversation. Some of the expatriate wildlife project staff do lodge with him, as do the occasional Peace Corps Volunteers stationed there. He serves them tea and bread in the morning, Akwaaba stew in the evening – his own creation, a mix of vegetables in a light soup flavored with palm oil, quickly prepared when a hungry overnight guest arrives late in the day. The guest rooms themselves are plain but quite adequate. Beds with mosquito nets, windows overlooking the valley, en suite toilets after a fashion -- no running water, but a commode nonetheless into which one turns a bucket of water after each use, which is perfectly fine. At GHc 10 per night (about US$9), the price seems about right, better than the beach camps in Ada where the toilets are far less interesting, rising and falling with the tide, never really flushed. Frenchman’s is not nearly as nice as the comparably priced bunkhouses of Beyin Beach Resort, no more than an hour’s drive away, which have proper flush toilets and showers, not to mention an idyllic adjacent beach and very swimmable bit of ocean.

Compare Frenchman’s to the lodging available within Ankasa itself. The fee per person to enter the park is GHc 2.50 plus something for the car, then Ghc 5 for the room, and a nominal hourly charge to have a game warden keep one from getting lost on the trails. There are four screenhouses, each with two beds, located at Nkwanta Camp, about 6 kilometers inside the main gate. The rooms at Nkwanta are certainly the best feature. With screens on both sides, I was very comfortable if not a bit chilled on one of the hottest days of the year, far better than the typical cement-block room, stifling hot, that one gets at the typical low-end, no air conditioning lodging in Ghana.



The rooms at Nkwanta were the nice feature. Now for the rest.

I brought along my own beach chair, which is something you can do easily if you live in Ghana, have your own car, and have either imported some nice chairs or had them made locally. The chair proved essential to a very delightful evening, and I’m sure this would have been true even at Frenchman’s. I bring my chairs everywhere, actually. None but the most expensive resorts seem to have good chairs, which is a bit odd given that a decent chair or even a hammock only costs a bit to make.

There was once solar electricity. Presumably the wiring remains intact in case someone decides to repair it or find a link to the regional grid.



There is a toilet out back, but since there’s no running water, the toilet is rank and essentially not worth using, a trip to a nearby trail with a kettle of water being the far preferable alternative used by the staff who also lodge there in 10 cement-block rooms to the side.

The staff will furnish a bucket of water for a bath in the serviceable shower stall next to the toilet room, so that’s fine, though when I visited, they’d obviously not cleaned the shower room out in quite some time, so I shared my shower with an enormous spider and the remains of its various meals over the last few days; there was actually room enough for both of us, and I managed to keep from splashing him, so do give the spider my regards should he happen still to be there during your own visit.



The rooms at Frenchman’s are at least as comfortable as those at Nkwanta, and all the rest is better, so for my money, Frenchman’s is for now the place to stay. The only reason one might stay at Nkwanta rather than Frenchman’s is for the sound of the rain forest. I sat entranced for nearly two hours, my chair parked inside the screen room, listening first to the staff as they settled in for the evening, all in bed by 8pm, then to the “quiet” cacophony of thousands of whistling and knocking night birds, howling jungle cats, barking monkeys, and of course crickets.

The Fleet

West African towns typically rise early, and Elmina is no exception. The thin windows of the Bridge House transmitted cocks crowing and the beeping of taxis even over the hum of my air conditioner. The BBC offered live updates of a massacre in Mumbai as I performed my morning’s 30-minute dance – situps, pushups, climbing up onto a chair and then off again. Music is usually a better accompaniment, but since the Bridge House doesn’t have a gym, the news would have to do.

CNN essentially repeated the BBC coverage as I attempted a shower, though the hot water was uncooperative, befitting a poorly designed system on the top floor. The cold water seemed sufficient and not too cold, and the pressure was adequate, so I applied liberal quantities of soap, at which point the water died completely. I contemplated this dilemma for awhile, considering whether to steal some water from the tank on the commode as a last resort, when scalding hot water burst onto the scene.



I grabbed my laptop to write a story or two over coffee on the terrace downstairs. The patio is laid with dark irregular stones lending a sort of 19th century feeling (through probably much younger) under an open-air shed with wooden posts offering shade from the early morning sun. A low wall of similar stone separates the Bridge House terrace from a walkway bordering the main inlet from the sea for Elmina’s fishing fleet. A low bridge traverses the inlet, just by the Bridge House corner, hence the name. Across the bridge is the parking area for Elmina Castle, which towers above everything, and is particularly striking when the early morning sun glints off the whitewashed walls.



I sat facing the low wall and thus the inlet, and could see heads bouncing along but nothing of the commerce passing below the wall. My waiter brought sachets of instant coffee and a big thermos of hot water, along with fresh cut pineapple, thick toast and jam, and a three-egg omelet. The passing heads occasionally glanced in my direction as I devoured my breakfast. Occasionally the heads smiled a greeting, “Hey white man, good morning!”

I immersed myself in a second sachet of coffee to accompany further writing, but was roused by applause from the bridge, which within a very short period had become packed with people all staring intently over the rail and down into the inlet. I could see a flag passing, and when I stood, it became apparent that the flag was attached to a boat. On board, the crew was chanting and dancing something like the twist, with feet planted in one spot while the rest of the body moved in rhythm, much to the entertainment of the crowd. I assumed the crowd was applauding the dancing and chanting skills of the sailors, though the dancing didn’t seem particularly skillful to me, so I resumed my typing.



Applause again, this time much more exuberant, greeted another passing boat, so I rose to see if their dancing was any better, only to find that they were not dancing at all. First theory dispelled, I surmised that perhaps something more practical was at work. By this time, the inlet was jam packed with returning boats, perhaps 20 of them end to end in the channel, with another 30 waiting out in the harbor to enter. It was astonishing.

Each boat is perhaps 30 feet in length, most fashioned from rough thick planks into long canoes with a cutout on one side toward the rear for a small outboard motor. They are brightly painted, many with the green, red, and yellow of the national flag, others in the flags of seemingly random African or European countries. Poles are erected from which varyingly the crew have hung laundry or perhaps a bolt of cloth serving as a shelter from the sun. All along the rails are painted names and slogans, some religious, some simply offering good advice. One boat passed with the name "Zimbabwe," adorned with the flags of that country, though I gather that the crew was Fante like all the rest.



As each boat passed underneath, sometimes the crowd on the bridge sat stone faced, sometimes there was mild applause, and sometimes the crowd literally leapt into the air with cheers. Looking closely at the boats, I simply could not discern the difference, at least from my angle, and so theorized further that there must be something down in the bottoms that could only be seen from the bridge above.

I asked the Bridge House security man, “Are they cheering for fish?”

“Yes, when they are happy, it means they have big fish. Everybody rushes to the dock to buy the fish, and everybody is very happy about that.”

I seemed to me that only about one out of every ten boats was rewarded with a cheer, which didn’t strike me as a particularly good percentage. I asked about that.

“There are no fish!” the security guard exclaimed. “The fish have gone away.”

“Where have they gone?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” the guard shrugged. “Maybe they will come back.”



I leaned on the rails for a bit and watched more boats pass. Standing tall, I could just see the white tops of ice chests, and when some of the boats docked just by the hotel, the crews quickly hoisted those chests ashore. I could tell from the weight that most of the chests were empty.

From my top floor bedroom I could see across the bridge and into the inner Elmina lagoon. Huge crowds gathered across the way, and boats banged into each other in a rush to land their catch. There seemed to be enough fish to keep the massive crowd busy, and before long women, each with a pan full of fish of one size or another, began filing back across the bridge and into the town, presumably on their way to the fresh fish market, to the transport park to carry their fish on ice into the capital Accra, or to nearby villages where the fish would be smoked and salted.



The entire process began at about 7am, and the boats didn’t stop returning until nearly 9. I’m told it happens every morning except Tuesdays, though I think that means that the boats do not go out Tuesday night, hence there would be no returning procession on Wednesday morning, but I could be wrong about that. It's a treat essentially only available to those that overnight in Elmina. Highly recommended.