This was put together by professional filmmaker Jamie Noel when he travelled on Overlanding West Africa’s Freetown-to-Accra tour. Look out for Kakum, Cape Coast castle and the Larabanga Mosque, among others; there’s also a glimpse of the run-up to the December 2012 elections as a young man proudly shows off his Ghana Peace Campaign t-shirt.
March 7, 2013
More or less everything I know about Fort Batenstein began with Wikipedia*. Not a promising start, is it? Let’s backtrack. I’m walking down Busua beach with Frank the Juice Man, who is a minor local celebrity. “I am in the book,” he tells me – meaning Bradt** – and indeed he is. He has been… [Read more…]
February 27, 2013
As a building, the National Museum on Barnes Road represents a strange mix of stylistic imposition and local celebration. Commissioned in 1955 in the run-up to independence and opened to mark it in 1957, it was designed by Englishman Denys Lasdun – later Sir, and the man behind London’s brutalist National Theatre. It is in… [Read more…]
February 7, 2013
Over the last two weeks I’ve been fitfully working on a new website for the Ghana Mountaineers. It’s an interesting project: simple, practical stuff for a tiny community audience, hand-coded from scratch. (No CMS. Long story.) Since the entire information load reduces to where we go, when we go there and what it’s like when… [Read more…]
January 18, 2013
Last week my profile of Accra-based orchid enthusiast Florence Benson went up on Urban Photo (part of my work for Mmofra Foundation, whose Playtime in Africa project Mrs Benson supports). By way of variation on a theme, here’s a very different urban garden - one that I pass and eat from so often that it… [Read more…]
January 17, 2013
If you approach Ghana Commercial Bank on Labadi Road from the east, you come first to the old branch, which has in front of it a sign that reads, “We have moved next door.” The site of the older building is used as an overspill car park, but the building itself seems to be unused.… [Read more…]
December 14, 2012
El Paso comes from the same stable as Chase, the sturdy fast food / sushi / teppanyaki / shawarma joint in Labone, and it shares with Chase the odd feeling of sitting down to dinner in a business plan. It is using Mexican in the mainstream US sense, which is to say Tex-Mex. That means… [Read more…]
December 12, 2012
Tandoor may not be the best Indian in town – for me, that is Khana Khazana – but it’s still good, and probably has the nicest setting. Though technically an outdoor space, it is cleverly screened off, and as long as you can forgive some rather ‘backpackers in Goa’ fabrics hanging from the canopy it manages… [Read more…]
April 24, 2013
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