Look at it. So dark. I doubt that every bottle of Rainforest Honey is as strong and spicy as this one – the stuff they advertise is much lighter, as are other Ghanaian honeys we’ve bought. Season and exact provenance probably make a big difference. Our working theory is that this batch has a high… [Read more…]
April 24, 2013
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 28, 2013
The Networker, a regular tech column in UK Sunday paper The Observer, waxes concerned: Most new users of the internet in poor countries will be connecting to it via mobile phones. So, according to an intriguing piece by David Talbot in the MIT Technology Review, “Facebook and Google are … persuading wireless carriers in poor… [Read more…]
March 8, 2013
Busua isn’t quite my cup of tea, but one of its charms – perhaps because it has been attracting backpackers for so long – is the relative integration of tourist activity with the rest of the town. Guest houses and surf shops are cheek-by-jowl with local homes, and surfers share the beach with fishermen. At… [Read more…]
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 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…]
November 27, 2012
The homepage hijack of Ghana’s Ministry of Justice website last night was purportedly by Argentine hackers angry over the detention of the ship Libertad. But the method and appearance of the attack suggest it could be a hoax by the same hacker who hijacked the Ghana Stock Exchange homepage a few months ago. Both are… [Read more…]
November 18, 2012
Though it is officially a botanical garden, the 60-acre park at the University of Ghana’s Legon campus has mostly run wild – even more so than Aburi, the struggling historic site for which the government is seeking private sector partners. Fortunately, bugs and birds love a mess. Fellow Accra-based blogger Tim Woods reports spotting hoopoes, shikras, hornbills, tinkerbirds… [Read more…]
May 22, 2013
0