Chapter 17...The Ghanaian Transport System!

What is the saying we have back home – ‘you wait 10 minutes for one bus to come along, then three come along at once!’ (We all know what I’m like with sayings, phrases etc, I’ve probably got it slightly wrong, but you get the gist)...well in Ghana that saying would be ‘you wait and wait and wait and wait some more for one bus to come along, then when it does it breaks down!’ 

So as you know from my last blog post, on Saturday morning I and three fellow volunteers had an early start to catch our bus to Bolgatanga in the Upper East region of Ghana (pretty much Burkina Faso)! We were all psychologically prepared for the 15 hour bus journey, we had packed a take-away breakfast and were good to go...! 

Now seeing as Ghana is around the same size as the UK, we all thought that 15 hours would be the max it would take to travel from one end to the other, unless we hit traffic or the usual road problems one occassionally comes across! But oh no, in Ghana things work very differently, especially their concept of time...!

Here in Ghana GMT no longer stands for Greenwich Mean Time, it stands for Ghanaian Maybe Time, because all sense of being on time does not exist as I found out when our 9am bus to Bolga eventually arrived to take us to the North at 3pm!!! So after 6 hours of waiting at the bus stop we were finally on our way with armed guard on board to deter any hi-jacks! We made it out of Accra in a couple of hours, which was pretty good considering it was like trying to leave central London during rush hour! As we were heading out of town we passed some fellow volunteers who were headed to the Upper West region, their bus had been broken down for around 5 hours (in the end they had to wait nearly 10 hours for another bus to take them the rest of their journey to Wa) so they were sat on the roadside waiting for assistance! We passed, gave them a wave and thought how lucky we were to have been kept waiting at the station instead of the roadside!

So to cut a long story short, we eventually made it to Bolga at 10am Sunday morning, only 10 hours late!!! We had an hour stop around midnight to fix a flat tyre and a slow journey between Tamale and Bolga, but 25 hours after we were due to leave Accra, the four of us had made it in one piece (just about), me vowing to wait a LONG time until I did that bus journey again!!!