
Education is not an option for most girls. Predominately families in villages do not send their



Welcome to Jose in Africa, through pictures and stories I am going to take you through an African adventure
A couple of minutes on the road to Accra, we started seeing differences between Ghana and Togo. Cars were newer American models, unlike 30 year old beat-up Peugeots that are falling apart and surprisingly that are still running, village houses in Ghana where made of concrete bricks, tin roofs, electricity and the houses were bigger compared to the village houses that I have seen in Togo, Benin and Burkina Faso
that are made out of mud, hay roofs, no electricity and consist of a single big room. At first the road was filled with giant potholes and crumbling apart, but after an hour the road was a new perfectly smoothed highway with six lanes, which is a rare sight in West Africa. When we were nearing Accra we started seeing huge house with backyards and pools, billboards for malls, brand spanking new Mercedes, Ford trucks, it felt like in an half hour we
went from Africa to suburban town USA and after about a year in being in Africa that’s a hell of a change.
After getting ripped off by the taxi driver we found a hotel had a couple Ghanaian beers that were better than anything I had in Africa and in the States for that matter. I am not joking; I have had some good beers in the States at micro breweries, or regional beers, but when I tasted a Castle Milk Stout, Golden Arrow beer and Club beer, I was in love. For mass produced beers these are some good freaking beers, and I am not even a big drinker.
Like I said we did not come to Ghana to enjoy the American lifestyle, we came to Ghana to see Africa so early next day we set out to the old colonial capital of Cape Coast, about 2 hours from Accra. Cape Coast was the main port for the gold trade that then was replace by the slave trade
so throughout the coastline you can see old forts and castles that date back over 500 years that were used for defense, for gold trade and then converted to dungeons for slaves that were going to be transported to the New World. We got a cheap shitty hostel room that was just fine for us, and for the next two days Ben and I visited the castles in the area. The best one was Cape Coast
Castle that is now a huge tourist attraction and was used by just about every European power at the time, the castle was originally a small fort and throughout the years extended and converted to a castle for the slave trade. The castle is huge, filled with cannons, solders’
lodgings and slave dungeons. Walking into these dark, hot slave dungeons you get a chill just thinking thousands of African slaves that had to endure the horrible treatment and living conditions. After Cape Coast Castle we visited some other minor forts and castles that now serve as lighthouses or monuments that local
people have invaded and turned them into make shift homes. My only qualm with Cape Coast was the ubiquitous smell of shit, from the open sewer system they use and the locals shit everywhere and throw trash to the ocean.
After the castles tour, we went to Kakum National Park, which is a rain forest were jungle elephants, monkeys, rhinos and other exotic animals live, it is also one out of four parks in the world that has a canopy walkway over the rain forest.
We had done everything we wanted to see and do in Cape Coast, so Ben and I decided to head back to Accra and explore the big city. The next day and a half we spent the time walking around Accra seeing the sights, aside from a couple of monuments and tourist attractions there is not too much to say about it, exploring Accra was just like walking down town Main Street USA. Yea, there are malls, bars, food courts and stores but that did not interest us, we were also running low on cash so we decided to head back to Benin. So we spend the next day in taxis, from Accra, to Lome, then
Cotonou. When we arrived to Cotonou it was about 10 at night, and upon arriving to Cotonou I said a couple of times “I fucking hate Cotonou” I really do, out of all the places I have seen in Africa so far, by far Cotonou is the most dirty, polluted, crowded and dangerous place I have been in. The water and electricity is almost always cut, the roads are small and in horrible deteriorating condition filled with massive cargo trucks and hundreds of
motorbikes swarming like roaches in and out of cars, the gasoline is not regulated so they throw out huge puffs of dark smog, Cotonou is a cluster fuck of a town. Back to my story, Ben and I got on a taxi-moto or zemijons like there called in Benin and Ben’s taxi supposedly broke down on a busy bridge and was mugged at knife point. Two robbers took his wallet, his iPod, passport, backpack, his digital camera with all the pics he had taken. I was lucky to have a taxi that was not in sync
so I was not robbed but Ben lost everything. Ben was actually calm through it all and was not mad; after all like he said the important thing was that he was safe, everything else is replaceable. Aside Ben being robbed, everything else went great.