Coconut Grove Hotel

We stayed for a couple of days at the Coconut Grove Hotel, on the beach in the town of Elmina, near Accra. It was a pleasant contrast to most of the other - often rather rudimentary - hotels we stayed in on this tour. Here are views of the breakfast cooking area and the swimming pool.

Accra Goats

We saw lots of plump little goats in the countryside, but here are a couple making a living in the city.

Accra Fantasy Coffins

Accra is famous for is coffin makers, who make fantastic wooden coffins of virtually any subject specified by their clients. Some of these are collected and shown in museums. We visited one such workshop; here is some of what we saw.

Fine Ghanaian Sculpture

Most of the art we saw on our Tribal Africa was made for tourists, but a gallery in Accra had a couple of finer pieces.

Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park

Dr. Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana to independence from Britain in 1956. He was one of the African anti-colonialist leaders whose name was familiar as I was growing up. He is honored in Accra by an impressive Memorial Park, with an odd sculptural twist explained on the pedestal bearing his head.

Jamestown Street Art

The Jamestown neighborhood of Accra has a few streets and walls featuring striking street art, that might well be called murals. Here are a few examples.

Accra: Jamestown Seafront District

Jamestown is an old neighborhood - formerly a separate town - in Accra, Ghana on the Atlantic Ocean. It's a focus for fishing and selling fish, and - like most such places - is colorful, lively, disorderly, and a bit annoyed by us tourists impinging on their workaday routines.

Loaded Heads

Everywhere, things need to be moved from place to place. And in poor places like western Africa, there are relatively few motorized vehicles or even carts or wheelbarrows to do the moving. So people often have to carry their loads, and have developed the balance and strong necks to carry them on their heads, often on a pad of coiled cloth. Three examples from the streets of Accra:

West Africa > Ghana > Accra

We/ve just returned from a two-week tour, "Tribal Ghana, Togo, and Benin", arranged by Wilderness Travel. After traveling for nearly 24 hours from Portland, Oregon through Amsterdam to Accra, the capital of Ghana, we were met at the airport and bussed to our hotel, where we fell into an exhausted sleep. The next morning we met the rest of our 8-person group, had breakfast, and set off on a bus tour of the city. Here are three photos taken from the bus window, that give some feeling of the vividness, color, and visual chaos of Accra.

Garonne River in Bordeaux

The Garonne River is one of Europe's biggest and most important. It's broad and silty-brown as it flows through Bordeaux, exhibits a tidal bore, and is deep enough to connect big ships with the Atlantic Ocean. And it has some attractive bridges.

Bordeaux Musee des Beaux Artes

Bordeaux has an enjoyable museum of fine arts, a significant portion being contemporary painting and sculpture. It serves as an educational resource for school visits.

City of Wine in Bordeaux

At the end of our Lot Valley hiking tour, we were driven from Cahors to the Toulouse airport, where we parted from the group, took a taxi to the train station, and then rode the train to Bordeaux. A couple of my first photos, once we had checked into our hotel and walked across the bridge spanning the Garonne River, were of a Kurdish(?) political march, as posted on my blog from that day. From there we walked along the Garonne to the City of Wine, a very large, modern, and interesting museum about wine around the world.

Spanning the river across from the City of Wine is the newly erected, hypermodern Jacques Chaban-Delmas bridge, claimed to be the tallest lift bridge in Europe.

Cahors Cathedral

The towns of south-western France have many attractive old churches, and Cahors is no exception. This Cathedral is unusual, however: Despite having been built in the 11th C, it has a few stained glass windows and a painted niche that may date from considerably more recent times - an interesting diversion from the predominantly Romanesque and Gothic styles we've been seeing.

I end this chronicle of our walking tour of the Lot Valley with a photo of a sculpted scallop shell embedded in the cobblestones. It's a reminder that Cahors, like most of the places we've visited on this tour, are on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Nice country to hike through!

Cahors Gardens

Though it is a rather small city, Cahors has more than twenty (small) municipal gardens. We wandered pleasantly through one of them.