It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Since my trip to Vietnam in November I was in Lukasa, Zambia (in January) and Hanoi, Vietnam again (February-March). I have some pictures posted of a side-excursion I made in Vietnam to Ha Long Bay. Check it out.<\/p>\n
Now I’m in Accra, Ghana. For those of you who are geographically challenged (which, if you are American, means most of you, alas) it will make things much clearer if I tell you that Ghana is right next door to Togo. Now, didn’t that make everything clearer?<\/p>\n
Togo, some of you may recall, was the topic of the second post of this little blog adventure, back in 2006. A dreary little backwater country where everything has been going downhill since Independence, if not before. Ghana, on the other hand….<\/p>\n
So, what to say about Ghana? It has some of the same elements of dynamism and good management as I saw in Zambia…and many of the same elements of poor management and decay too. The culture is such that people don’t generally give you a straight answer, especially if they think the answer isn’t what you want to hear. Personally, I would rather get an answer I didn’t prefer rather than a lie, or a mumble, or some sort of oblique response. But here, it’s not like that.<\/p>\n
As is usual in African countries, there is a lot of poverty, and an upper crust that lives very well indeed. And the combination of the two leads to outright scamming of the foreigners. The prime example was when I arrived at the airport. I had asked the hotel to send someone to pick me up at the airport, since in many of these countries taxis are definitely to be trusted. When I arrived, there was therefore a young guy waiting for me holding up my name on a sign. He took my bags and off we went to the car from the hotel. When we got there, I started to give him a tip, and he demanded $10 for himself, plus another $10 “for the boys”, who were basically a group of guys just hanging around the car. I didn’t pay him nearly that much, of course, and I certainly didn’t pay the boys, yet the attitude he demonstrated spoke volumes about his expectations from “rich” white guys.<\/p>\n
My adventures here have been many and mostly painful, but I will go on later. In my next post I will do something that I think might be of actual value (as opposed to these ramblings): I will review the two hotels I stayed in here in Accra, the Labadi Beach Hotel and the Golden Tulip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"0","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/52"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimramsey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}