On our way to Mole, part 1

The 4.5-hour ride from Tamale in northern Ghana to the entrance to Mole National Park in the NW of the country is not recommended by the American Chiropractic Association. On the list of things to be avoided it falls just between stage diving and falling out of a tree.

The first couple of hours of the ride you’re just happy to be free of the Tamale bus station. You’re distracted by joy. After four hours waiting for the one bus to the park, captive to the heat, the dust, and the welter of vendors, buses, tro-tros and people, the simple act of moving, anywhere, is a kind of intoxication.

You’re also putting distance between you and the station’s public bathroom. It’s a simple business arrangement: You pay the surly man in the sunglasses 10 pesewas, and you are permitted to pass through the screen door into what can only be described as a crapatorium. The row of eight or nine stalls look to have been without the custodian’s loving touch for much of the millennium.

The first half of the drive affords you the myriad benefits of asphalt, most notably, speed. Bikes and motorcycles keep to the shoulder. We pass a man who, far from any town or sideroad I can see, moves along in the waning afternoon light on crutches. He stops momentarily to watch us as we drive by.

A truck thunders by in the opposite direction, piled 10 feet high with bags of yams on top of which sit a dozen men. On the tailgate of the truck has been painted “Justice.”

As it is election season, there are political posters and billboards everywhere. They are plastered to every surface that will permit glue or nail, sometimes four or five for the same candidate right next to each other. We pass a woman collecting firewood at the roadside. Another is pounding her staff in its wooden pestle making the evening’s fufu.

As the sun begins to set, they all turn to dark smudges, backlit by a sky that is the brilliant pink of that Chinese pork they serve with hot mustard and sesame seeds.

(Picture: A taste of the pandemonium of the Tamale station)