As soon as we open the door to our room the next morning, some boys enter and sit on the couch while we prepare ourselves to leave. Dennis passes to say goodbye. He is going to church with other members of the family. Charles stays with us and accompanies us to a Trotro to Kumasi. There is nothing left to do for us in Bonwire and we are not sure how long it will take to Yeji, our next destination. In Kumasi we alight at the same dirty station where we got the car to Bonwire and are directed to an onward Tro to Yeji. While we wait for the car to fill up, I watch the bustling activity of the station. Women are cooking on the roadside. Men pack the roofs of the cars with baskets, packages, everything that needs to be transported. It seems to be a special skill to fasten the meters high load with ropes and nets. We decided to store our backpacks under our seats. There must be more than one Tro going to Yeji. I hear a man shouting for passengers on the other side of the road. They are seriously competing. If someone approaches their car, they try to grab her arms and pull her to the car. I see the locals wrest themselves from the grip of drivers and their helpers. Some become really angry. I have never seen them treat locals like this as well. For the second time on this trip, a preacher enters the car. She is worse than the first one we met in Cape Coast. She claps repeatedly, shouts. I can’t push her to the back of my mind and hope that she won’t travel with us the whole way. Fortunately she doesn’t. When the engine starts running and the car begins to move past other waiting Tros and through all the people hurrying through the station, she collects her money and finally jumps down. The journey is long. After two hours, Anna observes that we have got a quarter of the distance over and done with. I watch the landscape. Luckily, the rest passes much quicker. After about five hours, we arrive in Yeji, a port town on Lake Volta. We have no idea where to alight and wait until the last stop. The market place is bustling with life. This time, nobody jumps on us to offer a taxi or anything. We enquire after a guesthouse. Most people don’t know of any, but the driver of the Tro we came with volunteers to take us back along the road and drop us at a place. In fact, it would have been in walking distance, but we don’t know anything about this town yet. The place we are dropped at does not look very promising. We have a look nevertheless, but the guy there says they are full. It doesn’t look like a proper guesthouse anyway, as much as we can detect in the dark entry room. Anna saw something a little bit down the road. There, we are more lucky. The room cannot be called clean, has only two beds, and is overpriced considering the lack of running water and the state of the bathrooms, but we don’t need much. We want to stay one night and cross the lake to Makongo with the ferry the next morning. ‘The ferry only leaves on Tuesdays.’ What?! We are shocked. Two nights in Yeji, there is nothing to do here. The relief is immense when we realize that the lady is talking about the ferry to Akosombo. That one goes all the way down the Volta and leaves only once a week. We only want to cross to the other side. After a day on the Tro, we are hungry and look for food. On the way, we check where the ferry will leave in the morning. Yeji is a busy town. The roads are lined with stalls selling everything from jeans to food. People stare at us more than usual, I feel tense. We ask two women for directions to the ferry. They exchange a glance that seems to say ‘Why us?’. They don’t understand much English, but point out the right way. Now I really want to eat something. The difficulty is to find out what the women actually are selling. It feels bad to ask about it without taking anything. In the end, I go for dark rice and beans with stew, Anna for plain rice and stew, Natalie for yam chips. She doesn’t trust the street food. At a store, we find cold coke for 60 pesewas the bottle. Thus supplied, we sit together at the restaurant of the guesthouse that is closed at the moment. The food is plenty and very spicy. Good. To avoid spending the evening sitting in our tiny room, we stroll through the town and look for a spot and after a while come across the Lovers’ Inn behind a workshop where men are painting boats. In the bar, two or three men are dancing to the music. A small boy at the counter, maybe twelve years old, sells the drinks. Very soon, we are joined by a young man. He is strange, we can hardly understand what he is saying, try at best to ignore his drivel and are glad when he excuses himself. Another young man joins us and we get into conversation with each other. The guy finished Junior High School and is now waiting for results to continue with Senior High. He says he used to play football, but is a musician now and explains us a lot about Ghanaian stars and their music. When we tell him about our plan to go to Tamale, he warns us about the wicked people that live in the North. According to him, they love to fight and are too interested in sex. He doesn’t like the Northern people, that much is clear. A girl approaches our table. ‘This is my girlfriend. She is Muslim.‘ That doesn’t keep her from drinking and smoking. I am surprised how many smoke here. Before I started this trip, I rarely saw any Ghanaians smoke. Bonwire was the first place I noticed so many smokers at one place and here are even more. All of the young people at this spot smoke. At 8 pm we feel as if it is late at night and make our leave. The dark streets are still crowded. A woman washes her son in the gutter. Although I have nothing else than a straw mat to sleep on, it doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep.
