We now have a new travel companion and best friend – Bertha! She is a little old, temperamental and in need of some TLC, but as you can see from the pictures below she has already helped us to discover a little bit more of Ghana.
We went to Shai Hills, a nature reserve just outside of
Accra in the Eastern region. It is home
to lots of antelope, birds (we saw kites and eagles), bats, baboons and ostriches
(which are not native to Ghana, but kept in a field – strange). Shia Hills was home to people who migrated
west from Nigeria, and is seen as a scared place for many Ghanaian groups. Our guide told us some great stories of
traditions and beliefs, my favourite being about the magic stone. Apparently when a girl was considered ready
for marriage she had to undergo six months of training, at the end of which she
had to sit on a ‘magic stone’. If she
had already lost her virginity she would stick to the stone and be banished
from the tribe!
We also took Bertha to see the Akosombo dam, which created
the largest man-made lake in the world, Lake Volta. The lake is beautiful and it produces a large
proportion of Ghana’s electricity which we enjoy here in Accra – yay! Although, as our guide said – ‘it was very
expensive to build and that money could have been used to make Ghana better,
but Nkruma had the wisdom to build a dam’...
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