top of page

Still idyllic after all those years

Our one real opportunity to chill out was in Busua, a tiny dot of a fishing village with a couple of kiklometers of gorgeous, sandy, palm-lined beach.

We stayed in the Busua Inn, a place that would be just about perfect if not for an open sewer that ran right past the front gate.

At high tide, the beach almost vanished.

When the tide was out, football players of all ages appeared.

Kids on the beach. Perhaps they didn't notice the warnings against suffocation on the plastic bag.

This little lady lived in the trees above the Busua Inn.

She seemed especially fond of Pat.

One lovely lady groomed by another.

I first visited Busua in the mid-seventies. This is what the main street looked like in 1978.

And this is what it looked like 33 years later. Except for the green paint (provided by a mobile phone company preparing to launch in Ghana), things hadn't really changed much.

One fond memory from 1977 was drinking akpetishi, a sort of jet-fuel like distillation of palm wine. When we asked our innkeeper where we could get some, he pointed us to Sly Joint, a little hole in the wall run by a carpenter named Clement. Clement explained that the original establishment was on a corner where patrons could enter and exit through the back exits on the sly. When he took it over and moved it, he called the new place Sly Joint. He refused to accept any payment for our drinks.

Kids are always happy to pose, and delighted to see themselves on the camera display.

Over the hill from Busua is the slightly larger town of Dixcove, where there's another slaving castle. We actually did consider getting ourselves a drink in the Virgin's Pub, but the noise from competing sound systems nearby was deafening, so we passed up the opportunity

Dixcove on a Sunday afternoon in December.

The Dixcove fishing harbor, viewed from the ramparts of the Dixcove Castle.

bottom of page