Northern Ghana travel notes

You will see termite mounds, baobab trees, and open skies.

The major city is Tamale, the third largest urban settlement in the country.  The town is manageable and traffic is not intense.  At night it is quiet.  The “main street” is just a strip of stuff, and it feels neither like a center of town nor an “edge city” growth.  Some of the nearby roads still are not paved.  It is a shock to the visitor to realize that the center of town is not going to become any more “center of town-y,” no matter how much you drive around looking for the center of town.

We all liked it.

The “Red Clay” is a series of large art galleries and installations, of spectacular and unexpected quality, just on the edge of Tamale.  Some of the installations reminded me of Beuys, for instance the large pile of abandoned WWII stretchers.  One also sees there a Polish military plane from the 1930s, an old East German train, and a large pile with tens of thousands of glass green bottles.  Some of the galleries have impressive very large paintings by James Barnor, mostly of Ghana workers building out the railroad.  Goats wander the premise and scavenge for garbage.  If you are an art lover, this place is definitely worth a trip.

The Larabanga mosque does not look as old as internet sources claim.  I consider it somewhat overrated?

The surrounding area is 80-90 percent Muslim.

A driver explained to me that Islam in Tamale was very different from Islam in Saudi Arabia, because a) in Ghana women can drive motorbikes, and indeed have to for work, and b) in northern Ghana husbands cannot take any more than four wives.

Many more people here speak English than I was expecting.  Some claim that they all speak decent English.  I doubt that, but the percentage is way over half.

It all feels quite safe, and furthermore the drivers are not crazy.

Zaina Lodge has a kind of “infinity pool,” at a very modest scale, with views of the forest and sometimes of elephants drinking at the nearby water hole.  It is one of the two or three best hotel views I have had.

My poll will grow in size, but so far zero out of two hotel workers use ChatGPT.  One had not heard of it.  High marginal returns!