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After my last entry i caught the bus the next day to the Green Turtle Lodge near Takoradi and spent the next 4 days there recovering from my bug and being lazy! The resort was really nice, quite a mission to get to though, i had to take the bus from Kumasi to Takoradi which left at 6am, then from Takoradi i had to find the tro-tro station (that's what they call bush taxis down here), i found a tro-tro that was almost full and took that to Agona Junction, then had to get a taxi from there to the resort which took ages on a really bad road with huge potholes. It was really isolated which was nice so i spent 4 nights there just sleeping, eating and reading some African magazines i had brought. I sat in the sun the first day and got so burnt (i blame it partly on my anti-malarial pills that make your skin very sensitive to the sun) so had to spend the rest of the time in the shade! I didn't swim too often as there was a really strong undertow, you didn't even have to go in the water to see how strong it was, and the waves were big dumpers. It is like that all along the coast and swimming is quite dangerous. Also the beach had rubbish all over it, there is rubbish everywhere in West Africa, i don't know why i didn't think there would be any on the beach, it's a real shame because if it wasn't for the rubbish it would be such a beautiful beach!Anyway i left there on Thursday and made my way back to Takoradi and got a tro-tro to Cape Coast which was the largest slave trading port in West Africa. The place i stayed there was really nice and they had great food and cocktails! I visited Cape Coast castle which is where the slaves were kept in dungeons before being shipped to the Americas and also Elmina Castle, these two castles where the main ports that the slaves went through. They are pretty eerie places, the dungeons are awful, and the guides in both castles had some gruesome stories of the treatment the slaves were subjected to.I took some photos which I will post on here if I ever find a computer that will let me!!!I quite liked Cape Coast, it was a nice town and you could walk everywhere.Also the service at the place I stayed was much better than it was at the Green Turtle Lodge which is something that you can really take for granted, but when you get nice friendly service it is so good!One thing that does not exist on this continent is Customer Service skills (maybe in South Africa but I don't know…), but when you ask for something - usually at a restaurant - they are so rude, they make you feel bad for asking!At Green Turtle for example, you had to go to the kitchen to order you lunch or dinner, so you would go and stand there and wait for someone to come and take your order and they would carry on doing whatever they are doing and even though they know you're there they completely ignore you until they are ready, then they eventually come over looking really annoyed like its such a hassle to take your order, then if you dare to ask what is in the salad or what veggies come with a certain dish they just point at the menu and say 'you can order' no smiles or anything, they constantly look pissed off.So you order a salad and specifically ask for no onions (they put onions in everything here) and say it about 3 times to make sure she's heard you because it looks like she's ignoring you, and then one hour later when your salad finally arrives it has onions all through it.I find that it is the women here that are the rudest.When you meet them in a tro-tro or on the street or in any other situation they are fine, but when it is in a situation where you need to get a hotel room from them or order a meal from them they come across as being really rude, I don't know if its intentional or not.But even at the hotel in Cape Coast, the bar girl there was quite nice but even when I asked her for a cocktail I would get a big sigh and you could just see that she really did not want to make it for me, then it would take about 20 minutes because she would do a whole bunch of other things before making my cocktail despite the fact that I was the only person up at the bar ordering anything!The worst lady was at the place I stayed at in Kokrobite last night, I asked if I could order some food and a drink, and she looked sooo pissed off, rolled her eyes right in front of me and said 'what food do you want and what drink do you want?'I felt bad for asking, it was like I'd asked her to drive all the way to Accra to get it for me!I left Cape Coast yesterday and went to Kokrobite for the night which has a much better beach for swimming, still a significant undertow but not as bad as the rest of the coast.I went for a swim when I got there but when I went for a walk down the beach later that afternoon I wished I hadn't!It was the dirtiest beach I have ever seen, there was rubbish everywhere, it was washing up in the waves!And as I got to the part of the beach where there is a local village (which is not that far from the beach resorts) it stunk of human waste, the villagers use the beach and ocean as a toilet.I went to the bar at another hotel where there were lots of other white people, but their blender was broken so no cocktails - that seems to be the story of most places I have come across, the blender is always broken!I think that is another sentence for 'I'm too lazy to make it'!!The bar was full of 18 year old gap year volunteer workers from the UK and Europe getting drunk so I had a couple of drinks and left after an acrobatics show which was interesting with a guy eating fire.Today I got a tro-tro to Accra then jumped in a taxi to the hotel, the taxi driver didn't know where he was going and he drove me straight past the hotel without realizing it, I had a map from the lonely planet so I was trying to tell him where to go but his English wasn't very good, eventually I got him back onto the road the hotel was on and he was going 'oh we came down here!' then I pointed out the hotel and he finally got it.My first time in this city and I know how to get around better than the taxi driver!Checked in then got a taxi to the internet café with plans to download all my photos onto my blog but something is wrong with this place and I can't do it, I've given up, and this is supposed to be the best internet café in Accra?!I might try a different place later this afternoon.Well I'm still having issues with the currency here, I can't match the number they tell me to the notes I have, I don't know why I can't get it but it's really frustrating!And I feel like an idiot asking any other travelers cause unless they explain it to me repeatedly like I'm a 5 year old with a learning disability I still don't think i would understand!I'm slowly learning what some coins are, but I went to the ATM the other day and I thought I was getting out 200,000 cedis, but I accidentally got out 2,000,000 cedis, that was ok cause at least I won't have to get any money out again in Ghana but I had to ask the security guard how much I had got out I was so confused!There is some malfunction in my brain and I just don't get it, I now know how much I should pay for certain things, but for random purchases is when I get confused.And no one trys to help me nicely, they get pissed off and huff and puff and snatch the money out of your hand, just to make you feel even more stupid…!!!!I can't wait to get back to the CFA countries!!As I was walking back from the bank the other day trying to figure out how much money I now had this group of young kids in school uniform, they must have been about 5 or 6 years old, were walking towards me so I said hi to them and then they all surrounded me and hugged me with big grins on their faces, it was sooo cute!!Totally random, it was so funny, they just hugged me like a big group hug, and then carried on walking in the other direction!Well my time is about to run out, I'll try and download the photos from another internet café if I can find one that will let me!I should be in Accra for the next few days as I need to get a visa for Togo and Benin.Will write again soon…
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