So that’s it done, maybe I don’t write my blog too much since the travels are done, but I thought I’d put some final contemplations of my travels on the blog so that I can avoid telling stories to all you guys in a rather irritating ‘when I was in Africa’ kinda way.

So last time I left you it was after the lion hunting experience, the story for that has been improving as its told and now involves us lying in hiding from the lion, scary stuff eh!

We randomly moved about Ghana, it’s a busy place with lots of travellers and tons of folk doing voluntary work, so there are many organised ‘touristy’ things to do and for the first time in our trip we encountered hotels that didn’t have space for us (well, on a certain level they didn’t have space but mainly if you hang around and kept asking something – like a room without a lock – comes up and we are sorted, also not very picky on the accommodation front!) So the touristy things included things such as the canopy walk, which we had the joy of sharing with a group of rather irritating American/british school students. It was especially annoying since we had camped in the rainforest that night so we would be the first there. But camping in the rainforest is cool enough itself!

While roaming around Ghana, visiting a castle or historic site or two, a ‘paradise’ beach and hiking through more rainforest to see waterfalls we also decided to pop into Togo. Togo really is quite a random place and probably the one country that baffled us throughout our stay. There was a little bit of a ‘no rules culture’ meaning making transporting confusing but on a certain level, somehow easy, as you’ll randomly get picked up somewhere even if it doesn’t look like a taxi. It was also the only country where officials outright asked us for money, but they did after processing all our forms (which I’m not sure is the best method) so it turned out a ‘merci’ and a smile would do! So in the search of Voodoo we trotted around this rainy country, walked in hills and had a bit of a scary motorbike journey (they were taxis too!), the salad was plentiful and it was probably the best food of the trip.

Throughout our travels we meet many nice people, West African hospitality really made the whole thing a lot easier when we didn’t know what we were doing or how we were getting there. Or when we arrived too late for ticket purchases or our airport taxi didn’t turn up. Sometimes I think we winged the month with the belief that it would all work out in the end and it turned out it did!

So now I’m back home there are a few things I won’t really miss, as there is no more:
8 people in a taxi (that’ll be 4 in the front and 4 in the back, try it its not that comfy!), cold showers; bucket showers; open air showers; open air toilets (some with rather low walls); no more toilets that lacked any sort of toilet area (not even a hole in the ground just a walled space, nice nice huh!); or the question of your toileting purpose by the random man you ask directions from (its good to share). And thankfully no more need to use my French skills, until next time eh!