Tro-Tro’s and Mountain Biking

The public transportation around here is quite impressive. Everywhere we have gone so far is accessible by tro-tro’s. Each one is a 12 seat van with fold down seats to make it a 15 seat van for maximum usage. The “Drivar” is on the left side (even though Ghana was colonized by the British) and the “Mate” is next to the sliding door, hanging out the window yelling and using locally known hand motions to where the tro-tro is going.

The accessibility of the tro-tro system is exemplified on a journey for mountain biking.

Derek, a student also in ISEP, and I set aside 5 hours to hop on a tro-tro to a destination about 45-60 minutes away, go mountain biking for two hours or so and get back for an appointment. As Ghanaian time has it, we started out late, but once we were at the tro-tro station we got on our tro-tro headed to Madina. We each paid 35 peswas (about 35 cents). The traveling is a bit rough as the tro-tro is a stop and go ride along with the unfinished roads. Once we arrived, we bought a tro-tro ticket, price of 1.80 cedis (1 cedi ~ 1 US$), to Abore which would take us to the mountain biking shop.

People are selling items, most commonly food and phone cards, on the road. If there are many items, they are carried on the seller’s head. Derek purchased 4 juice boxes, the tro-tro filled up in about 7 minutes or so and we were off. Now, tro-tro’s are a great mode of transportation but each journey may be an exercise on your bladder. This was one of those times for me. Yet, I still chose to drink a strawberry juice box, very sugary, but I guess, not like the orange that tasted like cough syrup.

We arrive in Abore and every taxi driver looks our way to see if we need a ride to where we are going. We say we are walking and go on our way up to where the shop in. The mountain bike shop had Swiss founders, but quite a while ago, so the bikes were a bit old, and really heavy. We received a fold out map of pictures of where we were supposed to go. (But some pictures were taken at times of construction where there is no more construction.) We did have the option of a guide but turned it down for the sake of price and taking our own time.

We start out in the streets of this town, with kids shouting “Obruni, Obruni” means foreigner, more specifically “white person.” (It’s not derogatory, at least from the kids.) We traverse down this huge hill, only to remember that we will have to come right back up the hill. Following the picture map already proved tedious, but the local people continued to help us, pointing us in the direction we needed.

Once in the bush, we had tall plants on either side for a good part of the ride, in a trail that wasn’t more than a foot wide. We went passed people harvesting fruits and another group harvesting crabs. We traveled through private farms of cassava, cocoa, cocoa yams, plantains and bananas, orange, and other citrus. At one time we had to cross through a gate-that wasn’t on the map, a families front yard, and another time we passed about 2 feet away from the back of someone’s home. A couple times we took the wrong way at a fork in the paths. (By this time we gave up being back in time for the appointment.) We passed through streams on the path (Ghana just came out of the rainy season.) and I think the most soothing and majestic point was when we past under a canopy of bamboo trees. Four large (10 X 10 ft) pods of bamboo came together at about 25 feet high to produce a canopy above the trail. I marveled at the beauty of the place for a long time, until an ant crawled up my shorts to bite me at my underwear line! I just laughed at the wonderful reminder of Africa, if the Bamboo wasn’t enough.

Through the trails we traversed, and it was just a blessed site to see a landmark we remembered! We zoomed ahead and I took out a tall cassava plant! Whoops! They are resilient and it flung back into place. We entered back into the city and came to the big hill we so wanted to forget. We tried, but gave in and walked our bikes back up the hill. Through the people on the streets and the roads we got back to the shop 2 hours and 18 minutes after we had started. We talked with the owner a little, paid our 11.20 cedis, and started walking back to the tro-tro station, but not five minutes on the road we were picked up by a tro-tro headed to Madina. And we arrived only 20 minutes back at the campus to make it to the appointment!