by Philomena Esi Agudu
PureTravel Writing Competition 2023
“Soap, sponge and panties…”
“Soap, sponge and panties…”
I learned that from a Japanese custom called shisa kanko. In English it translates: point-and-tell. Most Japanese personnel at railway stations would relate. A typical railway staff is expected to point and loudly call out oncoming trains and warning signs on a given platform. By increasing mindfulness and alertness, this simple technique has been found to reduce accidents by a whopping 85%. Fact is, it becomes difficult to doze off or become distracted by the monotony of the job.
Hang on with your raised eyebrows. It’s only been a paragraph already.
You’ll see how this relates to a travel trip. I promise.
The great thing about pointing and telling is that it doesn’t apply to occupation alone. This particular chilly Thursday dawn I grudgingly hauled my groggy self from a wimple three- hour sleep. It really wasn’t the incessant nudging of the alarm that did the trick. I was already an hour late to catch the dawn shuttle, scheduled to leave at 4a.m. My hand luggage was somewhat packed with toiletries, clothes and all. In my opinion three items matter the most on a weekend trip to an unknown place- at least for any hygiene-minded woman. Forgetting to include them would mean a lot of improvising on arrival at the destination, and that is a sour footing to begin a decent getaway experience. So, while pacing and freshening up all at once, I muttered repetitively to myself: “Soap, sponge and panties.”
That morning was a blissful mess of all sorts. There was me, a spirited African girl, scurrying along with an overloaded Chinese-manufactured luggage bag, all the while engaging a Japanese custom in random chatter.
Newsflash. I wasn’t even going to Japan.
This was an impromptu road trip to Tamale, the capital of the Northern region of Ghana. It is a city stewed into a culture of its own; marching to its own rhythm. The weather is dry and immensely hot during the day, with nights tending to have this eerie chill to them. Street food is varied, cheap and tasty. Loose change can usually get you the original Hausa kooko and koose (millet porridge with fried bean cakes) or tuo with ayoyo (corn and cassava dough pudding with soup). Those nibbles are sold all over Ghana, but somehow the natives have this finesse in their delivery of such delicacies. It’s a lot like eating Sushi in Tokyo.
The crust of a trip to Tamale from Cape Coast in Southern Ghana, where I schooled, revolved around a 17-hour voyage that lay ahead. You could catch a plane in the neighboring city of Takoradi to reach Tamale in just about 45 minutes. The difference between 17 hours on one hand, and 45 minutes on the other, for the same trip is spelled in a five-letter word: M-O-N-E-Y.
That’s right. Limited funds would cajole me, a course mate of mine and the coordinator of our medical fellowship to patronize a 17-hour trip in two shuttles. We were headed for a four-day annual leadership conference for students. The first bus was overcrowded, mostly because people liked to bring excess luggage and the transport agency anticipated their profit all the more. It was no place for anyone with claustrophobia or anything like that. The air conditioning was broken, so for starters all of the extremes in weather during that first half of the trip was for the passengers to stomach. In sharp contrast to a cosy plane suspended in the clouds, comedy in a regular Ghanaian bus hits differently. Someone had strapped a live goat in blue nylon cords, carrying it aboard unapologetically. Throughout the journey you could hear its agonizing bleats, dreading one plausible catastrophic end: a boiling pot of light pepper soup.
As we meandered more unto rural suburbs and towns, roads became muddier and bumpier. Shockingly the obvious toilet facilities around were the bushy sparse lands overlooking backyard farms. That meant that anyone who had been eating or drinking recklessly till now was in big, big, trouble. Diarrhea is a jinx in any kind of public transport, more so in this setting. If the driver was in a good mood, he would make a stop and allow the victim to ease himself in about five minutes or so. And the victim was almost always a him. Women know that it takes more than just unzipping a flap to use any lavatory. Looming appetites and thirst had to be bridled for a good ten hours, until we approached the mid- Ghana zone in Kumasi.
The next half of the journey and experience was longer, but blissful. Maybe it was the change in vehicle. This particular one had more functional air conditioning, spacing and lighting. Or could it have been in the way I buried my nose in Michelle Obama’s Becoming?
Maybe it would be in the boiled yams with cassava leaf stew dinner on our arrival in Tamale that night at 11pm.
Or the dead, eerie silence that greeted us the mornings after.
Or the soft mattresses with white bedsheets in the guesthouse where we lodged.
Or the subsequent shortage in potable water that taught me to stop taking evening baths for granted.
Or simply the irony of meeting warm, lively natives in such a hot climate – mostly because of smashing street food.
Bread omelette sandwich, fried donuts and soybean milk.
Photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash
