more stories from the Road

Ellis Hideout Coconut

The beach resort of Ellis Hideout in the village of Butre is the most idyllic place that Ive been in Ghana. We spent 5 fantastic days there just relaxing and soaking up the rays.
Tony the watchman would bring us fresh coconuts that he knocked out of the trees every morning. He'd chop the top off with his machete and when we were finished drinking the coconut milk he'd split them so we could scoop out the coconut flesh with a little spoon made from the coconut skin. And apparently its good for ya aswell!!

Axim Drowning

Rip tides on the coast of Ghana are notoriously dangerous and luckily I’m here to tell you a little about them. Axim beach resort is a posh kinda place...the one where waiters come to you on the beach and ask you if you’d like a drink. They stopped coming to us when they saw us with our own pure water bags (little plastic bags of filtered water which one buys for 5c here and not really of the same class as everybody else staying at the resort). The waves were pretty big ... some nearly 10 ft and after diving under a few in a row Shannen and I found ourselves out of our depth and being carried slowly away from the beach. I began to get unsettled a few moments later when despite swimming towards shore we were still out of depth and Shannen was beginning to get out of breath. I'm a reasonable swimmer and was pretty sure Id be able to get myself ashore but wasn’t too sure about Shannen. Telling her to stay calm and regulate her breathing helped us for a few minutes but we were making the mistake of avoiding rather than going with the huge waves that were crashing shore-ward. I was afraid that I would catch one and Shannen wouldn't. Then I noticed the resort lifeguard had come onto the beach and I motioned for him to help us. He swam out quickly, allowed Shannen to hold his shoulder and motioned for her to catch a wave. I waited until I saw them surface some 30m closer to shore and then swam hard to catch the next one. I surfaced breathing hard but in shallow water and waded ashore with my heart pumping. Later that evening one of the waiters told us a story of how 3 men had been swept out to sea earlier that year as one and then another attempted to rescue the first swimmer who had gotten into trouble. I guess we got lucky!