Ali that is; my partner in crime
at the weekends for 3 months, my nurse, my drinking partner, my text teacher
and my friend. So many good times, good
memories and many I haven’t blogged about.
So here’s just a few extra….
Nightclubs and sausages just about
sums up our time together. Nightclubs
because we went a couple of times and would have gone more had Ali’s time here
in Ghana not been so short. One classic night,
about midnight, when I was about to go to bed dressed in my nightclothes she
asked the fatal question (to be said with a northern twang) ‘shall we go dancin’?’
Little did she know how spontaneous I can be; half an hour later we were out of
the door and Ali was accosting neighbours to join us on our dancin’ mission which
we duly accomplished, finishing somewhere around dawn with the cockerels
crowing. The only unfortunate consequence
was, we had to sit through a meeting feeling slightly worse for wear.
So what of the sausages? Here they are big and spicy. You can buy them
in the nightclub and on every street corner in town (this is not a euphemism) and
they were often the supper of choice ‘up on the roof’. When a sausage man opened up just across my
street… well let’s just say we couldn’t get enough of them….
Our second trip to Tamale (second
of three in total) was a mixture of the good the bad and the ugly.…… We took a
while to leave; Ali was late from Z-Town and then we got on the tro tro. This particular one
needed a push to start then stopped at traffic lights and a van went into the
back of it and knocked of the iron crumple bar.
It needed another push start to move us. Then we had to pull over to sort
it all out; the bar and the other driver.
The whole thing took longer than is necessary when you are sitting on a
tightly packed tro with zero air conditioning I was convinced we wouldn’t get
to Tamele! We were out of TICCS guesthouse
in Tamele and down the road to the Health and Beauty salon by 4pm to have a
pedicure (of sorts – still unsure of the need to use a blade). We were grateful on reflection that our
experience, however painful, did not leave us with the open sores that a fellow vol
got a few days afterwards having visited the salon on our recommendation. Whoops.
The next day in Tamele turned out
to be the Most Efficient Day In Ghana so far, and that was with a lie in! We
managed; a lovely breakfast, a taxi to town, withdrew money from ATM, booked
flights x 3, got text conformation while we sat there, had a drink, a taxi to the
VRA pool and sat down sunbathing all before 12 midday… unheard of. And I can
safely say without exception all of the above on a normal day would happen with
many problems attached, (no money in ATM is a regular one for example) or in the
case of text conformation – it would not happen at all. We devoured fabulous thin crust pizza and
great red wine that night which really finished off a great day.
The next day we discovered the cultural centre
in Tamele was not cultural at all and the toilet was simply a urinal which
equates to a piece of corrugated iron providing some privacy for you to squat
and pee on the ground… I couldn't go… and as Ali put it ‘it’s hardly cultured
is it…’ Statement of fact rather than a
question.
The tro tro back (I had to go back to tro’s
didn’t I!) was fabulous for me sandwiched between 4 men with small butts. Marvellous. Not so great for Ali who was perched on the
edge of a seat between 2 fat ladies and a family of 3… oh, then they shoved a
bloke on the row for good measure….kama for the boy who sat on my lap all the
way to Tamele the first time we travelled me thinks!
Our final trip to Tamele to drop Ali off at the airport and make the most of an overnight stay and good food with
the two Mr T’s (Tony and Tom), was thankfully not the last time I was to see
this lovely lady. She met up with her partner Mark and they headed to the coast
for a couple of weeks before they were to fly back home to Blighty. We talked of meeting up but didn’t want to
plan too much because 1. Ali doesn’t
plan (well, doesn’t admit to planning) and 2. We were not sure how far away her
plush hotel and our beach side hut would be from each other to enable
celebrating the new year together. Our
first beach side residence was literally right next door to her plush residence
and when we moved to our next beach side hut for New Year, it wasn’t far down
the road so I have some super memories of beach walks at night, midnight swims,
too much vodka, fireworks and sparklers.
Thank you Ali for a super fabulous 3 months. Missing you already.
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| Ali and me... partners in weekend crime. |
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