The Road to Bogla

I thought a few more comments on the road to Bogla were necessary.

The road to Bogla is an important part of the road network running north and south between Accra and Pago, the Ghana border city with Burkina Faso in the north. Since Burkina Faso and Mali are both land locked, the road to Bogla is one of two important trade routes to these countries - the other runs a parallel course through Togo. This trade route has been in operation for thousands of years.

The road to Bogla carries A LOT of heavy trucks carry everything from steel, to food, to cars, and many other things that you can't see under the the tarps. Just about every little town has a police check point where many times the trucks get stopped so the police can "check" thei drivers paperwork and whatever else might be going on. Dan says lots of smuggling takes place on this trade route.

The road is also one big continuous market place. Who needs Kroger and Lowes. As you drive the road, you can buy everything you need for the house - food, home improvement, clothes, etc. Many times without even getting out of your car. If one of the towns is having market day - well then it is like traveling through the fruits and vegetable isle of the grocery without leaving the car.

On either side of the road is the mesa - flat grassy land with trees sprinkled throughout. Off in the distance one can see a village or two with the huts positioned near/under a clustered group of trees. Dan calls the mesa the "bush".

The road does not come without danger. The amount of trucks and cars and motorbikes and bicycles makes driving a challenge. Passing on the left is the norm. Our whole day was planned around getting off the road before dark as Dan says - men will come out of the bush at night and block the road with rocks and trees and extort drivers with an expensive "toll". I only witnessed one car accident and that was the one Dan and I were in. We got side swipped about an hour outside of Bogla on our way back to Tamale.

The road to Bogla is also lined with agriculture. Low land rice, corn (lots of corn), Mango, peanuts, onion, and soybean. The towns and villages have control of the land and a farmer/family can lease a "plot" of land from the town/village to grow a crop. Most plots are 1/4 to an acre in size and all the cultivation is done mostly by hand, i.e planting, weeding, and so forth. No irrigation. There are tractors that are outfitted with small plows, but I also saw the time tested ox driven plowing taking place as well.

We stopped by a farm coop warehouse on the way back. This is a govenment built facility that was then handed over to the PCG to run. It provides storage and processing machinery for the farmers to use to store the harvested grains to sell over time. The processing machinery was idle (no electricity that day), so we got to see one group of ladies "sifting" out the dust, husks, and grass from the corn by hand before storing the grain in bags.

Bags of corn