On this day, we drove from Accra, Ghana to Lome, the capital of Togo. It was a drive of 125 miles, but it took eight hours. We made several stops, including lunch, but it was a very slow drive. The worst of it was that we had to drive over several hundred speed bumps on the main road. On our large bus, the driver slowed to a stop and then crept over each one. We also passed through many small villages and it took us over ninety minutes to cross the border from Ghana to Togo, which was quite an experience in confusion and uncertainty.

Some of the land was on the flat side but much of it was hilly. In the photo below, this was a hilly area. I will point out several things of note. First, most Ghanians are farmers. You can see many farms in this photo. The farms that we saw were all very small. I'm not sure I ever saw a farm here that looked much bigger than one acre. Plus, the farms don't look like our farms. Orchards, for instance, are never orderly with trees in rows. Another thing to point out is that I thought the houses looked very large. They are large but then we learned that most of the houses are multi-family homes. Houses have multiple generations living in them and often with more than one family of the same generation.

We drove through many small towns and villages. I'm just including one such village below. Most small villages were a hotbed of activity and often it took a long time for our bus to pass through them.

At least in this village, there was a minimal amount of vehicle traffic.

The brick-making business was perhaps the most common business of all in Ghana. We passed many dozen brick-makers along this road and every other road.

Another site that was extremely common in Ghana was houses or businesses with stacks of bricks on the road in front of them. Building houses and other buildings is a "pay-as-you-go" operation. People build the house as they have the money rather than taking out a loan and building it at once. It's common, our guides said, for some people's houses to take 30 or 40 years to finish. Plus, some areas don't charge taxes on the houses until they are finished...so some people never finish their house, according to our guides.

Other reasons for our long bus ride for such a short distance were all the reasons that you might expect, such as below. We passed several herds of cattle.

In certain areas along the way, the soil had a very high clay content. As expected, these areas made and sold clay pots of every description.

The next photo is just a glance down a side street in a small village. The smaller and more rural villages were often much cleaner than the Accra area.

We were told clearly and specifically that we were not allowed to take any photos in the border crossing area between Ghana and Togo. There were guards all about.

Still, it took over ninety minutes to cross the borders, and I was bored as all heck. I must have accidentally taken the photo below...my bad. Welcome to Togo.