Evil Heart

Cape Coast is the name of the one of the larger cities in Ghana. It is home to one of the best Universities in Ghana but it is known more for being the place where two of the most noteworthy slave forts in Africa are located: Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle. I will blog on the slave forts at some point when I revisit them with my upcoming visitors.

A young woman I volunteered with both years at CCS (Bethany) is here visiting her Ghanaian fiancé, (also used to work for CCS now finishing up his degree at Cape Coast) George, for 2 weeks. I realized my only opportunity to see them was yesterday so I decided to do a day trip and go spend the day with them at the beach. Cape Coast is about 161 km (OK I’ll do the math for you…100 miles) from Tema. So,…one might think that is a reasonable distance for a day trip-especially since I can take a nice air conditioned bus right from Tema…well …

The STC (State Transport Company) busses run from several of the large cities and are actually a very inexpensive and comfortable way to travel. I knew where the STC station was in Tema and I had been there once trying to find a schedule of departures/arrivals with not much luck. I went back Friday to buy a ticket.

Picture a brick wall with one brick missing.

That was the slot I had to buy my ticket from. A very pleasant woman explained to me, as I hunched over to see her, that the bus left at 6:30 AM and even though I was ‘alighting’ at Cape Coast, I had to pay the fare to the town where the bus finally stopped, Takoradi. This really wasn’t a problem the fare was about $5.25 US but the logic escaped me.

Three years ago when I first went to Cape Coast the road wasn’t even all the way paved, so traveling this time was better-although there is still only one lane and it was still a long ride. This time the trip there took about 3 ½ hours because of traffic and an overturned truck full of grain. The A/C was on full blast and it was freezing so I grabbed a towel out of my bag and put it on my shoulders. For the first hour and a half a talk show in Twe was loudly broadcast but then, half way through the trip, the driver put on a movie! It was called ‘Evil Heart’ and it was fairly representative of the Ghanaian/Nigerian movies which are so popular here. These movies are often very hard to follow and usually have slapstick comedy/supernatural/murder and a lot of screaming all mixed into one. I slept instead.

I made sure to buy my return ticket when I got off at Cape Coast. I was told there weren’t any late afternoon busses to Tema so I’d have to take a bus to Accra and then find a way to get to Tema from there (no problem-I do this a lot and I can always find a taxi but I don’t really like traveling in the dark-oh well…) My ticket was $2.50 this time.

Seeing George and Bethany was fun and we spent a nice afternoon at a picturesque beach. Being at the beach always ‘rejuvenates’ me. How great is it to be in a country with a beach easily available and summer every day?







I got back to the bus station at 3:30 and there were TWO busses waiting. One was going to Accra-one to TEMA. I asked the nice bus man if I could switch tickets since there seemed to be plently of room on the Tema bus (probably because no one was told it was coming). I paid the difference in fares and a small ‘fee’ for his ‘help’ and back on a bus I went. This time the trip took 4 ½ hours (remember I’m only going 100 miles)..there were several accidents and horrible traffic. Ghanaian drivers like to make four lanes out of one and don’t quite get it that that doesn’t help.

Not to worry they played Evil Heart 1 AND Evil Heart 2 on the way back! This time I watched. It was so fun for me to watch the way the entire bus laughed at the same places (actually not funny to me) and reacted to the ‘scary’ scenes the same way. Different cultures really do have different senses of humor. The woman next to me was very concerned that I understood what was going on and kept making (correct) predictions.

The plot was: married minister gets married parishioner pregnant. Talks her into an abortion and she dies. Sister finds out about affair and blackmails minister. Minister hires hit man to kill sister. Minister’s young daughter gets killed by a car. Another family (totally unrelated to this story) has a daughter come home possessed by some demon (this was the ‘funny’ part) They hire two ministers and a fetish priest (voodoo) to exorcise her but all are afraid of daughter and run away. Interesting plot to be shown on a public bus in a very conservative country.
Unfortunately this was a trilogy and I never found out the conclusions to these stories! The lady next to me told me we could probably find Evil Heart 3 at the market.

So 8+ hours on the bus but not a bad day at all… Just 'be breezy' my friend Kelly says…i.e. go with the flow.