The place we stayed is close to the tip of the sandbar beyond the roads, so that you need to take a ferry in one the local boats that look like an extra long dory and are designed and used for fishing. The resort is rather primitive. It is a non-profit project created by a one man to provide jobs for the locals. The town of Ada Foah is poor and as you head out on the sandbar it gets poorer, with a small break for a line of homes that include one owned by the president of Ghana, then after a concrete wall, it gets extremely poor, small one-room homes, with walls made of woven palm fronds and thatch roofs that sit on the narrow sand bar. After that, there is the "resort". The difference between the president's home and everything around it is glaring. It's hard to fathom how locals view the nice homes and, even more so, vice versa.
The resort has huts and buildings just like the local village, all made of woven walls and thatch roofs. The sand bar is very narrow. One side faces a lagoon with islands in the distance sitting in the mouth of the Volta River. The other side is the ocean with rolling waves. Below are pictures of the "resort:.
This will give you an idea of how the place looks. It is not very big. I don't think it can hold more than one hundred people if full. A few huts have multiple beds, up to 8. I stayed in the 2nd hut from the right in the top photo. It had a double bed sitting on the sand floor with a mosquito net (saw no evidence of mosquitos), one window facing the ocean and a table to put things on. The cost for 2 nights was 40 cedis or about $16.00. Everyone shared a bathroom much like a cement outhouse with 4 stalls, a barrel of water with buckets to flush the toilets and 2 cement stalls, like changing rooms, to clean yourself with bottled water purchased at the food counter.
Above you will see a view of the ocean side and two views of the lagoon side. The only plant life this far out on the sand bar is palm trees and you can see them everywhere and on the islands in the lagoon. It should all be idyllic but there is one big problem. Garbage and pollution. We could not swim in the lagoon because it is infested with parasites and it carries a lot of waste from the communities upstream. And the grounds suffer from a problem I find everywhere. There is no place to throw trash so it ends up everywhere. On Saturday, ferries arrived with large groups of day trippers, who I believe are church groups. I started talking to one woman who saw me in the Accra and I ended up playing scrabble with a group of her friends. They do not go in the water because they are scare, since they do not swim. In fact we saw locals in the water, but never above knee deep. When my group were romping in the waves, a small group watched us and a couple of men came to me to say I was a very strong swimmer.
Lots of people eating and playing and no trash bins. Then, when swimming in the ocean, trash floats by, mostly plastic and the high tide line is marked by seaweed and trash. To top it all off, as you walk toward the village you get a waft of sewage. The beach is their bathroom. Fortunately, there is a series of breaks in the beach with a line of rocks heading into the ocean to help prevent erosion. The "resort" starts after one of these rock breaks, but we are downwind enough that you want to avoid getting close to the break. I saw that just before day break, two women go through the resort sweeping the sand and picking up trash, but it is no way thorough enough and you can find everything in the sand. Sandals are always worn.
When in the water you can feel a strong current going perpendicular to the sandbar, in a direction that would continue to extend the sandbar but take sand off the beaches. I learned that there is a ship on the coast that is dredging sand for the sandbar paid for by the government. Already there is small man-made dune that runs parallel to the shoreline about a mile long that protects the village and resort from storms. I took a walk along the dune past the village and saw some men mending a net. Then I kept walking and the net seemed to be never ending. Here is a picture. You can see some village huts next to the dune and one made of cement and painted yellow.
On Saturday night, the entertainment was African drumming with dancers and then the beach because an open dance floor disco with gargantuan speakers and a bonfire. Dancing outside on the beach was fun, but it is harder than being on a regular floor because you feet cannot get a grip.
Sunday was nice and calm with no day trippers. We left in the afternoon and I took pictures from the ferry.
Please enlarge the bottom two pictures and you will get an idea of what the village was like. The colorful painted boats are for fishing.
In fact, all my blog pictures should be enlarged as there are so many details to look at.
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