After a 2 hour trip on a tro-tro (minibus) we were ready for our little bit of luxury, and pulled up at Hotel Fespa. Initial impressions weren't amazing, but we were ready to be wowed by this African rough diamond. We got to the rooms (via 4 flights of stairs) and saw we'd been given 3 doubles, not the 2 doubles and 1 triple we asked for... and even the correct number of beds wouldn't have compensated for the cleanliness and comfort of the rooms. Luxury this was not. The hotel manager's response to the bed situation was chucking what looked like a sunbed cushion on the floor in one of the rooms. We were fairly unimpressed, but it still had hot water, wifi and a bar. We tried hooking up to the wifi to research alternative hotel arrangements for Saturday night, but predictably it didn't work. "Oh well", we thought, "let's just go down to the bar and have some food, drink some drinks, and make the most out of staying in a shithole". We headed downstairs, discovered the restaurant and bar advertised on the front of the hotel didn't exist, and our only evening entertainment was the hotel security guard chasing away a fox.
Seriously unimpressed at this point, we enquired about our dining options and were given directions to a nearby petrol station which served pizza. Ghanaian driving is terrifying as a passenger, but even more so as a pedestrian. Walking along the side dual carriageway because there is no path. In the dark. With only a phone torch for illumination. We found this garage, but they had stopped serving food by this point. We asked a man where the nearest open restaurant was, and he pointed at a dirt track across the road, and told us to walk down it. It briefly crossed our minds that perhaps we shouldn't trust the directions of a complete stranger, in a foreign country where us 6 white girls are extremely conspicuous, which take us down "the dark road"... but our hunger overrode that little concern, and we headed down the dirt track wondering what could possibly go wrong?
At this point we met 2 men. Being 6 white girls in an unfamiliar country, late at night down a dirt track, we tried not to hang around for too much of a chat. This is when one of them grabbed my arm and started chastising us for disrespecting him in his country. Take me to any village and within the hour I will have found their resident nutter, and this bloke was no exception. He said his name was Michael and he owned the bar we were trying to walk into. We ordered some beers, and spouted some Fante for him, and ordered some chips - which made him pipe down. 20 minutes later he came up to our table, said we weren't drinking our beer quickly enough, we'd been there for 3 hours and we weren't letting him show us traditional Ghanaian hospitality. He kept on repeating that we would be offending him if we didn't let him know what he could do to make us comfortable, but somehow it didn't feel appropriate to say "well, you could start by fetching us those chips we ordered half an hour ago".
The chips arrived, and we noticed Michael sitting at the bar, paying for drinks. At this point we considered the possibility that he might just be a mentally ill bloke with delusions of owning a bar, so we tried to quietly get the attention of a waitress so we could pay up and escape. Michael noticed this, and came over again demanding to know what he could do to satisfy us. I handed my camera to the waitress, asked her to take a photo of us all with Michael, and then hastily retreated out of the (his?) bar.
We legged it back to the hotel, further pissed off the manager by asking for 2 top sheets (he refused), and enjoyed our first hot shower in a week.
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