After a few day honeymoon I am back to counting my cents. It takes a little more courage to argue with the people here about money, they don't do it with a smile like in Asia, it is not a game, a duel, a joke of wits and unlike India where everyone is small I am facing down guys twice my width and substantially taller, a new challenge. Not to give you a bad impression of the place, unlike Asia, I think, at least half the time people directly quote me the correct price, one guy bought me a meal. It is amusing the way people look over the world, the different body shapes and the way hair grows. The people here are so heavily set, the guys are enormous, the women are huge, with no hair on their face and growing uncontrollably from their heads, they don't suffer hair loss or skin cancer. I must look like a ridiculous emaciated boney stick figure who has just walked out of a famine, with hair on my face, arms, fingers, toes, legs and only a little on my head. The women look amazing, enormous bums and huge tits, languidly rolling down the street with four foot of tupperware perched atop their head for sale. Kids with suitcases balanced on their heads, women with planks of wood, twenty litres of water, food, snacks for sale, dirt, ice creams, coke and the men with a small transistor radio with the aerial pointing out to one side. It seems a cruel twist of evolution, women do all the work, do more physical labour yet are weaker. As tiny Hitomi from Japan and I watched women move a road and build a bridge Hitomi offered to carry my bag, a Ghanian guy said to us "In Ghana men do the carrying not women" looking at me proud, I had to laugh, he wasn't making a joke.

As we've moved further north it has got drier, less humid and more dusty, everything turns to a brown red, daytime temperature is high thirties and low fourties. Plumbing exists, taps, showers and flush toilets but no water comes out any of them. They dammed a river flooded a tenth of the country creating a hydroelectric scheme that in theory should have enough electricity for the whole country and two neighbouring ones yet every fifth day a neighbourhood is without power. A very organised form of load shedding. We stayed at a place called Sirigu, eco-tourism as organised by the thousand NGO's, the volunteer aid workers, the whites are divided, a few tourists and a million volunteers, with little education they are here to educate. The eco-tourist setup is impressive, for western tastes and hygienic sensibilities, designed to maximise the dollar extraction from foreigners in a very polite Ghanaian way. In the north, as across the whole country languages change rapidly, the people have intricate face markings, carvings from childhood, etched to scare off the possessors. The place has a drunk guard, always laughing and stereo blasting. New food, a new staple, rice to the background, the introduction of banku a maize-casava doe and fufu ground yam or plantain, rice balls, ground nut soup and cold beer everywhere. I met some truely wild looking guys from Niger wearing tshirts that went to their feet who looked they had just walked out of the desert. So I'm off to Bukina Faso home of FESPACO, Africa's premier movie festival and the country with the best name. Then I'm off to Niger where the Americans say Saddam Hussein bought uranium for his nuclear weapons.

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