The beach road near our hotel.

Around 7:00am our Norwegian travel companions—Jorgen and Lena—joined us at our table in the courtyard. Leena has spent the last four months travelling in both South America and South Africa; Jorgen the last four weeks, where he joined Lena in Cape Verde. For about 10 days previous they had been in Ghana, and Lomé for two nights already.

They also delivered some startling news: the Ghanaian border is closed today because of an election. This poses the issue of our three remaining companions who flew into Accra and were supposed to be joining us today.

Ain't gonna happen.

On the bright side, Jorgen has really loved Ghana and Lomé and is excited to get cycling.

The five of us headed off to try and find a place for breakfast, which we found in the form of two guys on the sidewalk next to a truck cooking omelets. (He breaks two eggs in a cup, cuts up some onion and tomato and then fries them in oil over a hot fire.) After watching them serve "café au lait" with about half the cup filled with the sweetened condensed milk I was wise enough to say, "sa suffit"—unlike Il, who couldn't stomach drinking her coffee-flavoured sugar.

We stuffed our omelets into our baguettes and left the table, full and satisfied. This type of meal typifies the Bicycle Africa standard (although omelets aren't actually normal breakfast fare for West Africans) and is so much more enjoyable (and cheap) compared to what other tourists tend to eat: supermarket meals of fruit and bread or at dull, overpriced restaurants.

Pouring milk into the coffee. Say when!

While we decided what we wanted to do with our day the lady at the desk warned us away from the beach and beach road (muggers) and even the street outside our hotel (where she was, apparently, mugged). Then Il set off to explore on her own and David and I sought out a taxi to explore restaurants for dinner in another part of town. I decided it best to leave my camera and most of my money in the room just in case.

We had fun walking the dusty, busy streets and peeking into restaurants to look at the various menus. When we walked the road to the end (at the beach) we decided to walk back to the hotel, passing hundreds of vendors just outside the Grand Marché. Along the way I became a bystander in a children's game that I think must be called "touch the Yovo and run". 

David and our two Norwegians having a laugh outside the hotel.

I killed most of the remaining day smoking cigars in the courtyard, playing Sodoku, and engaging in an exciting game of Kniffel (Yahtzee, as we know it in English) with the mother-daughter Germain pair that we shared our cab with the previous night.

Unfortunately, at dinner time, Jorgen informed us that Lena, after over a week of being sick, had worsened—fever had joined her stomach issues—and was not up to dinner, and possibly even cycling tomorrow. Assuming, that is, if we are even able to leave according to schedule.

The four of us left into the dark of the street to hunt for a cab to take us to dinner. After negotiating a fare David could live with we sat outside of the first restaurant that we had visited in the morning and ate plates of rice to which we added peanut sauce (with unidentifiable meat—probably goat) and two other sauces each with a different whole fish in it. Jorgen had the local "Flag" beer–which I had tried earlier—and I opted for my personal favourite: the robust (at 7.5% alcohol) "Guinness Foreign Extra Stout".

The lulling cacophony of noise from the street (traffic, honking, and a multitude of voices) had me slipping into unconsciousness but we soon headed back to our end of town where we went to the ritzy "Palm Beach Hotel" (where the cheapest room is $150/night) in hopes of using the internet kiosks: I wanted to let Gill know I was safe and sound.

But it the internet was down.

Oh, well. At least I'm not stuck in some Ghanaian border town. That would suck!

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