Labadi Beach

Well I am back in the States and home but never had time to update this blog and bring it to a conclusion. Now that I am back home and have had time to let the experience settle in a bit, I can give you a retrospective on my last few days in Ghana and in Ivory Coast.

I’ll start with Labadi Beach. The entire time we were in Ghana we were told this was a good place to go on the weekend. But as we made overtime when we worked weekends, none of us were willing to sacrifice the time to go. Finally we were reaching the end of the project and we were basically in maintenance mode where we were waiting for things to break and we really had no reason to be in the office. So on Sunday afternoon we decided to go check out Labadi Beach. We hailed a taxi and he stopped. We negotiated a fee and headed out. We made it a couple of miles before the taxi broke down. He popped the hood and tried to get it started again, and had one of us in the front seat reach over and try to start it. Then the key just fell out of the ignition. We all looked at each other and got out, and flagged down another taxi.

I was told Labadi Beach is a private beach, which means you pay an entrance fee of 5 cedi. There is also a public beach but we didn’t see it. The entrance to the beach is a covered walkway up against a building. There is a teller window to your right where you pay your fee. The entry fee comes with a complementary energy drink. Then once you go past this area it opens up and there are the booths and setups where you can buy sunglasses or whatever. We pressed on towards the water. The beach area was filled with people all clustered together under red umbrellas. There were a few expats wandering around but mostly it was a local crowd. There was music playing and cooks grilling unrecognizable meat, children running to and fro along the water’s edge while parents watched from the shade under their umbrellas. Teenagers and young men kicked around soccer balls. This is the first thing that’s different about a beach in Africa: Africans don’t suntan!

I had heard the beach wasn’t going to be too clean. Supposedly they don’t treat their sewage in Ghana and they just pump it into the ocean. I didn’t plan to get in the water anyway. Sure enough, the beach was dirty. There were piles of trash—whether grouped together by human hands or simply by the tide, I can’t say—and boys led ponies or small horses up and down the beach offering rides. Horses do what horses do, and they do it right there on the beach. No pooper scoopers in Ghana! The horseman just slides some sand over it and continues on his way. Then kids running along the beach no doubt come and step in it.

We walked down from the entrance towards the left. There were enclosed areas with chairs or sometimes tables and chairs set up where—for a fee of course—you could sit down and relax. There were waiters who would come along and offer beers or water to the guests. Some people were sitting in those areas and reading books or talking. We were continually offered a seat in these areas but we were there to look around and declined. My coworkers were offered and accepted a beer and were handed glass bottles. Not something you would see in the US!

We did see some interesting things at the beach. There was a group of drummers who wandered around playing. They would go up to tables of beachgoers and try to play for them, like mariachis in a Mexican restaurant. Then there was a guy making a sand sculpture of a rather severe looking woman in a hot rod. Then there was Zanla the Show Boy, who pranced up and down the beach in a flamboyant costume that made him look like a member of the Ghanaian Village People. He never spoke but was very happy to pose for pictures! (Click the picture to view it larger).