Ode To Tro-Tro

Traveling around Ghana, staying in towns for weeks at a time is great because Lindsey and I get to see a lot of the extremely diverse country. It can be draining sometimes to move so often, and sometimes we wish that we could stay in one place for a while, even to simply make some closer friends. But one of the best parts about switching from town to town is the traveling itself. I’d have to say that in Ghana, my happy place is riding in a tro-tro.

A tro-tro is a van or a small bus that transports people between and within cities and towns in Ghana. The tro-tro network in Ghana is THE best public transit system I have ever seen. Most people don’t have cars here, and people always need to travel, so you can literally get a tro-tro to almost anywhere in the whole country.

Tros can hold anywhere from 7 to 25 people at once. Some of the longer distance tros have tarps on the top to secure luggage, or they have a boot (a trunk). Generally, the boot is not big enough for all of the bags and boxes, so the trunk is tied shut with slightly sketchy rope. I continue to be amazed by what tros can hold: one trip, a 3.5 hour drive from Kumasi to Techiman, around 12 goats were put in the boot. Lindsey and I would occasionally here children screaming and look around the car confused, only to realize that it was the sounds of the goats in back. We’ve seen suitcases, sacs and sacs of rice or hay, bags of FanYogo (the favourite ice cream here), and couches stacked on the tops of tros. Once we even saw 5 people sitting on the top of a tro, I guess waiting for room inside the car.

Just sitting in a tro-tro is a fun experience. In each tro there is a driver and mate. The mate collects the fares, opens the door to let passengers in, and hangs out of the window of the car yelling his destination to passers-by on the road. If you need to get somewhere, you wait on the side of the road until you hear you destination being called, wave your hand, and the tro will stop.

Watching the people inside can be a lot of fun. If another car cuts you off, or if the driver is driving precariously, you will hear the cries of protest from all of the passengers. Everyone in the car is always looking our for one another, and if we ask one person where we should get off in order to reach a certain place, everyone in the car will take it as their personal duty to make us get off at the right stop. Sometimes the tro will be playing some sweet tunes, usually Ghanaian or Nigerian high life or hip life, which I’ll try to describe as a mix of rap, hip-hip, reggae and gospel. It that is the case, people in the car will be bopping their hands or singing along to the best artists (Mzbel, Batman Samini, Ofori Amposah, and my personal favourite Two-Face). One time, the driver was listening to the Black Starlight, Ghana’s under 20 football team play a match, and whenever Ghana scored the passengers would get pretty excited.

When the tro comes to a stop at a traffic light or a toll-booth, it will be stormed with street vendors selling every type of food you can imagine. The street vendors are often young girls and always balancing huge boxes, trays and bowls on their heads filled with Ball Floats (deep-fried dough), plantain chips, water in little plastic bags, ice cream and so much more that I can’t even begin to list. I’m telling you, if you stayed in the tro long enough you could buy all of your groceries off of someone’s head.

The funniest tro trip, I think, has been our trip from a very small village called Boabeng which is at the end of dirt road, to the main town, Nkranza. First of all, it was pouring rain outside, like the type of rain where the second you step out, it’s as if you’ve just emerged from a swimming pool. We ran into the tro, trying to escape the rain, but as soon as we got inside, we realized that there may not have been a point in running so fast. It was an old car and the inside was basically hollowed out, except for the seats. Water was dripping, and in some places pouring in and splashing up from the side door onto the passengers. When we first got in, there were only a few passengers so the four of us were huddled in the (relatively) dry area of the car. But as the car filled, inevitably, people would have to sit in the more wet seats and were trying to stop the drips and splashing by shoving random rags and sacs into holes, although there were not too successful. Now windows in tro-tros are generally 2-paned manually sliding windows that slide horizontally across the window, unlike more cars whose windows’ panes slide vertically. Well in this tro, one of the two panes was missing from one of the windows, and so the lady and mate sitting beside that particular window were arguing over the best placement of the small placement of glass in order to provide the best coverage for both of them from the torrential rain shower that was pouring in on them both. It was a pretty great trip.

But definitely the best part about being in the tro is looking out the window at Ghana passing you by. My favourite drive so far has been the 5 hour trip from Kumasi, a big city in the center of Ghana, to Tamale in the northern, more rural part of the country. Leaving Kumasi, as far as you can see, there are hills and hills covered in houses. Then, you pass over a hill and suddenly you are in the country. The scene is mostly savannah-esque fields with some trees, and the fields are a colour of green that I’ve never seen before, with bright orange-red paths snaking through them. On the paths you could see ladies going or returning from farm with huge bins on their heads full of cassava, plantain or firewood and a machete in their hand. We passed through tons of small towns which would usually consist of cement homes or mud houses with either thatch or tin roofs, some small street stalls, five or six churches, a few orange and brown school buildings, and as we got closer to the north, a mosque or two.

It was very neat to watch the changes as we got closer to the north, because it is very different from the rest of Ghana. It is much more Muslim and so as I mentioned, there are a lot more mosques. But even the style of hut changed from individual square buildings to small rounds buildings set up in a circle with a fence to form a compound. There is much more cattle farming in the north and so we saw a lot of small cattle herds as well. We also passed over the White Volta River, and saw fisherman in hollowed-out canoes on the water.

In general, tro-tros are pretty neat. But they are definitely not the safest things in the world. Road safety in general is a huge problem here and many times we have seen huge transport trucks carrying logs or hay rolled over on the side of the road.

There is definitely an issue. But so far the biggest ‘problem’ we’ve had so far is when my bags fell out of the back of a tro. And so we will continue to enjoy the convenience, fun and adventure of traveling around Ghana in tro-tros and look forward to many other great rides!

Amy