The north of Ghana is really interesting looking. It’s dry, and there are large areas of baobab trees and scrub and huge oddly-shaped boulders strewn randomly. It was approaching the dry winter season when I was there, so everything was brown and dusty.

I used Bolga as my base and visited three towns to the north, Paga right on the Burkina Faso border, and the whimsically named Bongo and Tongo.

Paga is nothing much more than a collection of shops, cafes and industrial shacks dribbled alongside the road that runs to the border. I had a long chat with two Burkina border guards who invited me for tea at a little place a few hundred meters inside their country. “Do you want to see my passport?” I asked. “Non,” they said and cheerfully dragged me down the road for tea.

Paga feels a little swashbuckling too, with all the border traffic and shifty looking truck drivers from Mali, Niger and Benin.

One day I made a long walk from Bongo, a little over four hours north of town in a big loop through incredible fields and landscapes of baobab and rock. It was very hot and there was nearly no one around which added to the weird atmosphere.

The population in the north is more Muslim than in the south, most of the ubiquitous churches having been replaced with little mosques. I didn’t see any women in burka, or any women covered-up particularly. Quite a few men sported beards though, and wore Muslim skullcaps. “Welcome!” was something I heard all the time, and everyone was very friendly, though perhaps a little shyer than the outgoing Ghanaians I’d met farther south. As I mentioned earlier, Ghana doesn’t have a lot of tourists outside the southern beaches, and I got the idea very few independent travelers came this way.

I had a fun meal the day I left Bongo. I found a small cafe (read: shack) where they offered me Jollof rice and chicken (Jollof rice is a spiced, hot rice). The chicken had to be killed, but it first had to be collected from a chicken seller a few hundred meters down the road. I went with the young girl to collect it and was even allowed to pick the one I wanted. I settled on a handsome dark-feathered bird clucking in the loose sand.

Bolga turned out to be an excellent and exciting base, and the parts of the north I saw were memorable and really interesting. I eventually left Bolga and headed back to Tamale, then farther south where the scenery changed again.

Stay tuned!