Hilltown of Aburi

“This could almost be an Italian hill town,” I gushed last weekend as we wandered the little town of Aburi.

“With some important differences,” Bill added, dashing my romantic take on Ghana.

Aburi street

He’s right, but the town seriously has a certain charm, and we don’t really want to be in Italy right now anyway (well, not all the time!). Aburi is about 45 minutes from Accra, and there is a botanical garden there. I must admit that we almost missed seeing the garden and the town – we really went to Aburi to escape our housing challenges and to stay at a nice hotel called Hillburi.

The Hillburi has A/C and – most exciting - HOT water in the shower! (I took 5 showers. Come on – it was the first hot shower in over a month!) And a nice infinity pool. Comfortable bed. View out over the entire city of Accra in one direction and the Volta hills in the other. Lots of bananas and other jungle-like vegetation, pretty yellow birds flitting around. While we were there, they were photographing a fashion spread for a Ghanaian magazine, so it was fun to watch the gorgeous models posing in various outfits – especially with complicated headpieces that they sometimes wear here.

We did eventually get to the garden, however, and hired a young horticulturist to show us around. One palm he showed us has so many uses, we can’t remember them all. The palm nuts are used for palm oil, then another nut is used for a white oil, then it is used for two kinds of palm wine –one non-alcoholic and one alcoholic – and the fronds are made into brooms. That’s one useful tree.

There is also a huge tree that was “strangled” by a fig. The host tree has now completely rotted, so the strangler fig has taken on the shape of the tree and is now its own tree with a hollow center.

The town is on a hillside, so it is kind of terraced, little huts and stands jumbled along tiny streets. Bill said, “That’s the picture I want,” of some cute little kids playing in the dirt with the view over the valley behind them. But, as I said earlier, people here do not necessarily want to be at the other end of a camera, so we didn’t take that particular picture. (One little boy who was walking through the garden, which attracts lots of tourists, put his hand over his face when he saw us. We can only imagine how he learned to do that around obrunis, and we felt bad about it – we’ll keep our camera tucked away.)

So it was a nice weekend that gave us the boost we needed.  More pix on Picasa.