ARRIVING IN ACCRA, GHANA

As the plane descended for landing I squashed my face against the plastic window to peer down below, not without first spending a great deal of time wondering what the little hole in the window does... air pressure? Anyway, what was stretched out below me, coming increasingly closer, was all red dirt bar a few narrow paved streets. There was a lot of half-finished buildings, with no roofs and no windows or doors, I saw more buildings with no roofs than those with a roof. 

But what really struck me as different, what really made me feel like an outsider in a whole new world, was when everybody got up to impatiently join the stand-still jam in the aisle, I noticed that all of the women on the plane (I was the only white person) had put the yellow complimentary socks on over the top of their shoes and were going to leave the plane, and presumably the airport, with socks on the outside of their shoes. I am not talking about just a few women here, but the majority of them! Not the men either, just the women.

The arrivals terminal in Accra airport was little more than a big room. Picnic chairs were lined up and most were occupied with slumped sleeping men, their heads dropping off their shoulders, their open mouths threatening a pool of dribble.

I had arranged for an airport pick up from the hotel I was booked into. A few men were holding torn pieces of cardboard with names scrawled on them, but 'Kai' was not one of them. I took a few minutes to absorb my surroundings. Mostly I was gauging peoples reaction to me. The tattoos that cover my arms were visible in my t-shirt, my short-cropped hair clearly allowed my 12mm stretched ears to be obvious. Was it as clear to people here that I was a dyke as it is to the well-trained eye of Sydney-siders, the gay capital of the world'? Was I about to get lynched?

Funnily enough it was not my tattoos, my facial piercings or my stretched ears that got attention, but rather my khaki pants. "Are you a soldier?" I was asked several times, even by airport security. That was my first lesson: Don't wear Khaki in Africa!

Every few minutes the lights would go out and a noisy generated would kick in.

I figured my shuttle service was not about to show, so I jumped in a beat-up taxi with the guy in pink who had been harassing me for a good ten minutes already. Too stubborn to go to the hotel that never came to collect me, I told him he could take me to any hotel... that was mistake number 1. No lock on the door, no running water, and at about 9pm the lights went out. But I had been in transit for 36 hours - thanks to lengthy poorly planned stop-overs, and all I wanted to do was sleep... after I stacked the chairs against the door (my mothers one piece of advice before I left Sydney: "Always push furniture against the door for added safety").

But before we arrived at the hotel I was fascinated, and over-whelmed, by the city streets. The smell of shit from the open sewage was the first thing that struck me through my open taxi-window. Every time I smell human waste I will be transported back to my time in Accra. Second was the amazing, and somewhat amusing, sight of all the women walking the streets with large, heavy, awkward loads on their heads. Everything from plates of pineapples to buckets of water and 20kg bags of onion that hung down to their shoulders. Many of them had a baby strapped to their back. If the woman was large and the child young than the baby had the awkward pose of arms and legs outstretched, like an old Warner Brothers cartoon when a character hit smack into a brick wall.

In an attempt at a joke I said to the driver "good thing these women don't have twins!"

"No!" he exclaims seriously. "But a woman with twins would never be alone. She would always have help"

I knew straight away how poignant that was, I knew then that throughout the trip I would reflect on this, scrutinize its accuracy and compare it to life back home.