Tema

Tema is main harbor of Ghana. It’s located about 30km from Accra and there are two main roads leading to it. Old one – near ocean’s coast is a bit longer and more crowded (will explain that later) and new one – motorway, fast and nice;).

We usually use motorway, which is paid road too (500 CEDI for going one way). It’s in good conditions and has two lines for each direction. While using motorway it takes us about 15 minutes to get to Tema (speed limit is 100 km/h but whoever can ride fasted does so). There isn’t much to watch while on motorway too – mainly fields pass by the car windows. Somewhere in the middle of distance there is small bridge which quite often causes over packed trucks to unload part of cargo and carry it under it, than pack again (drivers tend to take much more cargo than their cars were designed too).

Old way is much more interesting from sight seeing point of view. Unfortunately it’s much more crowded too, that’s why we have used it only 2 times so far. Why is it crowded? Main reason I guess is not paying 500 CEDI, second 99,9% of bus traffic to and back from Tema goes that way. Buses are mainly old Transits or similar cars. They go rather slowly and stop often to pick up ppl.

Anyway back to Tema. Here all main “water traffic” focuses. Ships from whole world come and bring their cargos which is later sold in whole Ghana (one of this persons selling ship’s cargo would be me:) ). As a result of all this Tema is full of warehouses, cold – storage facilities and other storing buildings. There are also many custom offices which handle all formal activities connected with receiving ones cargo. Add to this: banks, places where you can eat and more or less you will have picture of Tema. Also as everywhere in Ghana you will find there endless number of street sellers. Huge part of traffic in Tema are trucks – many of them just park around in lines waiting to be hired.

Two main places we visit in Tema are customs office and cold – storage where we keep our goods and sell them to customers. I will tell you now a bit how trade looks like here in Ghana.

Each storage has certain number of persons working in it, but also there are several ppl who sit there every day calling potential customers and selling goods to them for a small cut (they usually add 1-3 thousands CEDI to final price).

While in Tema you can find, I guess, merchants from all over the world. So far we have met traders from other towns of Ghana, nearby countries (Togo, Ivory Coast, etc.), or not so close countries like Lebanon, China and many other.

Side notes: some areas of Tema are restricted and i.e. taxi car can't enter them or must pay certain fee, same about trucks. There is also fish market located in harbor - if you need fresh fish that's the place (we bought few things there - shrimps and fish, but they offered us also squid or calmary). Certain areas of harbor carry smell of the fish - really intese one;) so be prepared;)

And here are the pictures: