Road trip! (or never trust a quiet child)

We drove to Accra this weekend to visit friends and do some shopping. On our way out of Kumasi, we were stopped at a traffic light when a hawker excitedly started tapping on our window and gesturing toward the backseat, where Elliot had been quietly absorbed in a project. The project, it turned out, had been to draw little hash marks all up and down both of his shorts-clad legs. As you can imagine, he was quite proud of his "tattoos" (just like Daddy's, except bigger and more conspicuously placed).

Now that we've been here awhile, Dusty is a lot less intimidated by the traffic, and the driving style seems less "every man for himself" and more "give a little, take a little" to us. It still gets ugly, though, especially when you have to drive through construction. No brightly colored signs warning you of lane closures 3 km, 2 km, 1 km ahead or precisely spaced rows of orange barrels designating which portion of the road is available for drivers and which is being worked on. Even when traffic is reduced to one lane, construction workers have to resort to putting large limbs or nail-covered boards in the other lane to discourage enterprising drivers from seeing it as a shortcut around all the poor schmucks who are waiting in the long line to get through the open lane.

Sometimes, though, they don't even bother marking off where you should and shouldn't drive, leaving it up to the drivers to negotiate a path for themselves. This is what we encountered as we approached Accra, where they are in the midst of a massive roadbuilding project to install a section of elevated four-lane highway. The existing "road" around the construction site is best described as the kind of terrain one would seek out if one were a "Jeep person" (you know who you are...) and generally not what one expects to try to navigate in a small European station wagon. Observe this scene, shot from the passenger seat, in which we encountered a backhoe trying to make its way across the road while vehicles in both directions tried to get through. Not for the faint of heart! (P.S. This is my first time experimenting with Blogger's video upload feature. I hope it works!)