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nicordeaux Says: It was an exceptionally amazing experience to head to Tamale Market place, and I would highly recommend it to those who have only been to the South. The journey up from Accra or Cape Coast can be long, but I would recommend getting the Metro bus as locals told us it was...
Pieter11 Says: East from the National Cultural Centre, and west from the Police Headquarters, you will find a huge open space in Tamale. This open space is called the Police Park. Around it you will see a lot of buildings that are the accommodations of the police officers, and the park is...
Mum's Cool Spot: Very cool indeed
grets Says: At lunchtimes, we used to stop at a bar/café/restaurant where they had adequate facilities. We were unable to find somewhere like that in Tamale, but Noah managed to arrange for us to use the toilets in the Technical College across the road from the restaurant. I don’t know...
Pieter11 Says: Titi's Inn is a very new restaurant in Tamale, and is unique in town. The owner is a Lebanese (he named the place after his daughter) and he wanted to promote the Lebanese cuisine in Ghana. The result is a great menu with shawarma, khebab and falafel, some typically Middle...
Pieter11 Says: Another way of transportation by bus is Metro Mass. This is a bus company with less luxurious busses then the STC, with cheaper rates and with routes that, unlike STC, also cross bad, bumpy roads. The Metro-Mass busses in Tamale depart from the Tro-Tro-station, but in other...
Pieter11 Says: The most important way of transportation in Ghana is the Tro-Tro. A Tro-Tro is every vehicle that is bigger then a normal car and smaller then a bus. It can be anything: vans, pick-ups, small busses...Every trip in a Tro-Tro is an adventure. The vehicles always are at least...
Pieter11 Says: Because shared taxi's only have fixed routes, you might need a drop-taxi once in a while. A drop taxi will bring you from anywhere to everywhere. You can ask any taxi out on the streets to be your "drop-taxi" because the driver can ask much more money for a drop. Everybody...
Pieter11 Says: Getting around in Tamale by taxi is very easy. Everywhere you look you will see very old, yellow and grey cars, mostly with cracked windows, rusty doors and some even without dashboards inside. These are the normal taxi's in Tamale. In Tamale you have two kinds of taxi's:...
Pieter11 Says: By far the most popular way of transportation around Tamale is the (motor)bike. In Tamale you don't see a lot of cars, and the most of those cars are taxi's. The rest is done on foot or by bike. A great thing about Tamale is that it has bicycle-roads next to the main roads...
Helpfulness
If you are staying in Tamale for a longer period -and a lot of foreigners that come to the city do- it is very advisible to buy yourself a bicycle. Bikes are the main way of transportation in Tamale, because cars are too expensive and the streets in the centre are too narrow and busy to drive one anyway.
It is possible to rent a bike for a period of a week or a month, but especially when you stay for a longer period buying one will be much cheaper. A normal price for a bike -don't pay more then that!- is 500.000 cedi's, about $50,-. And once you leave you can sell it again for about 300.000 cedi's.
Bikes normally have a basket on the front: easy to take anything you need, and a light at the front.
There are several places where you can buy the bikes. If you see ten bikes in a row anywhere in the marketarea, you can be sure that this is a bicycleshop. Just walk in and ask if you can try a couple of bikes.
Written Oct 11, 2006
Address: Market area, Tamale
Helpfulness
Almost everywhere in Ghana you have to be very careful with taking pictures of the local people. Tamale is one of the places where it is not appreciated at all when you take a spontaneous picture of somebody.
Taking pictures (or "snapping", like all Ghanaians call it) of children normally is no problem at all. They normally love it to be in front of the camera, especially when you can show them the picture with a digital camera. If you want to "snap" an adult though, you should at least ask it before you do so, and even then you should be prepared on receiving a "no" as an answer. Sometimes they ask you "why" so they give you a chance to explain that you just want to show the people back home what you have experienced in Ghana, and how beautiful the country is. And sometimes they ask you money for a picture. In both cases you are lucky, because just as often it happens that you simply won't allow you. If you do "snap" them, you take the risk of being attacked, or at least your camera being attacked.
Where does this fear for a picture comes from? There are two explanations for that. the first is that a lot of Ghanaians think that "white people" will use those pictures back home to show how poor and unmannered the Africans are. When they look at magazines and TV-programs about Africa, they often so only negative publicity. The result is a feeling of shame, and a fear of a picture.
The second reason has more to do with the religious background of a lot of Ghanaians. In a lot of regions in the country the people still believe in "voodoo" and a picture can be something to practise voodoo on. Most of the times that is not the reason why they don't want a white person to "snap" them, because they know that white people don't do voodoo. But towards other Ghanaians that can be an important reason to say "no" to a picture.
Written Dec 15, 2006
Helpfulness
Just as we were finished our lunch, there was a bit of commotion outside the walls of the restaurant, with a crowd gathering and throwing stoned at the ground just by the wall. Being curious creatures, we went to investigate, and found that it was a snake! The locals had managed to kill it (although it was still wriggling) by the time we got there (thankfully) and we never did find out whether it was poisonous or not (again thankfully). A bit of excitement for the day though.
Written Feb 7, 2007
Pieter11 Says: If you are in Ghana, or basically anywhere in West-Africa, you should at least once go to a church on a Sunday to see the service, or better: the celebration. When I was in Tamale I visited the church with the great name "Maranatha Charismatic Centre", in the east of the...
Pieter11 Says: In Ghana they have a very different system of local government. They don't know a system with mayors or anything. Instead they have local Chiefs. A chief is someone who is chosen as a leader of a particular community, mostly coming from one family for generations in a row....
Pieter11 Says: If you want to have some relaxation during the weekends and a nice way to get some refreshment, a very nice place to go to is the swimming pool at the VRA Clubhouse.The VRA stands for Volta River Authority, the electricity company of Ghana. Their terrain in Tamale has some...
Pieter11 Says: At the southside of the Tamale citycentre, a Chinese company is currently building a great new football (soccer) stadium. This Tamale Stadium is to be opened in 2008, when it will be used for the 26th African Nations Cup, that will be held in Ghana. The stadium will become...
Pieter11 Says: The Haj Adams' Clinic is a small hospital in the west of the city centre. It is meant for the poorest people of the city, who cannot afford to go to a "real" hospital. The prices in this clinic are very low: the only thing the patients have to pay are the materials.The...
Pieter11 Says: Very close to "my" computerschool was this primary school. A lot of the children I have been teaching were attenting this school. The original building of "Zion's" was heavily damaged during a storm in 2005, when the roof was blown of. Ever since the children are being...
Pieter11 Says: During my stay in Tamale I worked at a small computerschool called Buzz Computer Center. This center was started by an American volunteer that stayed in Tamale until August 2006. The school teaches basic computerskills to Primary School children, from 4 schools in the direct...
Pieter11 Says: Ghana is a popular destination for volunteers to work. The country is English-speaking, the country is safe and politically stable, and the country is in big need of people who would like to help a country in development. In Ghana itself, Tamale is a place where a lot of...
Tamale, city of goats, bikes and dust
Tamale is the third city of Ghana, but it is very different from the metropole Accra and the crowded Kumasi, the two largest ones. Instead, Tamale is a place where you can easily find your way around,...
We stopped in Tamale only to have something to eat for lunch. Tamale is the Northern Regional Capital of Ghana, with a population of around 350,000 people, mainly from the Dagomba ethnic group.
Build your own Tamale page
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