Greater Accra

Half an hour to an hour west along the coast, past the airport and the western suburbs, the shoreline opens into a run of villages where the beach is genuinely good — wide, sandy and backed by palms rather than by the city's industrial frontage. Kokrobite is the established one, and what makes it unusual is not the sand but the culture around it: a drumming and dance school tradition has operated here for decades, teaching djembe and traditional dance to visitors on courses of anything from an afternoon to several weeks, and the resulting scene is a genuine mix of Ghanaian musicians, long-stay students and weekenders from the capital. There is a small surf scene alongside it with board hire and lessons. The pattern to know is the week's rhythm: Sundays are loud and full, with live drumming and the whole strip busy, and midweek is quiet enough to have the beach largely to yourself. Swim with sense — the Atlantic here has a strong undertow, there are no lifeguards, and the surf is more powerful than it looks from a chair; the health and safety guide sets out what to do about it.

About forty-five minutes north-east of the city, a group of low granite inselbergs rises out of flat savanna, and the reserve around them is the single most useful thing in this region for a visitor short on time. It holds baboons — habituated, numerous, and usually visible from the entrance road — along with kob antelope, zebra introduced to the reserve, ostrich, and a good bird list. You can drive it, walk it with a ranger, or cycle it, and a morning is enough. The hills themselves hold caves that were used as shelter historically and are shown by guides on foot, with a climb up onto the rock giving a long view over the plain back towards the coast. It is not Mole and does not pretend to be — the animals are fewer and the scale is smaller — but for someone with two days in Accra and no time to reach the north, it is the difference between seeing Ghanaian wildlife and not.

At the region's eastern end, the Volta finally reaches the Atlantic, and the meeting is the best thing in Greater Accra. The river arrives wide and slow, breaking into channels around sandbars and low islands before the sandspit and the open ocean, and the result is a landscape of water on both sides — calm river on one hand, surf on the other, sometimes separated by only a few dozen metres of sand. Boats run out to the islands and the river mouth from the town, and staying on one of them is the point rather than a novelty: no roads, no traffic, and the light on the water at either end of the day. Two seasonal draws overlay it. Turtles nest along this coast roughly between November and March, and community-run night patrols take visitors out under proper guidance. And through the dry season the wind comes across the estuary steadily enough to have made this Ghana's kitesurfing centre, with flat water inside the sandbars for beginners and the open sea outside for everyone else.

Between the capital and the estuary, the coast runs east through the country's main port city and then along a strip of low, hot shoreline with the sea on one side and a chain of shallow lagoons on the other. It is not conventionally scenic and it repays a slow drive: fishing villages where the boats are hauled up on the sand and the catch is sold where it lands, salt workings on the lagoon margins where salt has been harvested for a very long time, and birdlife on the shallow water that is thicker than anywhere else near the capital. Prampram and the smaller settlements along here have become weekend spots for people from the city without becoming resorts. The practical note for this whole eastern stretch is transport: the road is fine, shared transport runs it constantly, and it is one of the easier parts of Ghana to explore without a hired car.