Volta

Wli is the tallest waterfall in West Africa and is reached by a genuinely pleasant walk rather than a scramble — around forty-five minutes on a flat forest path with a series of small bridges, through country thick with butterflies, ending at a pool below the lower fall. The volume is seasonal and considerable after rain, and the spray reaches you well before the pool does. Swimming is permitted and cold. Above it, the upper fall requires a proper climb of a few hours up the escarpment, steep and often slippery, and rewards with a view back over the valley into Togo — the border runs along the ridge, and the top of the falls is on the other side of it. A guide is required for the upper route and sensible for the lower, and they are arranged at the village at the trailhead. The wider area holds a scatter of smaller falls that see almost no visitors, including one near Liati Wote reached through cocoa farms, which makes a good half-day when the main site is busy.

Ghana's highest peak rises near the Togo border and is climbed from the village at its foot in something between an hour and two, depending on how much you stop. It is steep — properly steep in its middle section, on a path of roots and loose earth rather than steps — and short enough that most reasonably fit people manage it comfortably in the cool of early morning. The summit gives the Volta hills rolling away in both directions and Togo immediately east. Guides are arranged in the village and the fee supports it. Further north, Amedzofe sits at one of the highest inhabited elevations in the country, cool enough for a jumper in the evening, with a short walk to a lookout above the settlement and a waterfall below it; it functions as the region's hill station and is a pleasant place to be based rather than merely to pass through. The villages through this belt are small, welcoming and used to walkers, and the network of paths between them is the reason to give the region more than a weekend.

Ghana's famous cloth is associated almost entirely with Bonwire in Ashanti, and that association hides something: the Ewe of the Volta Region have their own kente tradition, distinct in pattern, palette and meaning, woven around Agotime and Kpetoe near the Togo border. Where Ashanti kente is strongly geometric and heavily gold, Ewe weaving characteristically incorporates figurative motifs — animals, objects, symbols worked into the strips — and a softer, more varied colour range. The two traditions developed alongside each other and weavers on both sides will happily explain the differences at length. Kpetoe holds an annual kente festival, and outside it the workshops operate as they do in Ashanti: strips on hand looms, sewn edge to edge, sold directly by the people making them. For a visitor who has already been to Bonwire this is the more interesting stop, precisely because nobody sends you there.

Lake Volta forms the region's western boundary and is the largest reservoir on earth by surface area — a scale that only registers from the shore, where the far side is simply not visible. Villages along it live by fishing, the light on the water at either end of the day is the reason photographers come, and a slow passenger ferry works the long route through it, which is a journey to take for its own sake rather than to get anywhere — the transport guide is blunt about why it makes a poor connection. At Tafi Atome, an inland village keeps a troop of mona monkeys that are protected by local tradition rather than by any fence — they are considered sacred, they have never been hunted here, and the consequence is that they come to people rather than away from them. It is a genuinely unusual conservation arrangement and the village runs the visits itself. In the far south, the Keta Lagoon is the largest in the country and a wetland of international importance: a shallow expanse behind a narrow sandbar, thick with migratory waders and terns through the northern winter, almost entirely unvisited, and reached along a strip road with ocean on one side and lagoon on the other.

The region's southern end is a strip of sand a few hundred metres wide with the Atlantic on one side and the lagoon on the other, and driving it is one of the odder pleasures in Ghana — ocean surf to the right, still water and fish traps to the left, and villages strung along the middle. Keta, the main town on the strip, has been losing ground to the sea for a century; whole streets went, and a long sea-defence scheme now holds the line. Standing on what remains of Fort Prinzenstein makes the point better than any account of it: the fort was built by the Danes in the 1780s, was one of the trading posts through which captives were shipped from this coast, later served as a prison, and a substantial part of it is simply gone into the water. What is left is looked after locally, a guide from the town will show you round for a donation, and the sea is audible the whole time you are inside it. Around Anloga, west of Keta, the sandy ground carries an intensive shallot cultivation that is unlike anything else in the country — small irrigated plots worked by hand, generations deep, and the source of most of the shallots Ghana eats. The coast here has no tourist infrastructure to speak of, which is precisely why the drive is worth building into a Volta trip rather than leaving as the bit you skip on the way to the border.