Beach Road on Wednesday Morning

It’s neck-and-neck in awe-inspiration with Spintex Road's delightful melee of fancy shops and devastating-girls-at-the-roadside. It was a glorious sunny drive from Teshie to Tema (not exactly Accra). The sea was brilliant and royal blue-er than the sky :)

The sea side of the road is lined with thin woods of trees, which soon give way to the bare and endless strip of red earth. The unforgettable essence of this particular stretch of sea carries with the drive from here on: a wet-mop, wet-dog kind of whiff.

The road soon begins to buckle and bump as if the sea were crawling under it. Wooden and concrete benches appear in the striking terracotta. And fish girls! Selling fat and curvy fish on askew tabletops. I’m ogling one from the corner of my driving eye. She’s frantically slaughtering the fish with a heavy butcher’s knife, as a gust of wind mistakes her dress and apron for a kite; makes me notice her satellite-dish hips and helium backside :)

The marvel ends with the man-made bank of black and grey granite (?)boulders. Here, the sea sings and lilts, and splashes against them in cheerful celebration.Of what? Fish? Women?

The left-hand side also begins with the same flimsy woods on either side of a revamped rail line (I have never seen a train whizz past). Then you drive by a vast and grassy marshland, part solid-enough-to-tread, part nearly-clear lagoon. In the far-off distance stands alone a two-storey shed. It’s built with both bamboo and strong wood – favourite haunt for a thousand white birds, and I’ve explored it by the inch.

If you brave a little muck, itchy grass and a bonnet of bothersome bugs, you will find upstairs, carved gracefully on a beam, “Sweet Kelly”. At that secluded spot, my flighty mind is not alone in wondering what Kelly was so kind to do as to make her a syrupy immortal. My own merely mortal mind is seduced with unbelief at the Robinson Kwame Crusoe who built this use-less monument, in the middle of nowhere, to lure Sweet Kelly.

The marsh makes way for the sprawling flats, Tema-side. For such a jewel of a road, why does it want a proper name? Or does anybody know it?