Accra west along five hundred kilometres of shoreline holding some thirty surviving European forts and castles, UNESCO-listed together in 1979, with a village built on stilts at the far end of it; then up through the forest to the Ashanti capital and its looms, and eight hours north into savannah for a mud-and-stick mosque and the park where you approach elephants on foot behind an armed ranger rather than from a vehicle.
Accra
Arrive, get a local SIM before leaving the airport, and give the day to Jamestown. Fort James went up for the English in 1673 and the lighthouse beside it still works; the Ga fishing community below has been landing boats on that beach for longer than either. Ussher Fort, a ten-minute walk east, is older by a generation — the Dutch fortified their trading factory here as Fort Crèvecœur in 1649 and it only took its English name after the Anglo-Dutch treaty handed it over in 1868.
Accra, the independence city
Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park stands on the old polo ground where he declared independence on 6 March 1957, and he is buried in it. Then the W. E. B. Du Bois Centre in Cantonments: he moved to Accra in 1961 at Nkrumah's invitation, took Ghanaian citizenship, and died here on 27 August 1963, the day before the March on Washington. Makola market in between, for lunch and for scale.
West to Cape Coast
Out along the N1. Cape Coast Castle was built by the Swedes in 1653, changed hands repeatedly, and ended as the British headquarters of the whole Gold Coast. Take the guided tour rather than wandering: the route runs from the governor's rooms above down to the male dungeon and out through the door on the seaward wall, and the order is the argument.
Elmina
Twenty minutes west. São Jorge da Mina was begun in 1482, which makes it the oldest European building anywhere south of the Sahara; the Dutch took it in 1637 and held it for two hundred and thirty-five years, until they sold their entire Gold Coast to Britain in 1872. UNESCO listed it in 1979 along with some thirty other forts and castles on this coast. Afterwards walk the harbour, which is a working fishing port of several hundred boats and not a heritage exhibit.
Kakum
Inland to closed-canopy rainforest, most of which Ghana has lost elsewhere. The walkway is seven suspension bridges strung between emergent trees, roughly 350 metres of it and 40 metres up. Go on the first entry of the day or book the dawn birdwatching slot — the coach parties arrive mid-morning and the forest goes quiet before they do.
Nzulezu
A long westward day to Beyin, then an hour by dugout canoe up a channel through the reeds to a village of about five hundred people built entirely on stilts over Lake Tadane — one street of planking, houses either side, a school and a chapel on the same platform. People live here; a guide from the village takes you in and the fee is the village's.
Axim and the last forts
Back east along the coast. Fort San Antonio at Axim was built by the Portuguese in 1515 and sits on a headland above a beach with almost nobody on it. Nkroful, where Nkrumah was born, is half an hour inland and has a small memorial. Sleep at Busua or Axim; the surf here has a serious undertow and there are no lifeguards anywhere on this coast.
North to Kumasi
The first of the two long bus days, back through Takoradi and then inland on the road to Kumasi. The forest thickens and then starts to be cocoa — the belt that pays for a large part of the country begins somewhere around Tarkwa and does not really stop until Ashanti.
Kumasi
Manhyia Palace was built in 1925 for Prempeh I, who had been deported by the British in 1896 and spent nearly thirty years in Sierra Leone and the Seychelles before they let him come home. It is a museum now and the Asantehene lives next door. Kejetia below it is one of the largest markets in West Africa and the fastest way to lose an afternoon.
Bonwire and Ntonso
Two villages north-east of the city that make the two cloths. Bonwire weaves kente on narrow treadle looms in strips a hand's width across, sewn together afterwards; Ntonso stamps adinkra with carved calabash blocks and a black dye boiled down from badie bark. Both will put you on a loom or a stamp, and both are working villages rather than demonstrations.
Kumasi to Tamale
The second long bus day and the one where the country changes. North on the N10 through Techiman and Kintampo, the forest thinning into savannah somewhere past the Black Volta crossing, mosques replacing churches on the roadside. Tamale is flat, hot, and the third city of Ghana.
Larabanga and Mole
West on the tarred Fufulso–Damongo road. Larabanga's mosque is mud and projecting timber in the Sudanese style, whitewashed, small enough to walk around in two minutes, and traditionally dated to 1421 — a claim nobody has been able to prove or disprove. The Mole gate is ten minutes further and the motel sits on an escarpment above a waterhole.
Mole on foot
The walking safaris go out at about seven and again mid-afternoon with an armed Wildlife Division ranger, and they are the reason to be here rather than at a fenced reserve elsewhere. You approach elephants at ground level with nothing between you and them, which recalibrates the animal completely. Kob, waterbuck, warthog and baboon are constant. Lion are still on the species list and are effectively gone: four decades of foot-patrol records and a camera survey running to several thousand trap-nights found a decline of roughly 96 per cent and then no lions at all, so a guide who offers you one is selling you something. This is Ghana's largest protected area and it is worked rather than displayed — the ranger is a salaried patrol officer, the gate fee funds the patrol, and the villages on the boundary, Larabanga among them, are inside the argument about the park rather than outside it.
Up to Bolgatanga
A transfer day back through Fufulso and Tamale and on north. Bolgatanga is the market town of the Upper East and the basket weaving here is a real export trade rather than a souvenir line — the straw is elephant grass, split and dyed and woven damp. Sirigu, half an hour north and on tomorrow's road, is where the Kassena-Nankani houses are painted in black, white and ochre geometry by the women's cooperative that has kept the practice going.
Paga, then south to the flight
Paga sits on the Burkinabè border and its crocodiles are under a taboo that forbids harming them, which is why they are approachable and why nobody in the village finds this remarkable. Pikworo, at Nania three kilometres west, was a slave transit camp founded in 1704 and worked until about 1845, feeding captives south to the Salaga market — the granite has bowl-shaped hollows ground into it that were used as eating dishes, and there is no building and no interpretation centre. This is also the one day of the route that needs checking rather than assuming, because the border strip carries a standing advisory (see the notes). Then the road back to Tamale for the evening flight to Accra.
Good to know
A yellow fever certificate is required of every arrival over nine months old, it has to have been issued at least ten days before you land, and it is genuinely inspected at Kotoka before you reach immigration; since 2016 the certificate is valid for life and no country may demand a booster. Visas run through the Ghana Immigration Service portal at evisa.immigration.gov.gh, which has replaced the paper application at missions for most nationalities and which asks you to upload the yellow fever card with the form. African passport holders have paid nothing for that visa since 25 May 2026 — which is not the same thing as visa-free, because the application and the pre-departure screening still happen. The rules here have moved twice in two years, so confirm the current position with a Ghanaian mission before you book rather than with a year-old forum thread. Malaria is the medical question that actually matters here: transmission is year-round and countrywide, Accra included, and there is nowhere in Ghana high enough to give you an altitude break from it, so take prophylaxis for the whole trip and keep taking it after you leave. Fees are quoted in cedi and revised often, so treat any figure you find online as an order of magnitude rather than a price: Wildlife Division entry at Mole, the Kakum walkway, the castle tickets at Cape Coast and Elmina and the Manhyia museum together cost a small fraction of a single day in a Kenyan or Tanzanian park, and this is the one part of West African travel that is genuinely cheaper than the east. Carry cash for gates, canoes and village guides; everything else runs on MTN Mobile Money, which a local SIM makes available to you. The country has two different rainfall patterns and this route uses both: the south gets a main wet season roughly May to July and a shorter spell in September and October, while the north has a single one running from about May through October and peaking in August — and the north is where a week of this trip sits. The harmattan blows Saharan dust south from about December to February — cooler nights in the north, flat hazy light, and occasional cancelled domestic flights. For Mole the dry months are the ones that work, because the elephants come down to the waterhole when the bush has nothing else in it; in the wet they disperse across the park and you may see none at all. Self-drive is realistic on the main corridors — Ghana drives on the right, the N1, the N10 and the Fufulso–Damongo road are tarred, and fuel is not a problem — but do not drive after dark anywhere on this route: unlit vehicles, no hard shoulder and livestock on the carriageway make night driving the single most dangerous thing you could do here. Police checkpoints are frequent and routine; keep the papers on the passenger seat. On the coast between Cape Coast and Axim the surf carries a strong undertow and nowhere is patrolled. Finally, one part of this route carries a live security warning and it is the last two days. The chieftaincy conflict in Bawku, about ninety kilometres east of Bolgatanga, has run for years, has killed people, and brings curfews and roadblocks imposed and lifted at short notice; separately, militant activity has spilled south from Burkina Faso into the border districts. British and other foreign-office advice is against all but essential travel both to the Bawku area and to within twenty-five kilometres of the Burkina Faso border — a strip that contains Paga outright and clips Sirigu. Nothing here goes near Bawku, but day fifteen drives into that border strip on purpose. Read your own government's advice the week you travel rather than the month you book, ask at the hotel in Bolgatanga on the morning, and if the position has changed, drop Paga and Sirigu and run the day back to Tamale from Bolgatanga instead — the route loses two stops and nothing structural.
Shorter or longer?
Four or five more days east of Accra instead of flying straight home: the falls at Wli, the highest in West Africa; the climb up Afadja at 885 metres, which is the highest ground in the country; the mona monkeys at Tafi Atome, protected by village taboo rather than by fence; and the dam wall at Akosombo that made Lake Volta.
Accra, Cape Coast, Elmina, Kakum, Nzulezu and back. Keeps the castles, the forest and the stilt village, cuts Kumasi, both long bus days and the whole of the north — which is also most of the cost.