Salon :: Tech & Business

Ask the pilot: No ticket? No problem. Hitching a ride in West Africa, the world's most "dangerous" place to fly

From the sun-fired dunes of a Saharan erg to the watery emerald sprawl of the Okovanggo, the vistas of Africa are primordially beautiful, their shapes and hues drawn from another epoch. A lucky few have beheld the thundering splendor of Victoria Falls, one of the planet's most unspeakably humbling places; or marveled at the baobab forests of Senegal, where a sea of gnarled limbs claw desperately at the heavens, frozen in suspended animation against a cobalt sky.

Then there's Kumasi.

Should anyone need a reminder that abstracting a whole continent into a slide show of romantic imagery is at best unfair, I welcome you to Ghana's second-largest city and one of West Africa's busiest commercial centers -- a swarming, oven-baked semitropolis marked by an ever-present blanket of filthy air and Bangkok-esque traffic jams. "Frenetic" some might call it, or to employ that most irritating of travel guide euphemisms, "bustling." To me, it's a great convective hurricane of a place that embodies everything one can and perhaps should despise about cities. You don't experience Kumasi so much as survive it: The simplest excursion is a battle against impenetrable crowds, scorching heat and a mad, horn-blaring rodeo of cars, trucks and buses.

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