At its best, this is a great "one-stop shop" for drums, wood carvings, woven kente cloth and other crafts. When it's busy, though, it's more widely known for some outrageous displays of Ghanaian sales histrionics.Where are the locals going that tourists don't know about?Half the fun on offer is to be had at family funerals, where music, dancing, drinking and feasting go on well into the night and beyond, with the incessant beat of drums being enough to wake the dead. More accessible is Tiptoe Lane, whose bars are almost unknown by visitors, and the occasional high-spirited eccentric may regale drinkers with an impromptu street dance.Where are the chic people doing their shopping?Actually, the seriously chic Ghanaians may well hop on a plane and head for London, to Marks and Spencer or even Ikea. The shops in Accra tend to be pretty well spaced out, and this gives the locals plenty of scope to practise their crazy driving techniques as they move about the city. In the upmarket district of Osu, Woodins is popular for clothes while Koala is all the rage for everything from food to glassware and household linens.
And, hidden away in the back streets, there is the occasional upmarket perfumery which welcomes well-heeled Ghanaian women into air-conditioned bliss.What's the trendy place to escape to for the weekend?Ghanaians head for Kakum National Park, about three hours' drive out of Accra, where the canopy walkway is a terrifying 100ft above ground. It may have been designed for visitors to get a glimpse into the rainforest canopy, and as such it's fascinating, but locals often treat it as the nearest equivalent to Alton Towers and come for the thrills.Tricia Hayne is editorial director of Bradt Travel Guides, whose second edition of 'Ghana: The Bradt Travel Guide' is published in July.. How can you fail to love a place where, in a tourist guide, it tells you that one of its great souvenirs is "canned sprats"? That is part of the appeal of this Baltic city, the capital of Latvia, which has retained enough briny flavour to feel like a major metropolis, while having enough dinky cobbled corners, spires and Hanseatic gables to satisfy those who wish for the historic and picturesque. There's fun, too: Riga is becoming the latest destination for those in search of a thriving bar culture, and has a reputation for supporting quite a wild nightlife. How can you fail to love a place where, in a tourist guide, it tells you that one of its great souvenirs is "canned sprats"? That is part of the appeal of this Baltic city, the capital of Latvia, which has retained enough briny flavour to feel like a major metropolis, while having enough dinky cobbled corners, spires and Hanseatic gables to satisfy those who wish for the historic and picturesque.
There's fun, too: Riga is becoming the latest destination for those in search of a thriving bar culture, and has a reputation for supporting quite a wild nightlife. Why go?To find a city in the throes of becoming the "new Prague": that is, an Eastern European city that has left the Soviet system with its antiquity intact, and is now ready to introduce masses of new tourists to undiscovered charms. Okay, there are several new Pragues it competes with Tallin in Estonia, Vilnius in Lithuania among other tourism debutantes but Riga has a lot to offer, both in the city and within easy reach of it; and the young Americans who helped wake up the Czech capital are in evidence here.It is more Soviet in feel than some of the other Eastern European cities the population is divided between Russian and Latvians, who sometimes do not see eye to eye and there are a fair number of high-rolling Russians in the bars and hotels, clutching mobile phones to leather jackets. As for the Latvians themselves, they look like Swedes and have their steely-blue eyes fixed on their future. Many see their opportunities in tourism, and so each year sees new launches, indicating that Riga will have even more to offer in five years' time.Indeed, over the past five years many bars and restaurants have sprung up, and there are fascinating museums, too.
