Life slows as we drive out of the city. The chaotic Accra streets, flat yet riddled with potholes, flow into smooth countryside roads that wander subtle hills. Speed bumps are scattered further apart and we drive faster, soon owning the road, only occasionally weaving around trucks with their towering loads topped by perching boys, or pickups with their beds gorged with lethargic cattle. Sprigs of young grass pierce the ever-present blanket of fine yellow dust, and the crowded buildings split. Trees shoot up between houses, their roots violated by the rummaging of pigs and goats, the scratching of chickens. The houses change too, buildings that desperately clung together crack apart to become the low spread of villages, their bright siding morphing into dull clay. Some are round, some rectangular. Some are crumbling dirt walls contained by a fractured skeleton of dry sticks and topped by graying fronds, others smoothed stone or haphazard wooden planks covered with rusting metal sheets.

A fluttering rainbow of a clothesline fractures the dominating shades of muted greens and browns, its vibrant colors lending themselves to the life of the village. Blurry forms of children appear beneath the wide low skirts of mango trees, the shapes of women bulge with the babies on their backs, and pulse as they pump buckets of water from wells. The intense mourning colors of red and black expose the seven funerals we pass, crowds of grievers pooling in shaded groves, broken strains of music sneaking in our cracked windows. The naked silhouette of a young boy flashes against a rare yellow wall, catching my eye for an instant before we are swept to the fringe of the village and follow the winding road into undisturbed country.

We drift higher, the savannah sweeping out until the haze thickens at a wavering horizon. Low shrubs and bushes lay passive on the grasslands, one straight spine of a tree soaring above every so often, dominating the land with its unfaltering height. The sun falls from the sky, softening the view from my smeary window and washing the mist with a chalky orange hue. We turn down a dirt road, lurching below spindles of yellow grass grazing the sky above us, and arousing a cloud of red dust that bleeds into the sunset behind us. Far off in the distance, lightening cracks among trampled clouds, but directly above me the stars glow bright against the inky sky. I rest my head on the cool glass and look up, absorbed in the deepening night as we continue north.

I wrote this post early this morning, sitting in the Accra airport getting ready head north again, but flying this time. The scenery I describe comes from my view out a window of a van on two 12-hour days of beautiful and bumpy driving during a trip I took my second weekend here. The journey was breathtaking and overwhelming, and I wanted nothing more than to take pictures of everything around me. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible through the grimy window, so I settled for the next best thing: taking detailed notes of everything I thought and saw. Today I compiled them into something I hope can help you to imagine at least some of what I was seeing. It’s impossible to do it justice. And those villages I described? I’m about to leave to go live in one for a week, hosted by a local family who farms and prepares soya beans. Working with them, eating with them, speaking with them, playing with them, sleeping with them, and cut off from contact with my familiar world back home. And I can’t wait.