Two weeks in Ghana

The route, and why it runs this way round

Run the two weeks as an anticlockwise loop: Accra, west along the coast to Cape Coast and Elmina, north to Kumasi, north again to Mole, then back down for the Volta Region and a final night in Accra. Every other ordering costs you a driving day.

The logic is simple. The coast road west out of Accra and the road north from Cape Coast to Kumasi form a natural chain, so you never double back. Mole is the furthest point and the one that justifies the distance. The Volta Region lies east of Accra, which makes it the obvious last leg before your flight home. Trying to do the Volta first, or Kumasi before the coast, forces you across the country twice.

Fourteen days sounds generous and is in fact tight, because Ghana is bigger than it looks on a map and the roads are slower than the distances suggest. The difference between a good two weeks and an exhausting one comes down to two decisions: how many nights you give Cape Coast, Kumasi and Mole, and whether you fly one of the northern legs.

Days one and two: Accra

Give Accra two days at the start rather than saving it for the end, because you will be tired at the end and the city rewards energy.

Most long-haul flights land in the early morning, which means day one begins before your hotel room is ready. Treat it lightly. Sleep if you need to, then start in the late afternoon with the craft market near the seafront or a walk along the shore at Labadi. The first evening is for banku and grilled tilapia and going to bed early.

Day two is the real one, and it belongs to the morning. Be at Jamestown by eight for the harbour, the boat builders and the lighthouse, ideally with a guide from the neighbourhood rather than alone. Then Black Star Square while the light is still bearable, and the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, where the museum beneath the mausoleum deserves a proper ninety minutes. Makola Market if crowds do not bother you, lunch, then the heat of the afternoon indoors.

Keep the packing tight. You are about to spend twelve days moving between hotels, some of them with steps and no lift, and a smaller bag is worth more than a complete wardrobe.

Days three to five: the Central Region castles

Leave Accra by seven in the morning, and you will be at Cape Coast in about three hours; leave at nine and it can take five.

The road west runs through Kasoa, where the interchange traffic can swallow forty minutes on a bad morning, then past Winneba and along the coast through Mankessim. It is a decent surfaced road with speed ramps through every town and police checkpoints along the way, which are routine and nothing to worry about.

Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle are the reason most people come to Ghana, and they are not sightseeing. You walk down into the male and female dungeons, stand in the condemned cell, and come out through the Door of No Return to the fishing beach on the other side. The guides are excellent and unflinching. It is heavy, and it should be — these forts were holding places in the transatlantic trade in human beings, and the Ghanaian coast carried more of them than any comparable stretch of West Africa. Do one castle per day. Doing both in a morning is a mistake people make once.

Kakum National Park sits about forty minutes inland, and its canopy walkway strings seven bridges through the rainforest at treetop height. Go early, before the school groups, and expect the walk itself to take less time than the queue on a busy day. Assin Manso, the slave river site where captives were washed before the final march to the coast, is roughly an hour inland and is a quieter, more affecting stop than its size suggests.

Stay at Elmina or on the beach just west of Cape Coast rather than in the middle of town. Two nights minimum; three if you want a proper day at the beach or a boat through the mangroves.

Days six and seven: Kumasi and the Ashanti heartland

The drive from Cape Coast to Kumasi takes about four to five hours through Assin Fosu and Bekwai, and the landscape changes completely on the way: coastal scrub gives way to cocoa, forest and red earth.

Kumasi is Ghana's second city and the seat of the Asantehene, and it feels older and denser than Accra. Manhyia Palace Museum is the place to start, because the history of the Ashanti kingdom — the Golden Stool, the wars with the British, the exile of Prempeh I to the Seychelles and his return — is told there in the palace the British built for him. The Prempeh II Jubilee Museum and the military museum in the old fort fill in the rest.

Kejetia is the market, and it is one of the largest in West Africa: a plateau of stalls and roofs that has been rebuilt in part into a covered market while the surrounding streets carry on as they always have. It is hot, close and overwhelming, and an hour with someone who knows their way around beats three hours of wandering.

The craft villages north-east of the city are the other half of Kumasi. Bonwire for kente weaving, Ntonso for adinkra stamping with bark dye, Ahwiaa for wood carving. Each is a short drive and each is a working village rather than a display, so you will be sold to and you should expect to bargain. Go on a weekday when the looms are running. There is much more on the court, the festivals and the etiquette in our guide to Kumasi and the Ashanti Region.

Days eight to ten: north to Mole

This is the long leg, and you should treat the travel day as a travel day rather than pretending it will leave you time for anything else.

The drive from Kumasi to Tamale takes about six hours, sometimes more, through Techiman and Kintampo on the main north road. The Kintampo waterfalls make a reasonable stretch-your-legs stop roughly halfway. North of Techiman the forest thins into savannah, the towns spread out, the trees change to shea and baobab, and you feel the country change around you. From Tamale to Mole is a further three to four hours west through Damongo, and the last stretch approaching the park is unsurfaced and slow — considerably slower after rain.

The alternative is to fly Kumasi or Accra to Tamale and drive from there. Domestic flights on this route are short and comparatively inexpensive, they are operated by a small number of carriers whose schedules change, and confirming availability and fares with the airline directly is the only sensible approach. Flying one of these legs is the single change that makes fourteen days comfortable instead of tight.

At Mole itself, stay two nights. The motel sits on an escarpment looking down over a waterhole, and in the dry season you can watch elephants come to drink from the terrace without moving. Do one walking safari with an armed ranger at dawn, which gets you close to the ground and to the tracks, and one vehicle safari, which covers more distance. Larabanga's mud-and-stick mosque, one of the oldest in West Africa, is a few minutes from the park gate, and the community canoe trip at Mognori on the Mole River is a gentler counterpoint to the game drives. Confirm park entry arrangements and guide fees with the Wildlife Division on arrival, since they are reviewed periodically.

Getting back south without losing two days

Fly from Tamale to Accra if you possibly can, because driving the whole way back turns two days of your holiday into repetition.

The return drive retraces the road through Damongo, Tamale, Kintampo and Techiman, and it is the same road you enjoyed on the way up with none of the novelty. Broken into two days with a night in Kumasi it is perfectly bearable; done in one it is twelve hours of vehicle.

There is one genuinely good reason to drive back, and that is Bolgatanga and the far north-east. If the crafts, the compound architecture at Sirigu and the markets of the Upper East interest you, extend that leg deliberately rather than treating it as a corridor, and read our piece on northern Ghana from Tamale to Bolgatanga first. It is a different country up there, and worth its own week if you ever come back.

Whichever you choose, arrive back in the south with a night in hand before the Volta leg. Starting a new region on the evening of a long drive is how people end up too tired to enjoy the waterfall they came for.

Days eleven to thirteen: the Volta Region

The Volta is the green, hilly, quiet counterweight to everything you have just done, and three days there is the right amount.

Akosombo is about two hours from Accra along the road through Somanya, and the dam that created Lake Volta — one of the largest artificial lakes in the world by surface area — is worth the stop for the scale of it and the view back down the gorge. Boat trips run on the lake from the town, and the Adomi bridge upstream is a fine thing to stand on.

Ho, the regional capital, is a comfortable base, roughly three and a half hours from Accra on a good day. From there it is about an hour and a half north to Wli Falls near Hohoe, the tallest waterfall in West Africa. The lower falls are an easy forty-minute walk over stream crossings through forest; the upper falls are a steep, sweaty climb of several hours that is genuinely hard in the wet and worth it for the view. Bats hang in thousands on the cliff face above the plunge pool.

Mount Afadja, the highest peak in Ghana, is a short and steep climb from the village of Liati Wote and takes most people a couple of hours up. Tafi Atome's mona monkeys, protected by local custom rather than by a fence, come down to the villagers who feed them. Amedzofe sits high on the ridge with cool air and a waterfall below.

What makes the Volta different is that almost everything runs through the community. You arrive at a village office, you pay a community fee, a guide from the village takes you, and the money stays there. It is slower and more human than a ticketed attraction, and it asks a little patience in return.

Day fourteen: Accra and flying home

Come back to Accra the day before you fly, not on the morning of the flight, because the road from Ho can lose you two hours without warning.

The last day works best as an unhurried one. The craft market near the seafront for anything you have been putting off buying, a decent restaurant in Osu or Cantonments, and time to repack around the carvings and cloth you did not plan for. If you missed the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park at the start, this is when to catch it.

Most flights to Europe and the Gulf leave Kotoka in the late evening or overnight, so you will have a full day and a late departure. Ask your hotel about a late checkout, and arrange your ride to the airport in advance — the run to Kotoka in the evening peak is not the moment to be opening a ride-hailing app.

At the airport, allow longer than feels necessary. Departures at Terminal 3 involve several checks, the evening bank of flights fills the hall, and the queue for check-in on a busy night is substantial.

Come back to Accra a day early. The road will take that day from you eventually; better it is a spare one.

Honest driving times and what changes them

Every timing given above assumes a dry day, an early start and no incident, and you should add an hour to any leg you cannot afford to get wrong.

Three things stretch a Ghanaian driving day. The first is leaving late: the difference between departing Accra at seven and at nine is often the difference between three hours and five to Cape Coast, because of Kasoa. The second is rain, which slows unsurfaced approaches such as the last stretch into Mole and can make a village road into a problem. The third is the unplanned — a funeral filling a town on a Saturday, roadworks on the north road, a diversion nobody mentioned.

Ordinary friction is constant rather than dramatic: speed ramps through every settlement, police checkpoints where you slow and greet and move on, fuel stations that are frequent on main roads and rare off them, and long stretches with no reliable phone signal in the north. Night driving is the one thing worth avoiding outright, because unlit vehicles, livestock and pedestrians share unlit roads.

If you want this route compressed rather than extended, our seven-day Ghana itinerary shows which legs to drop, and it is a more honest starting point than trying to squeeze fourteen days of driving into eight.

Adjusting the plan for season, pace and family

Change the route rather than the length if your dates, your pace or your travelling companions do not suit the standard loop.

In the main rains, roughly April to July in the south, trim the northern leg and give the extra days to the coast and the Volta, where the waterfalls run at their strongest and the hills are at their greenest. In the dry season, do the reverse: the north is at its best from about December to April, when scarce water concentrates wildlife around the Mole waterhole.

Travelling with young children changes the calculation more than anything else. Six hours in a vehicle is a long time for a five-year-old and the castles are emotionally heavy for anyone under about twelve. A two-centre trip — Accra and the coast, with a few days at a beach hotel near Elmina or Busua — usually produces a happier fortnight than the full loop.

If you are travelling to meet family as well as to see the country, build in slack deliberately. Ghanaian family time expands: one afternoon in the family house becomes a whole day and then a funeral on Saturday that you would be wrong to miss. Plan eleven days of itinerary for a fourteen-day trip and let the rest happen.

How we run two-week trips

Ghana Travel & Tour builds fourteen-day routes like this one around the parts you actually care about, with a driver who knows the north road, accommodation booked ahead at Elmina, Kumasi and Mole where rooms are limited, and a domestic flight slotted in when it saves you a day. We will tell you plainly when a plan has too many legs in it, and which one to cut.

The current routes are on our tours page. Quotes are itemised leg by leg, so you can see what the vehicle, the hotels, the guides and the park entries each cost, and they come from a named trip manager who stays with your booking from the first message to the airport run home.

Questions people ask