Overview

Next time you’re in Accra, do yourself a favor and get a room at Meaglent Hotel. I guarantee you will enjoy comfort and quality at an amazing value!

Conveniently located on the Adenta-Aburi road, Meaglent Hotel is only 45 minutes away from the Accra city centre and 30 minutes drive from Kotoka International Airport in Accra (Ghana’s only airport for international flights).

Meaglent hotel is surrounded by some of Ghana’s most exciting tourist attractions and is a fresh breath away from the bustling city traffic of Accra. The Hotel is only 15 minutes drive to the Aburi Botanical Gardens, one of the world’s 1,800 botanic gardens leading the fight to save plant diversity through research, conservation of medicinal plants, plant multiplication, horticulture training and environmental education.

Designed to feel more like a private club than a hotel, a “home away from home.”

Hotel Features

• Complementary breakfast
• Complementary Internet access (wireless and cable)
• Outdoor pool

Guestrooms

• Satellite TV
• Refrigerators

Meaglent Hotel Photo Gallery

meaglent-hotel-main-block-entrance

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But let me warn you beforehand: the audio is very crappy! I’ve got a terrible cold right now. I have an accent. I used my Macbook’s in-built microphone which picked a lot of background noise. And I’ve got zero audio editing skills so I couldn’t cancel out the background noise and the humming sound from the computer.

So why did I bother to put out this audio if it’s this bad? Take a listen to find out why: it’s just 2 minutes. Click on the arrow on the left of the player below to play the audio in your browser, or download the MP3 file.

Ghana Travel Podcast Episode 1 Transcript

[George speaking]:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Keep going, keep going.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

[Clapping]

If you have listened this far, I’m sure you must be wondering what’s going on here.

Well, you are listening to Episode 1 of Ghana Travel Podcast, a weekly audio show I’m going to be doing to augment the travel guides and resources available here on this web site — Ghana Travel Guide.

This is something I’ve meant to do for a very very very long time, but I never got to doing it. Every time I set out to record this podcast, I always found one excuse after another and ended up not doing it: I have a very heavy accent and will sound terrible, I don’t have proper podcasting gear to do the recordings, I don’t know anything about podcasting and not much about the travel industry, and a whole host of other reasons why the sky would come down and crush upon me if I dared to produce this show.

Well, today I decided I had to confront this beast… this fear… today or never. So here you have it, my crappy voice and all.

Thank you for listening to The Crappy Voice Podcast, and trust me: it can only get better with time. Until next week, enjoy your travels.

The purpose of our trip was to conduct a Technical Site Survey in order to access the communication needs and determine how to provide Internet access for Prestea Sankofa Gold Mines — a small gold mine operating in the area.

In case you didn’t know, I’m a Telecom Engineer, and while I’m … II still handle the odd consulting gig here and the so I can feed the poor (myself and my family!). Hopefully, someday, Ghana Travel Guide will become my bread and butter.

The trip itself was a success. But I left Prestea with mixed feelings about the gold mining industry, particularly the surface mining kind that’s being done at Prestea.

This was not my fist visit to Prestea. But before this trip, I hadn’t visited the town in more than a decade and half.

And despite all the gold being mined from the area, Prestea remains the same old rusty town I saw 15 years ago when I last visited the place. But with the deep excavations going on right in people’s backyards and the frequent cyanide spillages, the condition of the people has actually gone worse.

This is a clear example of what economists call resource curse or the paradox of plenty: the paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries and regions with fewer natural resources.

Below are the few photos from Prestea I could take from the rear seat of our car. It rained all day throughout our visit, so stepping out to with my borrowed camera to take photos was not an option. Click on the thumbnails below to scroll through the photos.

Central Prestea Town

This is central Prestea Town, an area that has been the center of major mining activities for centuries.

Typical House At Prestea

This is a close view of a typical house you'll see at Prestea. It's all rusty old buildings everywhere, exactly as it was 15 years ago when I last visited this town.

Prestea Sankofa Gold Mines Site

Scenes like this surround the Prestea town. The whole town is one big mining site.

Heavy Construction Equipment Everywhere

There are heavy construction equipment all over the place. No, they're not building the town. They're digging for gold.

Prestea New Century Gold Mines (Now Defunct)

Until shutting down recently, this mining plant operated right from the center of the town.

Prestea New Century Gold Mines

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Traveler beware: even cheap flights to Ghana still aren’t cheap, especially to Europeans and North Americans who are used to ultra-cheap flights back home.

The cost of your ticket to Ghana may very well be the biggest expense of the whole trip. And because of this, you can save a considerable chunk of money by making sure you get the cheapest Ghana flight possible.

So how do you find those cheap flights to Ghana?

There is no single best way to find cheap Ghana flights. All International flights are through Kotoka International Airport, a small but very well run airport in the center of Accra (airport code: ACC). With a your destination airport fixed, how much you pay for your ticket depends on where you are traveling from, how flexible you are with your schedule, and how long you plan to stay in Ghana.

In this section I put together some general tips to help you find the best travel deals, and point you to the best online resources where you can compare flights to Ghana. I hope it helps you to find the cheapest tickets to Ghana to suit you and your unique situation.

The cheapest fares to Ghana outside of Africa are usually from London, but that doesn’t necessarily mean British Airways is the cheapest (i.e. a transfer inside continental Europe may be required). Afriqiyah Airways is one of the cheapest airlines maintaining flights to Accra, from London Gatwick via Tripoli.

Those living in North America might be able to save by getting a cheap ticket to London from their home country. Beware though that there are two separate international airports, Gatwick and Heathrow, so allow lots of connection time.

Find Cheap Flights to Ghana

Use the tool below to find and purchase your cheap ticket to Ghana. This nifty tool (from Kayak automatically searches hundreds of travel sites at once to find the deal that’s right for you. It’s quick, easy, and will save you a ton of time to find the cheapest ticket to Ghana.