Ghana Visa

To friends and family who are more interested in our travelogue, my apologies, for this post serves only to get some information onto the internet. When I searched for relevant and current information on the subject of a Ghana Visa one month ago, there was an extreme deficient of information. Now I can add our experiences and inform others in similar situations.

The moral of this story is: while you can certainly get an emergency visa upon arrival in Ghana, it is quite expensive. But totally do-able and may be less time-consuming than the traditional route. My experience is with an American passport.

We did try to get our visas in advance, but it just didn’t work. The Ghana Embassy in Ethiopia was not only unhelpful, but verged on unfriendly as well. So we arrived at the Accra airport with passports, a small amount of cash, and hopeful smiles.

Although we debarked quickly from the plane and sped to the counter, we were the last to be helped at the Visa on Arrival desk. The staff were courteous, though filled with criticisms about our decision to arrive without a visa. Why do you have a desk here then?

An “emergency visa,” or visa on arrival for Ghana costs $150 USD. Rather expensive. We opted to get the 48-hour transit visa, only $20 each. In fact, this was all that we could do. We had $43 USD, and all airport ATMs were visa (we have mastercard). So, there wasn’t really an alternative, aside from booking a flight elsewhere right then.

So, we are here in Accra for 48 hours, and then we plan to catch a bus to Togo…beaches! When we informed the Visa on Arrival desk of our intentions to travel to Togo, they thought that it sounded like a good plan. They also mentioned that the Ghana visa is a great deal cheaper either at the main embassy downtown, or in Togo.

Since we have made a conscious decision not to travel with a guidebook, we aren’t really sure where we are going, aside from East, to Togo.

update: April 30, 2010
With our two day transit visas, we traveled to Togo by bus, which is only 2-3 hours by bus, and 5-6 cedis per person. Upon arriving at the border, we obtained a seven day Togo visa which cost us 15,000 Togo dollars each. We thought that we might go all the way through Benin to Lagos, but the visa for Benin was only two days, and cost 10,000 Togo dollars. Although unable to confirm our assumptions, we would most like need to pay again at each border to cross back through. While in Lome we visited the Ghana embassy and secured our 30 day visas. So, instead of paying $150 USD each at the Accra airport for a 30 day Ghana visa, we paid a total of $91 USD ($20 Ghana transit + $8 transportation to Togo + $20 seven day Togo Visa + $40 Ghana visa from the embassy in Togo + $3 in required visas photos that we forgot to bring with us + $8 transportation back to Accra) each. The excess of almost $60 paid for our hotels, food, and general fun in Togo. Accra is more expensive than Togo, so we made out pretty well.