Ghana

Arriving in Accra, on one of our cheap holidays to Ghana, is like stepping into a spicy stir-fry of colours and textures. It's a large, hot city, yet the locals are affable, easygoing and welcoming.

There's room for drumming and dancing alongside Bob Marley and ardent Christianity, just as vibrant traditional dress is mixed and matched with plain western garb. At jumbled marketplaces, beads, batik, huge yams, plastic chairs and fruits are piled up on the ground or on wooden crates, the stallholders squatting on makeshift stools beside their wares, because cheap holidays to Ghana really do allow you to witness the magic of Africa first-hand.

To cool down, head for one of the beaches nearby, and when you want to heat things up again, find out for yourself why Accra's sizzling nightlife is famous throughout West Africa.

Despite a past riddled with colonial plundering and slavery, the country is probably one of the friendliest places you'll ever visit. Cheap holidays to Ghana also reveal beautiful, varied terrain, from the sandy coastal plains, through rainforest and hills in the central zone, to the grasslands of the north.

The coastline gets the most tourism, drawing travellers to its beaches, rainbow-coloured fishing villages and 17th-century forts - grim, but fascinating reminders of the slave trade.

Cheap holidays to Ghana can be action-packed and in Kakum Nature Park, arrange for a guide to rouse you early so you can walk along the rope bridges high in the canopy of the rainforest, with elephants, monkeys and some 200 species of birds to keep you company.

Kumasi is the hub of the Ashanti people - Ghana's largest tribe, who are famous for their hand-carved stools, fertility dolls and kente cloth - but it's also got a market so vast that if you don't buy that amazing hand-crafted wood carving when you see it the first time, you're unlikely to ever find it again.

Deeper inland, the Africa of black-and-white photographs lives on, in remote villages where women still trudge dusty roads to their mud and thatch huts, balancing pots of water on their heads, because cheap holidays to Ghana really do provide a glimpse of the real Africa.