Rainforest rambling at Kakum
by typecat
Kakum National Park is a 375 square km national park located in the Central Region of Ghana. You will find it about 30km north of Cape Coast near the small town of Abrafo. The whole area is covered with virgin tropical rainforest. It covers 350 square kilometres park and has been a national park since 1960.
Kakum National Park contains rare animals, including the endangered Mona-meerkat. Whatever that may be. There are pygmy elephants, forest buffalo, civet cats, a lots of birds, and over 500 species of butterfly. And gigantic ants. Enormous they are. I dread to think what the spiders look like.
We stayed at the Rainforest Lodge just inside the park gates. There are two Rainforest Lodges, as you will know regular reader, so make sure if you are staying at the cheap one you get dropped off at the Park itself. It is a bit of a bitch getting between the two if you are at the wrong one. If you arrive that cheap one and you have booked the posh one, man, I would like to see the look on your face when you open the door. Send me a picture please. Speaking of which…
The Rainforest Lodge is serviceable. There is a bed, a shower, a toilet and there is also a gecko above said bed. What is a bit unnerving is that there is no member of staff there through the night. So if you are a woman travelling alone you might want to bear that in mind. Not because I think anything would happen to you, but it can make an active imagination run riot. Also, that we had a gecko in our room when we got back from an epic trip for food? Now, I don’t mind geckos. But I am not sure if I want one over the bed while I am sleeping. What happens if they forget to hold on the ceiling? I do not wish to wake up with a face full of gecko. Also, if a gecko can get in then just think how many mosquitoes can. Shudder.
On the very, very positive side, if you stay here you will probably be woken up in the middle of the night by monkeys. Bonus. Particularly as it will be the sound of monkeys, not monkeys landing on your face that will awaken you.
If you are thinking of going to Kakum my advice is this: either just go for the day as it can be done easily or if you wan to stay overnight go the whole hog and camp in the park at one of the campsites. You can sort it all out when you get there at the ticket office/ information centre. They are very helpful and will provide you with all the equipment. Be organised about it though, there’s not much to do once you get up there as you can’t go wandering about the park without a guide, and there is nothing to eat nearby after about 3.30pm. But it is really, really worth the trip to see it. It is beautiful.
At the park you can go on a canopy walk which is terrifying. They have built the walkway according to this formula:
Ladder + rope + plank = canopy walkway
It’s really, really high up. They are, obviously and rightly, big on conservation at the Park and they got some of the parrot trappers to help build the walkway because they were the best tree climbers in Ghana and were regularly nipping up the trees to great heights with no ropes, nets or concerns for personal safety. The parrots are apparently very happy with this arrangement. This kind of ecologically sound thinknig has meant that many of the communities that live off the forest are now finding new ways to do things. It’s a fraught relationship at times but it is working. And it has to really becuase the huge amount of rainforest that used to cover Ghana compared to how little does now is scary.
You can try and forget the near death experience while on a Nature Walk with a gamekeeper which is excellent. We had Bafoe for our guide and he continued the tradition of excellent Ghanaian guides, following Oscar at Cape Coast Castle. We didn’t see any animals, because they run away when they hear the noisy humans coming. But we did meet a lot of remarkable trees including one covered in pointed nodules so that elephants didn’t use it to scratch themselves. Because if there’s one thing you don’t want it’s an elephant using you as a scratching post. Also, when a gamekeeper asks you to knock on an ebony tree he is doing it to demonstrate how hard it is, so some restraint is in order or you will get sore knuckles. All in all a great excursion.
Oh, and at Kakum I saw a massive centipede. It was so big I almost trod on one of its feet.
