On Friday we made a spontaneous decision to take a trip to Mole National Park. There were a few extra visitors staying at the house and we thought we should take advantage of the extra help and get away for a few days. A new volunteer arrived Friday night and we invited her along. We were impressed at her flexibility and eagerness to go despite just coming off of a 30 hour trip from Canada. She was super laid back and a great travel companion. The trip was not exactly luxury travel (it never is with us). Mole is in the northern region of Ghana. The whole country is about the size of Oregon, but you would never guess it by the length of time it takes to drive across. We took a bus to Tamale which made several fifteen minute breaks which turned into hour-or-two breaks for bus maintenance and various other issues. What was supposed to be an eight hour drive ended up being about sixteen. The roads are intermittently paved and I’m not convinced the paved areas are any better than the unpaved. We probably doubled our intended mileage with the amount of swerving we had to do to dodge potholes, and goats. The drive was beautiful and very entertaining. We watched the landscape change from flat and sparse to thick and hilly. The buildings change from cement blocks to round mud homes with thatched roofs. The people changed from busy city Christians to rural traditional Muslims. And the transportation changed from traffic jams of cars to occasional groups of villagers walking miles to fetch water or sell the goods they carried on their heads.
We arrived in Tamale at 10:30pm and after a few short hours of horizontality in a hostel we caught an early ride to Larabanga, the little Muslim village at the entrance to the park. There wasn’t space on the Metro bus so we asked around and found a tro tro going there at five in the morning. The ride turned all of us from white and black people into red dirt people. Every head was dyed henna red by the time we arrived and what began the trip as white prayer caps came out fully transformed along with any part of your body or luggage that was exposed to air. We rented bikes in Larabanga and rode about 5km into the park. About 50 meters past the entrance we spotted our first antelope and just beyond that we saw a bunch of monkeys. We stayed at the Mole Motel, which is idyllically located on a cliff overlooking two huge watering holes and the vast spread of the park. Just as exciting for me was the clean swimming pool which we made good use of, I haven’t swam in ages.
Within the first few hours we were sipping cool drinks by the pool and watching the lookout for animals when a couple of baboons came running out carrying a bag of stolen food. They startled us from behind and were followed by about ten more friends of various sizes. A couple of them settled on a perch about five feet away from us. We had to fight off a baby baboon who wanted our yellow bottle of sunscreen (a precious commodity) that he must have mistaken for a banana. It seemed too cliché to be true, like a page out of Curious George where we are the man with the yellow hat. Soon afterward he found an actual banana peel and was satisfied to sit there obediently for a kodak moment.
We went on two safari hikes in the park which are only allowed with a park ranger as your guide. The landscape is technically called “wooded savannah” but to me it was a jungle (John argues it’s a forest). We saw different kinds of antelope – kob, water buck and bush buck – three kids of monkeys, baboons, more than our share of warthogs, and a lot of different birds including storks and guinea fowl. Our first hike was in the evening and we did another the next morning. The jungle smelled like fresh herbs everywhere, which surprised me, I was expecting more of an animal smell I suppose. It was hot and muggy, but the anticipation of seeing the animals was so exciting no one minded. We tried not to leave any evidence of our trek, save for a few sneaker prints and a number of bugs fuller than before. After a rigorous two and three hour hike with some intense tracking, we were disappointed that we hadn’t seen any elephants (the main attraction). Our guide, who had worked there for 27 years, was feeling bad about it too and was working hard to find them. Somehow, though, it validated the experience for me. This was authentic. The elephants weren’t being coaxed out of cages to perform for us; we were foreigners in their home, not the other way around. Later in the day we saw one from above. He was taking a bath in the watering hole and we watched him for a few hours as he napped and went about his daily routine. I was satisfied.
At night I lay awake listening as the fan click rhythmically, it sounded like Grandma Mary’s fingernails rapping out tunes on a restaurant table. I couldn’t sleep and kept getting up to look for animals out the window. I saw six or seven kob antelope grazing at different times of the night and in the early morning light I could make out a few elephants moving from the open field into the trees. We ate lunch at the motel restaurant, which is notoriously slow - we took our time in the pool and at the lookout - and when our food finally arrived we tried some new ethnic dishes; guinea fowl in curry, fufu, and omo-tua with groundnut soup. Warthogs watched us from their mud hole by the pool. This place is definitely in the running for a spot on my list of paradise locations.
Unfortunately John got sick on our last day and as we rode our bikes out of the park we found tick bites all over our legs. We spent the night on the roof of a small guest house in Larabanga with a Dutch couple and two German students . The owner’s son played on the roof with us and told us what we could and couldn’t take pictures of. The Dutch couple had left from Spain and have been traveling for four months around West Africa. They plan to spend eight more months on their way to South Africa and had some pretty interesting stories to tell.
The chief of the village had just died and there were continual funeral services going on. I was amazed at how remote the town felt, and pleased it had kept its cultural flavor despite its location on a tourist path. I suppose even the most touristy location here is off the beaten path compared to Egypt. John couldn’t sleep because of his sickness so we spent most of night looking up at the stars and the full moon until the cloud cover rolled in. The clouds looked like a giant white reflection of the crackled mud we had been walking on all day. It seemed that everything here came full circle and I felt the chaos around us settle into a peaceful rhythm. We listened to chickens, people and goats rumbling around in the night and finally fell asleep just a half hour before it started to rain. Thankfully, our bus was arriving soon so we packed our things, climbed down from the roof and began our journey home.
It took 6 different vehicles to get us home, but we saved about eight hours compared to our way there. On one of the tro tro drives we stopped suddenly. The driver’s assistant ran back a few hundred yards and returned carrying a four foot lizard. When they threw it in the back of the van it was only mostly dead and I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder every few minutes to make sure it wasn’t moving in our direction. When we finally got home the water wasn’t on, but we were so thankful to be in our “own” bed we didn’t care that we were filthy and fell immediately asleep.