This past weekend I went up north to Mole National Park, hoping to see enough wildlife to make the incredibly long journey there and back worth it- and I’m happy to say it was a trip well worth taking, and that’s saying a lot, considering just how difficult it was to get there…I left Accra around 3:30 pm on Thursday, and got to Tamale, a town up north, at around 6 or 7 am Friday morning, after a very long bus ride complete with traffic, road blocks, and cops on board the bus (I guess just in case anything happened along the road). And these cops- like most in Ghana- didn’t have little handguns- they had guns maybe two feet long. Luckily, the bus was comfortable and the road not too bumpy.
The bus from Tamale to Mole, however, was a different matter entirely. I waited in Tamale for the 2 pm bus, which left late, and didn’t get to Mole until maybe around 8 9pm on Friday night! The bus wasn’t as nice as the one from Accra for starters, and much of the journey was on really really bumpy dirt road- so bumpy I wondered how the bus could drive without falling to pieces. There was an exit door towards the back, and I could see it sorta rattling back and forth, looking as though it would fly open at any second!
Next, there weren’t enough seats for everyone, so lots of people had to stand. By the time we were near the end of the journey, they bus was crammed full, with people in the aisle and in the stairwell of the rear door of the bus.
Mole was quite a paradise after such a journey. The place was beautiful, with the park’s hotel set
up on a hill so you could look out and see the landscape below, including elephants near the watering hole. There was a pool and an outdoor restaurant. My room was huge- three beds, and a big bathroom.
Luckily we had two buckets for water that could be filled from a pump or something, because the water wasn’t always on in the room.
Saturday morning I went on a walking safari, reporting time at 6:30 am. Before we actually departed, elephants came up to near where we were meeting, and it was awesome. And then around the corner from the info center, we saw more elephants, maybe 40 or 50 feet away!
The nature walk was great. The guide was armed- Mole has never had any incidents of somebody getting hurt by an animal, and they want that record to stay the way it is. We asked him if he’d even fired his gun before (we were thinking maybe at an animal), and his answer was “Yes. In training.” Fair enough.
The afternoon walk was great too. Our guide had been a guide for eleven years, and we’d be walking, and he’d stop, and you could tell he was looking closely for clues about where the animals were- fresh
droppings, footprints, broken branches. On the walks, I saw bushboks and waterboks and monkeys and warthogs. You could see animals looking right at you from far off, then they’d dart away, or sometimes not care and go about their business.
The animals were beautiful- except I a problem with one of them. It all started at dinner on Saturday- my friend and I were sitting outside, on the restaurant porch. I had ordered dinner, and she had brought some snacks, including a new package of onion-flavored crackers that she told me were a favorite snack of hers. It was dark out already, and the restaurant was quite busy- lots of people eating, including people sitting on the pool deck, which is closest to the forest.
We were sitting and talking when, in my friend’s words, she saw a “hairy little arm reach up to the table.” Turning to look, she sees a 50-70 pound baboon trying to steal the whole cartoon of crackers. Rather
than darting away once my friend noticed its presence, the baboon persisted in trying to grab the crackers. We jumped out of our seats, and she tried to scare it away, but that baboon did not care- it was huge, and it was taking her crackers no matter what.
A waitress rushed over, grabbing my friend’s chair, jabbing it in the direction of the thief to make it go away- it ran down a few steps to pool area, the waitress running after it with the chair, and it then ran away, went around to the other side of the pool and sat out there in the open (or that might have been a second baboon) and then ran away. Wow, talk about intense. After, we just sat there, kinda stunned.
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