Kakum

Saturday morning Angelina and I found a tro-tro on its way to Praso to drop us off by the entrance of Kakum National Park. We were supposed to meet other Global Mamas volunteers there, but we were about half an hour late. In the tro-tro, on the way, we met Lea, a recent college graduate from South Carolina. Her dad is Ghanaian and she was spending the summer with her Ghanaian family. We got to know her and her two cousins, who were in Cape Coast just for the day. After Kakum, they were going back to their home east of Accra. Lea was bummed we hadn’t met earlier, but we were all happy to make new friends.

Kakum National Park is a large protected rainforest area in Southwestern Ghana. Once again another place that felt so familiar. Nicaraguans, going to Kakum is like going to Mombacho except Kakum is not as high up as Mombacho, and there isn’t a volcano. Another difference is that Kakum has elephants, unfortunately they live deep in the forest so you can’t see them. Kakum’s main attraction is its canopy walk. It is one of four places in the world that have these canopy walks (the others being in Peru, China, and Malaysia). They consist of suspended bridges spanning between several trees inside the forest, so you are literally walking among the canopy of the trees. Our young guide, Samuel, very eloquently encouraged us not to be afraid of the bridges. He told us the bridges were built some 16 years ago by a group of Canadians and Ghanaians and are visited each year by many people, and no one has ever fallen.  We weren’t going to be the first ones to fall he said and although I thought “he doesn’t know that”, I wasn’t scared. Zip lining in Mombacho’s canopy tour had prepared me for this.

        After surviving the canopy walk, five of us stayed behind to continue with a ground walk along the forest with Samuel, our guide. He led us through the forest, stopping to tell us about the important trees and plants in it, and their significance and functionality for the Ghanaian people as well as the animals in the forest. Angelina asked me to note that we stepped on an anthill and although we both got bitten, she literally had ants in her pants. After our walks through Kakum, we found a tro to take us back to Cape Coast. There, we found a taxi to take us to Elmina (at a good price of course) where Eli was waiting for us with groundnut soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Our taxi driver, Bonaventure…. Well, he deserves a blog post all to himself.

There are 7 of these suspended bridges