Mole National Park

Mole National Park is the largest national park in Ghana, located in the North West corner of the country. It’s a bone crushing 670 kilometers from Accra, and the trip generally takes 11 hours. We ended up stopping in Techiman overnight, because the roads are just so treacherous; one minute you’re on a dual carriage way, and the next there are potholes the size of a VW Beetle.

After having some issues with booking the accommodation, we finally were able to book a room within the motel in the middle of the park. It’s a run-of-the-mill motel, apart from the fact it’s in the middle of a national park and the animals are allowed to walk through it. When we were checking in, there was a baboon running along the roof. Once the room was organized, we headed out for our first walking safari.

The Lonely Planet guide describes Mole as being the cheapest safari in Africa. The price for the guide is 3 cedi ($1.6 AUD) an hour, for a minimum of two hours. So we decide to start with a walking safari. We were assigned a guide, Christopher, and with a gun slung across his back, we head out into the park.

I’ve effectively done no exercise for 4 weeks, and walking through the searing Ghanian sun is difficult enough as it is, let alone having to walk through dense savannah scrub. The majority of the first walk was spent seeing glimpses of the backsides of bushbuck through thick vegetation. So we headed back to the motel, where we ordered dinner (I had two beef kebabs and yam chips) and had a few drinks by the pool before it rained us out.

Walk number two was at 7:00am the next morning. Thankfully the terrain was a little more forgiving, consisting primarily of grassland. We did get to see some cute warthog families, and monkeys. It was also refreshing to see the front of a bushbuck, and their cousin, the waterbuck.

I had resigned myself to the fact that we’d never get to see an elephant. We were told that they frequently can be seen drinking from the watering hole near the motel, or indeed the pool, but the “lower” temperature and rain over the two days had kept them away. We spent four hours optimistically watching the waterhole, and then due to a misunderstanding with our driver, we had to rent a vehicle for our driving safari, which we luckily shared with two American girls from Minnesota. It cost 45 cedi ($27 AUD), an hour, for the car, which is outrageously expensive by Ghanian standards.

So sitting on the roof of the car, we slowly made our way through the park. When we saw an animal, we would bang on the roof and the guide would stop. We opted for three hours of driving, and after almost two and a half hours we hadn’t seen a lot. The other safari car that we passed hadn’t seen any elephants, so it was not looking good. As we slowly headed back to the motel, we caught a glimpse of one in the distance, and so we quickly stopped the car and proceeded on foot. It was so exhilarating following the elephants through the scrub, and we eventually got within 20 meters of a male. All happy, we headed back to the motel.

Mole National Park was an amazing experience, and I’m glad we made the trek up here. Next stop, Wechiau Hippo Sanctuary.