Home » Ghana » African Adventure to Ghana - Summer 2003 (part III)

My summer of 2003 was a very exciting one. I went to Jonquière, Quebec to learn French for 5 weeks, and with only a few days to prepare (including a party at my friend Paul's cottage in between) I was off to Accra, Ghana landing July 1 (Canada Day, and also Ghanaian Independance Day). After that, within 3 days I was back at Ottawa to complete my Economics degree, so it was a very action-packed summer.

African Adventure to Ghana - Summer 2003 (part III)

Andrew Wozniuk
2006-04-02 10:47:42

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helped. Anyways, we went around Tamale for the day since our bus for Mole was going to leave at 3pm. We bought some paintings from a local artist and talked him into doing some drumming for us when we returned on sunday if time allowed. When we went back to wait for the bus a boy decided he wanted to help us out. He also made us realize that if we wanted seats on the bus back to Kumasi on Sunday we would need to buy our tickets ahead of time. The bus that was supposed to leave for Mole at 3pm didn't actually leave until 6pm. The boy that was helping us and another one hung out with us the whole time keeping us company. They were pretty fun. We finally got on our way to Mole and wouldn't you know, 2 hours into our journey when it became dark, the bus' headlights wouldn't work. We had to stop on the side of the road and just wait. The bus driver hitched a ride back to get another bus and 4 hours later we were back on the road. Finally, we arrive at Mole National Park at almost 2am. We check into the hotel and get to sleep by 2:30am, and slept for 2 hours (we had to wake up at 4:30am to be ready to go for our safari at 5:30am).

We were a bit early for the safari which really didn't start until 6:30am, but we managed to get one of the few pairs of rubber boots (since it had been raining quite a bit the night before). The safaris were just walking around the park in groups of about 5 people and 1 armed ranger (he had a 303). There were about 4 or 5 groups that were going around. The animals are free and wild so what you see is by chance most of the time. We started out by going to the big watering hole. There were 2 elephants bathing and we also saw a crocodile. Apparently in the dry season when it is the only main watering hole, up to 20 elephants will congregate there to bathe. As we walked around some more for the 2 hour safari, we saw bush hogs, 3 different types of antelope, baboons, 2 other types of monkeys, many different birds, and ...