The Hindu Business Line : Wild, wild West Africa

The last time one was in a forest was in the Jaldapara wildlife sanctuary about three years ago, a visit that was memorable because we had never seen a rhino in the wild before that. Indeed, that trip was our first to a West Bengal forest, the earlier ones we had visited since the late 1970s being in Bihar (a part of which now is Jharkhand).

One is referring to the Hazaribagh and Betla National Parks, both forests being prime hunting ground for those who would give anything to steal an extended weekend and spend it in the wilds waiting for a glimpse of an elephant, a tiger, a leopard, a hyena, a bear, not to speak of deer, black bucks and monkeys by the score. Even earlier, when not much more than a kid, one remembers the jungles of Netarhat (near Ranchi), where the forest road then was not only inordinately steep — specially for cars of a much earlier vintage (we had at the time, I remember, a 1939 Flying Standard) — but was also not much more than a tiger and leopard-infested country track.

Familiar with the ambience of a jungle, particularly late in the night when the silence was deafening, we waited impatiently for the sound of a snapping twig or the crackle of a dry leaf indicating that something was moving in the dark. Thinking that forests as a genre bore the same fundamental characteristics the expectations from the visit to the Mole (pronounced Moley) National Park in the north of Ghana — some 700 km from the capital of Accra on the Atlantic coast — were not much. The only point of novelty was the fact that this was the first forest in the true sense of the term one was visiting outside India, excluding the visit to the Yellowstone National Park outside San Francisco some 25 years ago. The central point of interest there was the giant Redwood trees that have been standing there for ages, literally speaking.

At Mole, our guide was the dapper James Jima, all decked out in his official khaki dress complete with cap and a gun. Jima has been working at the national park for the past 29 years and, therefore, should be adequately informed about the forest and its past, which is what the indications were going by the volume of information he disgorged on us as we were driving through the forest. He told us that the national park was established in 1971 although before that it was a game reserve (since 1957, when Ghana under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah became the first African country to gain its independence from Britain). Even earlier, since the 1930s, the area was the home of a project to combat the well-known sleeping sickness induced by the bite of the tsetse fly. This disease, as Jima told us, has been truly conquered although he was still careful enough to tell us to roll up our windows to keep the flies out!

At the national park we stayed at the Mole Motel, strategically placed on a hill so that one can see elephants at a waterhole from the balconies attached to the cottages (or chalets as they are called there). We were not deprived of this sight, which was memorable when a herd of 10 or 12 pachyderms were making merry in the water quite oblivious to the outside world, specially the crowd of curious two-legged onlookers not much different (from their perspective perhaps) in size and stature compared to generally similar variants up in the trees. The motel is a bit different from the ones we have in our own forests for tourists in that it has a large swimming pool catering mainly to visitors from the West, a large number of whom are NGOs and the like working in places like Kumasi and Tamale which are within the reach of a longish drive.

We went into the forest (for nearly 25 km) early in the morning, in our Toyota Prado Land Cruiser which had brought us to Mole from Accra, which is perhaps just as well because the track we were following ceased to be one in places, with the driver Sammy making sure from Jima that we would not be returning by the same route.

Every drive into a forest need not be rewarded by sightings, and if one does not see any animals it does not mean that time has been wasted. A drive deep into a forest (Mole has walking safaris too which, as Jima told us, are not to be found in any other African national park) has a charm of its own, the intrinsic value of the experience far transcending mundane milestones such as the number and type of animals seen.

This is not to suggest that we were unlucky, for within five minutes we spotted two large elephants by the side of the road, lazily feeding off the trees. This was just the grand beginning, for as we made our way through the forest we stumbled on water-bucks, antelopes and full-grown hartebeests. In places, all of a sudden, huge expanses of flatland opened up which, Jima told us, was sheer rock.

We left the track and drove on to these areas that were used as landing places for helicopters if and when they had to visit the national park. The greenery was muted; certainly not of the type we are used to seeing in our own forests. But then this is the dry season with little rain. June is the time when there is water in relative abundance and the foliage becomes lush - and more easily recognisable to visitors from India.

If there are tigers and lions in a forest, obviously no visit can be said to be entirely successful if they are not seen - indeed, even pugmarks will do sometimes depending on how rare the sightings are. While there are no tigers in Mole, lions can be found in the interior.

Jima said there was no clear estimate of their numbers, but at some places in the camps, during the nights, they could be heard. He said sometime ago a lion had been killed by villagers because it had attacked their cattle.

Poachers of course are still around and one of the main jobs of the staff of the national park, as in other parts of the world, is to get rid of them... easier said than done!

Mole, however, is well known for its elephants of which there are around 600. A visitor will really have to be luckless not to see the lumbering pachyderms in the park. The waterhole below the motel (which, incidentally, affords a striking panoramic view of the forest in the distance) is an indispensable point of interest for our four-legged friends, a point where fun and frolic on a rather weighty scale is, for humans, a joy to behold and savour.

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