Xmas in the wilderness ; Escape from the city madness
On Christmas Day, I found a new home away from the comfort of my usual abode where I relax with my family every day. But the kind of job I do requires that sometimes I stay away from my family, all as part of the process of earning a living.
Advertisement
So a few days to Christmas, my boss asked me if we could do a special Xmas project by visiting a remote area of the country to celebrate the festive occasion with the people there.
As was the case 2013, I was asked to select any area in the northern part of Ghana.
What is exciting in the north this time around is that development up there requires exposure in the newspaper.
My boss and I settled on the Mole National Park, especially because the one-time neglected Fufulso-Sawla road is undergoing rehabilitation to open up the area to the rest of the country.
For many years, it was difficult for residents of Tamale to travel on that stretch of road to Wa, the Upper West Regional capital. Commuters and buses try to use the Bolga-Tumu-Wa road, which is equally in a deplorable state.
Ultimately, I travelled to Mole to celebrate Xmas 2014.
Christmas Day found me at the Mole National Park, home to over 93 mammalian species that range from friendly and rowdy baboons to black and ash elephants who could be seen at certain times of the day.
My Christmas home, in the heart of the West Gonja District, was some 700 kilometres off fume-infested Accra, the national capital that is about 21 times smaller than the Northern Region, yet hosts twice the population of the latter.
At 8 a.m. on Christmas Day it was still too early for most people in the region, but not for the dozens of Christmas hikers and tourists who were anxious for a ‘hamper’ – the sight of wild animals – to feast their eyes on.
Climbing the hilly escarpment to the restaurant of the Mole Motel was Michael, a Dutch, and his family of three children and his wife. On my extreme right was Anita, an 11-year-old girl whose Ghanaian policeman father preferred taking her for a walk in the nearly 5,000 square kilometre park to making her eat rice and chicken with friends and family on an occasion like Christmas.
“Unlike the olden days, this our generation eats rice and chicken all the time and so staying in the house to eat it in the name of Xmas does not excite me again. I think taking a walk here and seeing some of the animals you only hear about or see in documentaries is somehow better,” Issifi, Anita's father, said in reply to the question as to why he chartered a taxi from Tamale, about 146 kilometres away, to the park on Xmas Day.
For 81-year-old Mr A. S. Dubir and his wife, who travelled from Accra to the park, it was an escape from the ‘maddening crowd’ in the national capital.
“We came because we wanted to be far from the maddening crowd and to escape from the hustle and bustle of Accra life. We want a serene and quiet place like this where there is no noise or filth,” he said, while declining a photograph request.
Before my conversation with Anita's father, the entire place was quiet and serene. The air was filled with the northern Ghana harmattan haze and breeze and forks and knives rattled over food.
All was well in this wilderness of peace and pride until Young Anita let out a yell and dashed to her father.
The reason? Her biscuit had been snatched by a baboon.
Robert Tindana, a wildlife and tourist guide at the park, smiled at her and looked on helplessly as the baboon sprinted to safety with the biscuit.
When all was done, Tindana, with a rifle dangling on his left shoulder, drew closer to the little girl.
“These baboons are not ashamed of even little children. They snatch anything they see, including fufu,” he told her.
“Anyway, welcome to Mole. Here, the animals are friendly, except when they are wounded,” he added, noting that a python had once crawled past his feet without hurting him.
Tindana, 41, is among a team of 180 workers who have committed their lives to and sacrificed their comfort for animal safety and the preservation of the fenceless park.
With 16 years of service in the wilderness to his credit, nothing about wild animals, including the dreaded lion, which he sighted in 2004, amuses him and his colleagues any longer.
Notwithstanding the challenges of their job, which range from being shot at by poachers to spat at by cobras, their conditions of service are nothing to write home about.
Although they declined to grant interviews, in line with civil service requirements, independent checks revealed that people with over 10 years of service earn about GH¢300 as monthly take-home pay, while those with 20 years take home about GH¢500, yet spend 16 days in each month on routine patrols in the park.
While on these patrols, the cost of feeding, fuelling and servicing their personal motorbikes, which they use for the patrols, is borne by them. Also, risk, night and inconvenience allowances which they enjoyed prior to the coming into being of the single spine pay policy (SSPP) have been scrapped and supposedly lumped into their monthly pays.
Yet, these issues do not demoralise the officers in green uniform from happily guiding tourists, answering their queries, walking for over 10 kilometres just to locate animals of tourists’ choice on Xmas and Boxing Day hikes.
11 Nationalities, one Xmas hamper
Information on the conservation of the Mole National Park is varied, but data from the Forestry Commission (FC) indicate that the area was first designated a wildlife refuge in 1958.
Thirteen years later, it was redesigned and about 33 small and adjoining communities relocated to help insulate the animals and the plants from human distractions.
That notwithstanding, issues of poaching, bush burning and financial neglect from the FC and the government in general abound and these have resulted in the slow development of the area into a major tourism hub and revenue earner.
Stories of poachers shooting at wildlife guards, poaching traps catching animals and staff alike and tourists enduring over six excruciating hours of travel on an otherwise two-hour journey due to the bad nature of roads are on the lips and minds of people in and outside the park.
However, with the construction of the Fufulso-Sawla road, which leads to the park, due to be completed in April 2015, the Mole Park Manager, Mr Dubiure Umaru Farouk, said one major hurdle had been cleared, paving the way for the authorities to tackle other challenges in their quest to develop the area.
The road is a 148-kilometre trunk network that has been the campaign message of various governments, right from time immemorial to 2011 when it was finally awarded and now 98 per cent complete.
The road links two regions, three districts and 27 communities, including Damongo and Larabanga, the two adjoining communities to the Mole Reserve.
“Prior to the construction of that road, the mention of Damongo and Mole was a scare to many people. If I were asked at a ‘what do you know?’ contest about what was unique about Damongo, I would easily say ‘bad roads’ because the area used to be associated with bad roads. It was an embarrassment because we prided ourselves with this premier park, yet access roads to it were just horrible,” Mr Farouk said.
The current state of the road has helped to make it possible for people, including Mr and Mrs Dubir, to go to the park to celebrate Xmas.
The couple, who travelled by road to the park, were among 300 tourists who visited the area between December 24 and 26, 2014.
Ebola steals Xmas shine
The only accommodation for tourists in the park is the 33-bedroom Mole Motel owned by a private developer. Apart from its dormitory, which has eight beds, each of which is priced at GH¢40 per night, each of the rooms has three separate beds, with each room costing GH¢70 or GH¢90 per stay, depending on whether it has a fan or air-conditioning.
As a result, competition for accommodation inside the park is often keen on festive occasions such as Xmas, New Year and Easter, with most late bookers being forced to lodge in guest houses in Larabanga and travelling to the park daily.
This, however, did not happen during this Yuletide, which the Park Manager described as dry and unusually quiet.
On a good Xmas day, Mr Farouk, who has managed the park for the past 10 years, said scores of people, usually in groups and buses, normally besieged the area on a daily basis and turned the information centre into a brisk business centre.
Data from the centre showed that close to 800 people visited the park during the 2013 Yuletide, compared to 300 last year.
“Of course, if you don't know Mole, you will think it is normal, but this is not. On a typical festive season like this, the whole of this area would have been full of people and the staff busy," he said, pointing to an arc-like building which serves as the information centre, a museum and stores.
Ashiya, a storekeeper at the centre, and Lavidge Annor, a driver of Yorks Car Rentals inside the park, corroborated what Mr Farouk said.
The two said business had been low during the last Yuletide, partly because of the deadly Ebola virus disease (EVD) which broke out in December 2013 and had so far claimed over 7,500 lives worldwide.
With Western media reports creating the impression that the outbreak of the contagious disease was in the entire West Africa had led to the cancellation of visits to the sub-region, including Ghana, which has not reported any case.
Checks at the Mole Motel indicated that about 40 per cent of bookings were cancelled this year, with guests citing EVD as the reason.
This development adds to an already worsening situation as far as visitor numbers to Mole is concerned.
The number of visitors to the park had dropped from 16,000 in 2012 to 14,000 last year, and with the Ebola scare, the Park Manager said "the number for 2015 will not look good".
City madness
On Xmas night when Mr Dubir and his wife were enjoying a meal at the poolside of the motel, amid the whistling of birds, he said, "If I were in Accra, I would have been visiting friends or have friends visiting me and there would have been the usual noise all over, but here there is none of that. I am far from that city madness. The place is very quiet, beautiful and serene and I am communing with nature."
"I knew of the distance, time and stress involved but we chose to come. People spend lots of money going outside this country to spend Xmas when they can easily do it here. Look at the place and tell me which area in Europe or wherever is not as nice and serene as this," he said.
His concerns border on the issue of low domestic tourist numbers, a challenge the Ghana Tourism Authority has been battling with for years.
Not many of Ghanaians patronise local tourist sites, something Mr Dubir said could be reversed if Ghanaians changed their psyche towards tourism.
But, institutions such as the FC and the GTA also need to sit up by resourcing and motivating their staff, training people to properly handle visitors and creating access routes to and within tourist sites nationwide.
This is very necessary because if information on the service conditions of personnel at the Mole National Park is anything to go by, then a time will come when wildlife guards and other staff in the various national parks and Mole in particular will say goodbye to their jobs.
Writer's email: [email protected] [email protected]