THE KAKUM BROUHAHA

 

International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism defined Tourism in terms of particular activities selected by choice and undertaken outside the home environment. The United Nations classified three forms of tourism in 1994 in its Recommendations on Tourism Statistics: Domestic tourism, which involves residents of the given country traveling only within this country; Inbound tourism, involving non-residents traveling in the given country; and Outbound tourism, involving residents traveling in another country.Kakum National Park is in the central region in the southern part of Ghana. It is the best-preserved region of virgin rainforest in the country and provides the easiest access to the rainforest for tourists along with the famous canopy walkway.

Kakum National Park is one of the more accessible parks in Ghana. It’s just a short cab ride from Cape Coast or Elmina. Short meaning somewhere between half an hour and an hour depending on how good your cab driver is at avoiding toll checkpoints (or bribes as we’d call them in most places). The park entrance is a rather innocuous looking hut with another toll gate attached to it (that cannot be avoided).

On our visit it was 20p to enter, which is really insignificant compared to the costs of a guided land or canopy tour hike. Realistically, the entrance fee gets you access to the museum, the gift shop and the restaurant and that’s about it. Everything else is an additional expense although I seriously doubt any visitor show up at Kakum not intending to do the canopy walk (we’re not sure if you get your money back if you flee once you actually see the canopy walk). The canopy walk is a series of seven rope bridges strung between assorted species of very sturdy trees. The valley drops away as you walk out along it so at the midpoint it’s really quite far to the forest floor, not that you can see it very often through all the foliage.

 The canopy walk is a series of seven rope bridges strung between assorted species of very sturdy trees. The valley drops away as you walk out along it so at the midpoint it’s really quite far to the forest floor, not that you can see it very often through all the foliage

Quite a lot of people suffer a variety of bad reactions to it. The advantage of people who take a very long time to struggle across each bridge is that you can spend plenty of time on the platforms, especially since the bridges cannot hold many people at once (another comforting fact) or the sure-footed, it’s still a bit alarming as the V-shape made by the ropes tends to close in on your feet as you apply pressure. Naturally there is swaying caused by your movement, and unless it’s a rare day indeed, the wind will be helping out as well. We suspect this must be extra enjoyable in a rainstorm

 The most annoying thing about Kakum is that it’s truly enormously vast and contains fascinating wildlife including assorted primates, forest elephants and members of the antelope family that we can’t distinguish from one another. Why is this annoying? Because you can’t actually get to any of it. The canopy tour, while interesting, is a very short loop. The guided ground hikes are not much bigger. There are no maintained trails into the interior

 One will therefore wish that any person or group of people who visit such a historic site gets his/her money worth it. But with my visit on the 1^st of July, 2008, a republic holiday for Ghana, I am more than convinced that the officials do not border about the comfortability and safety of anyone who comes to visit the reserve especially on public holidays when there is the expectation of a “large crowd”

 It is the priveledge of every Ghanaian and to some extends, foreigners to have access to any tourism site ( I stand to be corrected), but it should not guarantee the officials at the site, to admit more than necessary at a time to get people stranded at the entrane to the canopy. For the best of my knowledge, I know that, specific number of people are allowed to go in turn, therefore implying that too much pressure exerted on the canopy could cause havoc.

 The experience I had on my tour could be likened to that of a “Pilgrimage to Mecca”  or foreigners running away from a xenophobic attack in a specific country dubbed ‘the survival of the fitters’. This unfortunate incident was due to a large number of tickets being sold at a time without any communication between the tour guide and the ticket sellers.

 It therefore happened that a stampede was initiated causing a lot of struggles to the peak of the entrance of the canopy amidst pushing, slapping, boxing, pick pocketing, crying, noise making and “tourching of unauthorized parts of the people’s bodies” just because one could not afford to waste GH¢3.00 in this modern day Ghana, to return with the simple reason that there was too much congestion at the entrance. How sad!!!

 I remember an unfortunate incident which saw a huge stick fall like ‘manner from heaven’, onto a beautiful lady in the course of the struggle to climb to the top of the entrance hence enabling her to discontinue her tour. No refund of money.

 This babaric attitude of the officials at the Kakum National Park should be condemned and never repeated. Structures and better policies for instance allowing specific number of people to do the journey and to wait until all have climbed the canopy before a different set is allowed through effective communication, should be put in place to prevent future occurences.  

 Sam Watson, owner of the biggest shopping mall in the US qoutes that “ the external customer is the only boss, He can fire everybody in the company from the chairman down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”

 A word to the wise is enough

Pic 1: A section of the stranded tourists holding onto a tree

Pic2: These are not some refugees fleeing from their country but tourists struggling to have an opportunity in their life time to walk on the canopy.

 

 

 

 

Story by etor