Vicarious Nomads: Mole National Park

In the footsteps of elephants.

Bok with leafy-eared baby.

Bok.

Monkey in the road.

We watched the burning ball retire for the evening from the orange Metro Mass Transit bus from Tamale to Mole National Park. What was three seats across yesterday is now five. And people stand in the aisle. But the sun's departure and the approach to Mole bring a welcome coolness. And a brilliant full moon rises, a star, presumably Venus, standing guard directly to her right. The ride has been bumpy and filled with red dust for hours. Now, the bus brakes not for poor road conditions, but antelope in the road. We are getting close to our destination.

We are welcomed by warthogs, millipedes and bok (antelope that look like white-tailed deer) outside our door at Mole. We sleep off a hard afternoon's travel after a beer and some chicken and rice. We wake early for our 7 a.m. walking safari through Mole. I step outside to find two warthogs crouched on bended front knees to allow their massive heads to get closer to the grass for grazing. They are ugly. An inconsistent tuft of hair lines their spines. Warts dot their face. Curly horns poke through like zits and the few awkward first facial hairs of a teenager. They snort a bit, but are mostly undisturbed by us human-folk.

We meet around some benches under a tree. There are two groups of seven. Our guide, Isa, carries a shotgun over his shoulder. He has been working in Mole since 1973. He is a man of few words. He leads us past warthogs and monkeys and into the bush. We swat bugs away as we gather mud and dew on our boots. Occasionally, Isa stops to point out the hole of an aardvark, the tracks of a nocturnal hyena, an antelope ahead. Mostly he points with his walking stick in silence when there is something to see, so as not to scare the animals away. He shows us traces of elephant. Jurassic Park sized footprints. Trees torn down. Roots dug up. Bark worn off. The noisy Germans in our group eventually quiet down as we walk through high grasses, thin woods, along and across a muddy stream. We see monkeys, warthogs, antelope (bok), birds. The call of the plantain eater seems to follow us. We search for elephant, but only find more warthogs.

After nearly two hours we emerge at a pond below our accommodation. There Annette spots an elephant. It is bathing. It's ears are half submerged. One can get no sense of its size. In three minute intervals, it blows water on its back with its trunk. Birds circle. It reminds me of a whale watch. The highlight being its breach, in this case when it lifts its trunk from the water, flaps its ears, and sprays water on its back. We watch it for several minutes before the guide reveals our time is up. He must lead us back to our hotel. We spot a large crocodile before crossing a small stream and scampering a kilometer or so up a hill to the escarpment that is home to the Mole Motel.

We eat breakfast, shower, put on bathing suits and soak in the pool. A baboon with baby on its back struts by. Annette calls me out of Invisible Man (the book I am now reading, thanks to the good folks in Mankessim) having spotted more elephants. An observation deck near the pool looks over an impressive uninterrupted landscape of trees. Immediately below us are a series of watering holes an open grassland speckled with small woody areas. There is a huge elephant with two tusks walking from the pool. In the pool behind it are an additional two. We pull up chairs and proceed to watch two elephants charge each other and lock trunks. One walks forward, the other back. There must be thousands of pounds of force between them. But it all looks entertainingly innocent from here. The antelope run away from the action. A safari driver tells us that male elephants usually fight over food, not females. This fight has a clear winner. The loser retreats to another tree to munch.

We alternate watching elephants soak in the watering hole and soaking ourselves in the pool. The heat seems oppressive. When not submerged, we cling to the shade underneath an umbrella and read. Even in the heat, the air is fresh. The horizons are far enough away to provide the peace of mind that only comes with a lot of space and nature.

I opt to go on the afternoon walking safari, despite the 3:30 p.m. heat. Once again, Isa is our guide. This time, I stay on his left shoulder, just behind his Department of Forestry Wildlife Division patch and his shotgun. Six elephants walk within twenty feet of us. They are massive. They crash through the trees with an amazing grace, especially considering the destruction they wreak. They are on the move, hardly stopping to eat. We follow them for a while, before parting ways. We literally walk in their colossal muddy footsteps for the rest of the afternoon. We follow a family of water bok. They look like big red elk. The males have two curved horns that impersonate the shape of their head. They act like deer, sprinting away from us, turning to see what's happening, ears perked. Their tails wave incessantly, almost as persistent as the flies.

The plantain eaters seem to laugh in the distance. They sound like children playing in a nearby village. They look like plantain eaters. Birds with curved beaks, like the stem of a plantain. They have long tails and fly in fluttery bursts like a magpie or a cedar waxwing. We see heron, ibis, guinea fowl and those small white storks that follow the elephants. They remind me of the birds you look for on a whale watch, tell tale signs that huge mammals are nearby. They exist in a similarly symbiotic relationship, picking ticks and dead skin off the elephants' backs.

We see more warthogs. And monkeys who seem to pose for the camera this time rather than run away from it as they did this morning. We approach the morning's watering hole from the other side this time. A crocodile scampers out from its muddy camouflage feet from our feet to our surprise. It belly flops into the water with grace I could never seem to muster in a belly flop, a cannonball or a dive. Two more follow. One is noticeably smaller. The whole group takes photos and moves closer to the safety of the shotgun on Isa's shoulder.

We hike back to the hotel as the sun burns a huge patch of clouds brilliant red and orange. Tonight we catch the only bus out of here, at 4 a.m., back to Tamale and then onto Accra, where we may have to fight Ethiopia Airlines to get a decently-priced ticket to Johannesburg. Then onto Botanical Gardens, hills and waterfalls in the Volta region before we leave Ghana.