Kakum National Park

Kakum National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Kakum is the rainforest park thirty kilometres inland from Cape Coast in Ghana's Central Region, three to four hours by road from Accra, and it is visited for its canopy walkway, almost always on a day trip that pairs it with the slave castles of the coast. The tours from Accra leave at five or six in the morning to reach the park when it opens, walk the canopy bridges, and spend the afternoon at Cape Coast Castle and, in the longer versions, Elmina Castle, returning after dark, a day of about fourteen hours; the two-day tours sleep in Cape Coast or Elmina and are much less of a rush. From Cape Coast or Elmina the same outing is a relaxed half-day by taxi or tour.

At the park, the entrance fee and the canopy walkway ticket are paid at the visitor centre, and guides take groups up in turn; the walkway fee for foreigners is modest and the wait on a weekend or a school day can be an hour. Those who want the forest rather than the bridge should book the guided nature walk on the forest floor, where the guide explains the medicinal trees, or arrange ahead through the park office to sleep on the tree platform or at the campsite and go out at dawn and dusk, which is the only real chance of seeing animals, and birders hire specialist guides for the Abrafo and Antwikwaa sides. The day tours sold from Lagos are long overland packages.

Visiting Kakum National Park: what you will see

The forest of the Kakum river headwaters was made a reserve in 1931 and logged for mahogany until 1989; the national park was gazetted in 1992, unusually at the urging of local people and the regional administration rather than the wildlife department, and covers 375 square kilometres of moist semi-deciduous rainforest, with the Assin Attandanso reserve joined to it, an island of forest in a sea of cocoa, oil palm and food farms. The canopy walkway, built in 1995 with Canadian engineers and American aid money, was the first in Africa and remains one of very few: seven suspension bridges of rope, netting and aluminium ladders laid with planks, 350 metres in all, hung between the crowns of emergent trees at up to forty metres above the ground, with viewing platforms around the trunks.

It sways, it is safe, and from it the forest is seen as the birds see it, a rolling surface of crowns with the grey trunks of silk-cotton and wawa trees rising through. What is not seen from it, in the middle of the day among school parties, is wildlife. The park has the densest population of forest elephants in Ghana, a few hundred, along with bongo, yellow-backed duiker, giant forest hogs, leopards, pangolins, potto and seven primates including the Diana monkey, the black-and-white colobus and the mona monkey, all shy and mostly nocturnal; their signs are found on the forest walks. The birds, 266 species with nine hornbills, the grey parrot, the white-breasted guineafowl and the white-throated bee-eater, and some six hundred butterflies, one described as new in 1993, are the accessible wildlife. The elephants raid the farms around the boundary, and chilli-grease fences are the local answer.

Kakum National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open daily from about 8 am to 4 pm, with the first walkway groups at opening. The main dry season from November to March is the easiest, with the harmattan haze in January; the rains come from April to July, heaviest in June, and again in September and October, when the forest is at its finest and the paths and the bridges are slippery. Weekends, public holidays and school-trip days crowd the walkway by mid-morning, and the first hour is the only quiet one, which the overnight guests get to themselves. Allow two hours at the park, a full day with the castles. Cape Coast Castle is forty minutes south, Elmina an hour, and the Hans Cottage crocodile pond is on the road between.