Mole Magic

Enough with the depressing dog drama, on to our first week long vacation in Ghana! When I last wrote, I talked about our upcoming trip to Mole National Park, Ghana’s biggest and most well-know park. Everyone who works here goes to Mole eventually as it’s the only place to go to see elephants. Elephants are arguably the most exciting big animal that Ghana has, as it doesn’t really have other big game.

Originally we were going to go to the park for 4 nights and then visit a different park in the far eastern part of the country, but when I investigated the travel that would have taken I went off that idea pretty quickly. Although you can fly up to near Mole Park, it’s still a 2.5 hour drive from the closest airport. The other park had a similar situation, so if we wanted to go from Mole to the other place it would have consisted of a 2.5 hour drive to the airport, an hour flight to Accra, and hour flight to another airport and then a 2.5 hour drive to get to the new lodge. That started stressing me out a whole lot so that’s when we got the idea to just stay in Mole and move lodging there.

Our flight up to Tamale was pretty uneventful, but for future reference you do NOT need to get to the domestic terminal of the Accra airport 2 hours before the flight leaves. There is literally nothing in the terminal except one little cafe. Gav bought a beer and some fries and exclaimed at the cost to the guy behind the bar. He responded with “Sir you are at an airport, what did you expect.” Fair enough. When we arrived in Tamale (the nearest large town to Mole) we were supposed to have a driver waiting for us. I even had been WhatsApping the guy and was so impressed with his attentiveness and timely replies! Well when we exited the airport he was no where to be seen-I called him of course it was not actually HIM coming to pick us up, he had sent someone else who was late. I was crabby and hot which we all know is not a great start. The actual driver eventually showed up to get us. As we got in the car I told him that we would like to stop along the drive to buy some beer. We kept passing supermarkets, but I figured he had someplace in mind that would be a good place. After about 30 minutes he he pulled in to a random place and said “I’ll wait here for you to finish.” Turns out this was a bar and he thought I just needed a pick me up on the way to the hotel. We cleared up the misunderstanding and he eventually took us to a bottle shop where it took some convincing to get the owner to let us buy a crate of beer. You see we had no empties to trade in, so he didn’t want to give us any full ones. We eventually convinced him that we would return the crate and bottles on the way back to the airport and would leave him a deposit. The whole transaction even with a deposit was ridiculously cheap so worth the run-around I guess.

Then we were on our way to the 1 star Mole Motel. I had heard first hand reports ranging from “it’s totally fine” to “Baboons wrenched their way into my room and trashed all my belongings” so I was really not sure what to expect. We didn’t arrive until well after dark and on first glance I was worried that maybe we were the only people staying there. The woman at the front desk took us to our “chalet” and, despite having to kick a cockroach out of the way as she showed us the room, my worst fears were not realised. The room wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible either. The sheets on the bed were clean and the fridge was cold for our beer so honestly you can’t ask for that much more for less than $80 a night. We headed to the “restaurant” for dinner and that’s when we came across everyone else who was staying at the motel. During our stay there was actually a pretty steady stream of people, lots of whom were returning customers. The food was fine, but my top tip is don’t wait until you are starving to order, everything takes forever to arrive. BUT the beer is cheap and cold and you can self-service that right from the industrial fridge.

The best part of Mole Motel is its location. Not only is it right on top of a watering hole, but it is right next to the ranger station. Every morning, if you want to go on a safari, you just wander over to the station and they organize you into groups depending on what you want to do. In general you can choose a walking safari or a jeep safari. It’s a base price of 25 Cedis (about $2.25) per person to do a safari. If you want to go in a jeep, you pay that fee plus a vehicle fee of 400 Cedis, but that is split among however many people are in the car. It holds up to 8 people. If you want to walk, you just owe the safari fee. You can organise special tours (like a birdwatching one) for slightly more money but on the whole it is a fantastic deal. The whole thing repeats at 4pm, and also if you happen to see an elephant or something at the watering hole at other times you can just run over and ask a ranger to come with you and he will walk you down to watch!

We did a mix of walking, driving and birdwatching while we were at Mole Motel. In general the rangers were really good, with a few outstanding ones, especially the bird guys. When we went it was still considered the wet season so we only saw male elephants and the guides told us that in the dry season you see many more animals in general. Still, we saw elephants every day and Gav got lots of new birds which I am sure he will tell you about (sorry).

Look at the different colors of the elephants! The grey color that we normally see is actually dust they throw on themselves for sunscreen. When they come out of the water they are totally black! And in Mole the dirt is red so sometimes you will see them with a very red tinge. Amazing! The best encounters with the elephants were when we went on walking safaris. The rangers all know the elephants and their personalities so with some of them we could get very close to watch them.

Overall I give the 1 star Mole Motel a thumbs up. It’s not the fanciest, it definitely hasn’t had any kind of upgrade in the last 20 years and it’s possible that your skin will fall off if you don’t shower immediately after a dip in their pool, but it does the job. The chalet rooms (below) each have a porch/balcony overlooking the watering hole and the view is outstanding.

After four nights in the 1 star Motel, we moved to the 5 star Zania Lodge. About a 15 minute drive away, but also inside the park, Zania Lodge is not only 4 stars higher than Mole Motel, it is also about 6 times the price. It is a beautiful lodge with individual safari-tent rooms and a swimming pool to die for, but is it worth it?

Eh, I am going to say no. It’s nice, but it’s not nice enough to justify the price differential. The safaris here cost $45 a pop (although their vehicles are far superior and their drivers are much better) and their beer prices are exorbitant. Good thing we smuggled in some very classy box-o-wine to enjoy on our terrace. They also failed to organise an outing for us on the last morning which led to us having to hitch a ride with a birdwatching group (the horror) back to the ranger station to get our own safari. Very poor.

The dining room did have a resident civet who obviously is very used to coming by for scraps. Of course we loved it up and it got quote a lot of treats from Gav and Linz! That picture above has awkward lighting because, despite this being a 5 star hotel, they did not turn on any lights at dinner time. I think that lights attract insects at this time of year, but instead of getting like…a fan or something, the solution was to just turn the lights off and have everyone dine in the dark. Very strange. Probably the civet liked that though.

You will be pleased to know that we did return the empties to the worried man at the bottle shop on our way back to Accra. We had a great 6 days in the park. Probably you don’t need 6 days, but we wanted to have a restful time and that’s what happened. We will for sure go back to see it in the dry season and we will be staying in Mole Motel Chalet #3 (top tip). Honestly watching elephants never gets old and it gave us a little warm-up for our adventures during our Christmas break. Now we just need to get through the next 4.5 weeks of work…