A Memoir of my favourite travel experience

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We still chuckle at the dictaphone tapes I sent home from Ankasa, as I tried
to record the sounds of the rainforest, sharing my experiences. I distinctly
remember rewinding the tapes to see if the noises could be heard and then
pressing record once more to try again. Oh course I failed to realise that's it' is
difficult to hear a recording of something which is still going on live in front of
you.

Ankasa Rainforest, Ghana. Over five hundred square kilometers of wet
evergreen. Wow, what a sense of disappointment I felt when I was told I would
be spending a month there. I soon came to realise how wrong I had been. It
never ceased to surprise me how quickly the climate changed as we turned
off the main road and drove towards the warden’s gates signaling the start of
Ankasa. A good deal cooler and certainly a good bit darker I remember feeling a
little overwhelmed at the prospect of 31 days surrounded by some of my top 10
items for room 101.

Along with a small group if ten people we were set the task of finishing off the
construction of a visitors centre at the edge of the forest. A fifteen minute walk
inwards, there was a clearing which we would call home, made up of two open
sided huts. Waking up with the sun each morning, I would never tire of the
sounds of the forest waking up with me - even at 5am! Pure chaotic noise that
fitted together in perfect harmony.

It doesn't take long for the magic of a forest to intrude ones soul. Ankasa was
full of surprises. A new friend in the form of a large black and yellow spider we
named Mummy - her daily routine at 6pm around our camp searching for food
for her new children whom she set up home with on our mosquito nets. The
electric blue scorpion that visited one night, which still bugs my imagination -
was it the Larium or real? Or the red striped snake, which slithered between the
two longdrops so you never knew how long you had - go little and often became
our moto.

However, none of this eclectic band of companions would have been quite so
special without the beauty that surrounded them. Great towers of bamboo
bowing to one another and meeting at the top to form grand arches aptly named
as bamboo cathedral. The wild forest elephants that we sadly never found, but
definitely heard and smelt on a bizarre outing collecting elephant dung to be
used as manure on the visitors centre garden. The ‘Big Tree’ they are known to
scratch their skin on, an incredible twenty-foot high and almost as chunky, and
not forgetting the crazy tree roots of other trees which were tall enough to use as
benches. And cutting through these is the gushing cool water of the river that we
bathed in every night. Listening to the sounds of the rapids was the ideal way to
relax after a hard days digging. Follow the river’s flow, you will find it eventually
drops off deep in the forest, leading to the most beautiful waterfall, hidden away
from most human eyes.

On my trip, I was here to work. We would start at 7am, after making the narrow

winding journey through the forest back out to the main entrance in the same
fashion as all the ants on the ground below us. Each day was different; collecting
elephant dung, sawing trees, cutting wood, hammering, digging, entertaining
local children, going to the local market to buy food, learning more about the
forest from the rangers... An endless list but one with the same theme - the
materials, the teaching, the techniques were no different to that of any local
Ghanaian. The days were long and hard - humidity is a hard thing to get used
to and the black fly were not going to give up their task in biting every part of
our legs. Yet none of that mattered. We were there to do something different -
to make a difference. The visitor centre was being built in a hope it would help
produce money for the area so the locals would stop felling the trees of this
ancient rainforest. I hope it does, it's too enchanting to destroy.

At dusk we would once again return to the clearing, to the sound of the tree
hyrax and monkeys saying their goodnight. We would cook together and then sit
around the campfire discussing the day and the seemly distant lives we all led
back home. Time once again for the dictaphone to record my desperate attempts
at capturing the sounds around me.

The day we left I cried. I cried as we left the rangers, and the groups of laughing
children, at the gates, as we drove up the track to the warm and sunny road
and all the way back to base camp. I had learnt a lot... I learnt about lives, about
getting along with different people, about physically building something, and not
forgetting about learning how to get on with all the insects I would have put in
room 101, and loving it all. Would I pick up a bird-eating spider now? Absolutely
not. Those experiences are reserved for Ankasa only.

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