Kakum's canopy walkway is tied to the trees that carry it — not one nail or bolt pierces the bark. Seven rope-and-plank bridges run about 330 metres from crown to crown, some 40 metres above the forest floor, slung between emergent hardwoods whose own tops keep climbing another ten metres over your head. Two Canadian engineers and five Ghanaians built it in roughly six months, and it opened in 1995 as the first walkway of its kind in Africa — a project of Ghana's Wildlife Department and Conservation International, funded by USAID. The aim was to give the forest a value that did not require cutting it down. Below it lies Kakum National Park: 375 square kilometres reserved since 1931 and declared a national park in 1992, one of the last big tracts of rainforest left in West Africa.
The bridges are a single plank wide. You cross in file, hands on the rope rails, netting to your chest, and every step you take travels down the span as a slow bounce that the person behind you feels. Most of what you meet up here is sound: cicadas, the heavy whoosh of a hornbill's wings, colobus monkeys crashing through a far crown. Butterflies are the real spectacle — more than 600 species have been recorded in the park, and the rains bring them past the ropes in drifts. The forest elephants, Ghana's densest population at perhaps 100 to 150 animals, are another matter: they keep to the deep forest and are almost never seen in daylight. Today the crossing is close to a national rite of passage, and you will most likely make it alongside a line of uniformed schoolchildren gripping the same rope.