Mole National Park is the largest wildlife reserve in Ghana, 4,800 square kilometres of savanna woodland in the Savannah Region of the north, and it is one of the few places in Africa where wild elephants are approached on foot, walking out behind an armed ranger to the waterholes where some 800 of them crowd in the dry season. The park is cheap and unpolished, and its heart is an escarpment above two waterholes: the motel and the lodge stand on the cliff edge, and from their terraces the elephants are watched wading in to drink and cool off through the afternoon heat, spraying mud over their backs, while kob antelope graze the flats and shaggy defassa waterbuck stand near the water. The walking safaris leave in the early morning and late afternoon with a Ghana Wildlife ranger and a rifle, through the grass toward the herds, and the ranger reads the wind and the mood of the bulls to bring the group within a few dozen metres; there are lions and leopards in the park but they are rarely seen, so the walk is about the elephants, the antelope and the birds.
The wildlife does not stay in the bush. Baboons and warthogs share the camp, the baboons raiding anything left on a terrace, and at the end of the dry season, from February to April, when even the waterholes shrink, the elephants walk up among the chalets and dip their trunks into the swimming pool before staff can wave them off. The village at the park gate, Larabanga, guards one of the oldest mosques in West Africa, a small building of mud and timber in the Sudanese style with whitewashed walls bristling with wooden stakes, said to date from the fifteenth century, and a sacred stone at the roadside that legend says returned by itself each time the road builders moved it. Mole is Africa's elephants without the fences or the prices, and the walk toward them is what the place gives.