I did not stay at Frenchman’s, but instead camped inside Ankasa itself, wandering about with one of the game wardens, looking for monkeys and other mammals. I stopped by Frenchman’s place on my way out of the park the next morning, turning up a side road and climbing to a high ridge with panoramic views of the park. Frenchman has big plans to build lovely cabins with upper-deck terraces overlooking the valley between his place and the park. If he ever pulls it off, it should be truly spectacular.
In the meantime, hardly anyone visits Ankasa, so an investment of such a magnitude would seem momentarily unwise. I checked the registration book at the park entrance – maybe one or two visitors a day right now. Frenchman himself says it would be foolish for him to invest more until the facilities in the camp itself are upgraded, though if someone is willing to subsidize, he’s happy to build.
Of course, if there were more facilities, if there were more to do inside the park, if there were truly knowledgeable guides who could properly interpret the park for visitors, and if the park were not so far from Accra or Abidjan, then there’d probably be more visitors. Ankasa is actually not all that far from Accra, and with some slight improvements to the last bit of road, it could be reached easily within five hours. If the Ghana-Ivoire border were eased a bit, Abidjan would be even closer than Accra.
The rest is a bit more problematic. There’s a lot of talk about new investment, and certainly the park seems ripe for it. An investor’s guide is circulating, prepared by staff of a project funded by the European Union, trying to attract someone willing to put in high-end suites with air conditioning and a nice restaurant. The investor’s guide seems strangely lacking in any indication of why someone might want to stay in one of these high-end suites. A wise investor would surely have to bring along the necessary programmatic elements that are currently missing from the park -- better guides with a corresponding continuing education program for them, more and better maintained trails, lookout towers, canopy viewing perches and tree houses, an interpretive center or museum of some sort, special periodic lectures and interpreted walks, and so forth.
An initial “anchor” investor would have to be someone quite skilled and experienced in the tourism trade, who would know about all of those programmatic elements that would turn a room in a forest, which might as well be in a forest somewhere else closer to home, into a proper destination. If one major hotelier gets it right, then lots of others catering to various niches would surely spring up around it, lured by the major improvements in infrastructure and skills that the initial anchor would have brought to the park. Now it seems as if the niches are generally catered for, but the anchor is missing, so the infrastructure is lacking and the skills are largely absent. There’s just not much point to the casual tourist visit to Ankasa. It’s a bit of a disappointment, not living up to even the modest hype of the guidebooks.
Frenchman himself doesn’t do too well on his guest house, which is not surprising, but the the guest house is entertaining for him, and is an easy complement to his farming and other activities. He gets the occasional visitor from abroad, which sparks good conversation. Some of the expatriate wildlife project staff do lodge with him, as do the occasional Peace Corps Volunteers stationed there. He serves them tea and bread in the morning, Akwaaba stew in the evening – his own creation, a mix of vegetables in a light soup flavored with palm oil, quickly prepared when a hungry overnight guest arrives late in the day. The guest rooms themselves are plain but quite adequate. Beds with mosquito nets, windows overlooking the valley, en suite toilets after a fashion -- no running water, but a commode nonetheless into which one turns a bucket of water after each use, which is perfectly fine. At GHc 10 per night (about US$9), the price seems about right, better than the beach camps in Ada where the toilets are far less interesting, rising and falling with the tide, never really flushed. Frenchman’s is not nearly as nice as the comparably priced bunkhouses of Beyin Beach Resort, no more than an hour’s drive away, which have proper flush toilets and showers, not to mention an idyllic adjacent beach and very swimmable bit of ocean.
Compare Frenchman’s to the lodging available within Ankasa itself. The fee per person to enter the park is GHc 2.50 plus something for the car, then Ghc 5 for the room, and a nominal hourly charge to have a game warden keep one from getting lost on the trails. There are four screenhouses, each with two beds, located at Nkwanta Camp, about 6 kilometers inside the main gate. The rooms at Nkwanta are certainly the best feature. With screens on both sides, I was very comfortable if not a bit chilled on one of the hottest days of the year, far better than the typical cement-block room, stifling hot, that one gets at the typical low-end, no air conditioning lodging in Ghana.
The rooms at Nkwanta were the nice feature. Now for the rest.
I brought along my own beach chair, which is something you can do easily if you live in Ghana, have your own car, and have either imported some nice chairs or had them made locally. The chair proved essential to a very delightful evening, and I’m sure this would have been true even at Frenchman’s. I bring my chairs everywhere, actually. None but the most expensive resorts seem to have good chairs, which is a bit odd given that a decent chair or even a hammock only costs a bit to make.
There was once solar electricity. Presumably the wiring remains intact in case someone decides to repair it or find a link to the regional grid.
There is a toilet out back, but since there’s no running water, the toilet is rank and essentially not worth using, a trip to a nearby trail with a kettle of water being the far preferable alternative used by the staff who also lodge there in 10 cement-block rooms to the side.
The staff will furnish a bucket of water for a bath in the serviceable shower stall next to the toilet room, so that’s fine, though when I visited, they’d obviously not cleaned the shower room out in quite some time, so I shared my shower with an enormous spider and the remains of its various meals over the last few days; there was actually room enough for both of us, and I managed to keep from splashing him, so do give the spider my regards should he happen still to be there during your own visit.
The rooms at Frenchman’s are at least as comfortable as those at Nkwanta, and all the rest is better, so for my money, Frenchman’s is for now the place to stay. The only reason one might stay at Nkwanta rather than Frenchman’s is for the sound of the rain forest. I sat entranced for nearly two hours, my chair parked inside the screen room, listening first to the staff as they settled in for the evening, all in bed by 8pm, then to the “quiet” cacophony of thousands of whistling and knocking night birds, howling jungle cats, barking monkeys, and of course crickets.
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