Mutia in Kakum National Park?

After my dinner Saturday, I returned to Biriwa to attend a drumming/dancing performance for the UCSD group, and it ended up being a late night because Sammy (the guy who drove me down to Biriwa) had to hang mosquito nets for them (without a hammer) at the last minute; so I got up slowly this Sunday morning. I was immediately greeted with “Happy Father’s Day” by the different staff members at the Fairhill Guesthouse. It was a slow morning, because I knew that I didn’t have anything until Nate and Nana Gyan picked me up at noon. We had no set agenda, and they decided to take me to Kakum National Park.
Kakum is a large park not far from Cape Coast; it’s too big to explore in a couple of hours (some people camp out there, with a guide). One of the main attractions to the park is the “canopy walk” – a 350 meter long, 40 meter high rope-bridge where you can see above the tropical rainforest canopy. It’s a fantastic view of the bush, from an unusual perspective, and the sights are stunning.

Other than the pleasure of the outing, I also learned about the mutia, a kind of Ghanaian leprechaun. Our guide told us that you can find their footprints in the jungle, and they supposedly go around the jungle digging for gold. Nate, a junior at Rutgers who was born in the US but also lived in Ghana for much of his childhood, looked at me and asked if I thought they were real. He told me that when he was younger, he would hear stories about the mutia, but he seemed skeptical. Well, we didn’t see any mutia in Kakum that afternoon.