Kakum Canopy Walkway is seven rope bridges strung between living hardwoods about forty metres above the rainforest floor, in the Central Region of Ghana. Nothing was nailed. A forest ecologist and surveyors went over each anchor tree for health as well as strength before a rope went round it, because bolts driven into those trunks would have wounded the very things holding the walkway up. So the spans are wire rope, aluminium ladders, planks and netting, tensioned between trees still growing under the load, and the decks between them are lashed around living trunks without breaking the bark. The bridges are one plank wide. The rope rails sit at chest height, the deck answers every step you take with a slow bounce, and everyone on the span feeds the same movement, so crossing is less a stroll than a negotiation.
The platforms are the only places to stand still and take your hands off the rails. If you stay on one, the forest fills in around you: cicadas rising and falling in waves, the heavy beat of a hornbill going over, butterflies passing the ropes at eye level. More than 600 butterfly species live here, and the rains bring their peak from April to June. Kakum is also the school trip nearly every Ghanaian child takes, so you will probably cross alongside them, the nerves and the shouted encouragement travelling along the rope both ways. The steep forest path that climbs to the walkway shows what the structure actually is: from underneath, thin rope strung between giants, almost invisible until the light catches the netting. The bet behind all of it was that a rainforest could earn more standing than felled. The park drew about 2,000 people in 1992, and 136,000 in 2009. Underneath lives Ghana's densest population of forest elephants, and hardly anyone sees one from the bridges. They are counted from dung and footprints rather than sightings, and the way most people here actually meet them is at the park's edge, in the cocoa, cassava and maize of the farms around it.