Mole National Park is the largest in Ghana, nearly 4,600 square kilometres of savanna woodland, and it is one of the last places in Africa where you walk up to wild elephants on foot. About 800 of them live here, more than anywhere else in Ghana. You go out behind an armed Ghana Wildlife ranger, twice a day, for a couple of hours. The early walk is the one that matters, before the heat clamps down. The ranger reads the wind and the mood of the bulls, and the group rounds a thicket to find an elephant stripping bark a few dozen metres off. On foot the small things take over: the width of a print in the dust, the tension in fresh spoor, the sound of a branch going before you see anything. There are lions and leopards here, but they are hardly ever seen, so what Mole gives is the walk itself, the herds of kob out on the grass and the shaggy defassa waterbuck near the water.
The rest of the day belongs to the escarpment. The motel and the lodge stand on the cliff edge above two waterholes. From the terrace you look down on elephants wading in to drink through the afternoon heat, hosing mud over their backs while warthogs and antelope wait their turn. As the heat goes, the savanna runs unbroken to the horizon in amber light and the birdcalls give way to the sounds of night. The village at the gate, Larabanga, keeps one of the oldest mosques in West Africa: whitewashed mud and timber, its walls bristling with wooden stakes, held locally to be from the fifteenth century. The park was set aside as a game reserve in 1958, and in 1961 the people living inside its boundaries were moved out. Nothing much separates the two sides now. Baboons lope across the motel grounds and warthogs kneel to graze the lawns. At the end of the dry season, when even the waterholes fail, elephants come up among the chalets and put their trunks in the swimming pool before the staff can wave them off.