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On Safari With Baboons At Mole National Park

WriteOnline
4 min readJul 23, 2021
Streetwalking Baboons near Mole Game Park, Ghana.
Streetwalking Baboons near Mole Game Park, Ghana.

We heard an almighty scream at Mole National Park, followed by a loud crash in the motel room next door. We ran into the adjoining room, my driver and I, to find a white American male red-faced on the floor with blood pouring from a gash in his forehead.

“What’s happened to you?” I asked, fearing the worst. He said he left his bedroom door open while he went out to fetch some documents from a hired car parked nearby. He got back to find a baboon stretched out on his bed, eating his Butter Bread.

The white man had tried to coax the animal at first, doing his best Doctor Dolittle act. But the raging baboon “with wild maddening eyes” leapt up and struck him in the face. “It was like some corned methhead back home,” he grinned, trying to make light of a bad situation. But neither Ibrahim nor I could see the funny side.

We were both wondering the very same thing, it seems. Whether this pathetic looking tourist had gone and got himself bitten by a baboon and managed to catch Ebola? Even though we knew there were no known incidents of Ebola in Ghana, we figured if it were to happen, it could only ever happen to an ‘Obroni’. And that tickled us immensely, later, laughing in the car heading back down south.

We had picked the bleeding white man off the floor and led him to reception for the young…

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WriteOnline
WriteOnline

Written by WriteOnline

Often found in far-flung places reading Walter Mosley with a rucksack on his back.

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