One of the reasons birders on a budget will love Ghana is that public transport is readily available and very cheap!  After getting a good night’s sleep in the Holiday Inn, we were very keen the next morning to get to Kakum National Park, Ghana’s premier birding hotspot.

We paid around $10 for a hotel taxi (it would have been cheaper if we had gotten one in the street) to the Tema Station.  I had mistakenly believed that we could get a tro-tro to Cape Coast from there.  That was wrong, we needed to take one tro-tro to Kaneshie, then get another one to Cape Coast.

Since we were the last to board, we had to go to the back of the mini-bus.

The driver dropped us off at Kaneshie right in front of the section where the Cape Coast tro-tros departed.  We found Ghanaians to be very friendly and helpful whenever we needed directions.  The drivers of these tro-tros charged us the same as everyone else, no attempt at tourist prices.

While you wait for the tro-tro to fill up, vendors will come around selling everything under the sun.  We just watched the people in the market and waited, it didn’t take more than 15 minutes or so to fill up.

You can also get buses like this to Cape Coast but the tro-tros tend to fill up quicker.  Either way it’s a cheap trip, around $6-$8.

Upon arrival in Cape Coast, the driver dropped us at the station where another tro-tro went to Kakum National Park.  You can actually go all the way to the park from here and hop out at the gate.

This is where we hopped out – the Rainforest Lodge.  By this time it was around 2pm so we decided to just have lunch, relax and watch birds around the lodge and save Kakum for an early start in the morning.