Even though tourists arrivals at Kakum Park in the Central Region reached 136,000 in 2008, there are still only 12 tour guides working at that national tourist site, an official of the park said on Wednesday.
"We have 74 staff members out of which only 12 of us are tour guides and the rest are security persons, front desk staff and other peripheral staff," Kate Effi Donkoh, a senior tour guide told a group of international travel writers and local journalists on a visit to the park.
The visit was part of the on-going United Nations World Tourism Day, under the theme, "Tourism Celebrating Diversity."
Kakum Park is a 360 square kilometres state-owned protected forest reserve, jointly managed by the Wildlife Division of the Forestry
Commission and the Ghana Heritage Conservation Trust (GHCR), a non-government organisation.
It is famed for being the only tourist site that houses the only canopy way on the continent of Africa, and other features that serve as major
attractions to tourists from all over the world.
In 2007 there were 100,000 tourist arrivals at the park and this year the number reached 136,000, out of which 120,000 went into the park and unto the canopy way and into the camp site, said Ms. Ernestina Anim, a director at the park.
According to Ms. Donkoh during the peak seasons, between March and August of every year, tour guides are overwhelmed with the number of tourist assigned to one tour guide, saying that there were times one tour guide was assigned 120 tourists to take round the park.
During Wednesday's visit, one tour guide was for instance assigned 61 tourists.
"This situation makes it difficult for us to keep a close eye on the tourist and to check them from littering the park," she said.
True to her words, even though there were sign posts which said "Please do not litter" the travel writers, numbering 18, to whom Ms. Donkoh was assigned, ran into some litter during the tour, particularly in one big hole, of which some took pictures.
Ms. Donkoh said a maximum of 20 tourists per tour guide should be enough to control in order to ensure that the forest was kept clean and the tourist themselves were kept safe during the tour.
A staff of the Wildlife Division told the GNA that the problem of inadequate staff numbers was a general one across the entire division.
Ms Anim told the travel writers that out of the total number of visitors to the park, 70 per cent were Ghanaians and 30 per cent were foreigners.
"Of the 70 per cent Ghanaians visitor, 15 per cent are adults and 55 per cent are children and of the 30 per cent foreigners, 20 per cent are adults and 10 per cent are children," she said.
Ghanaian adults paid GHC2.5 per head and children paid GHC1.5 per head as admission fee, while foreign adults paid GHC9.00 per head and children paid GHC5.00.
According to Ms. Anim, there were other special charges for persons wishing to take still and or moving pictures in the park, saying that for still pictures there is a GHC200 charge and GHC500 charge for moving pictures.
Some of the travel writers questioned why they should be charges so much for wanting to take pictures to promote the park as a world tourist site.
Revenue generated from the park is distributed between the Wildlife Division and the GHCR; Wildlife Division manages the reserve while
GHCR manages some of the resources like the canopy way and the camp site.
The visit also took the travel writers to Cape Coast and Elmina Castle, where the journey through slave dungeons and the gate of no return, and the narration of the history of what Africans suffered under slave masters in those castles, got almost all of them moody and dumb founded throughout their stay in those two castles.
Some of them admitted to the GNA that they felt guilty for what their forefathers did to Africans.
One of the travel writers, John Bell, from the UK, told the GNA that the castles were clear evidence of what African's were put through in the past, saying that in Britain "we never learnt the history of the slave trade in the way we have learnt today."
He said for British students, the slave trade was interpreted in a way to remove all emotional attachment, saying that Africans needed to do a better interpretation of that period and present the right picture to the world.
Mr. Bell also noted that the way so many tourists sites were crowded in the Central Region, was not good enough for the benefit of tourism to the entire nation, saying, there should be a wider spread of tourist sites in
order for the entire country to reap from the benefits thereof.
They also paid a courtesy call on Ms Ama Benyiwa Doe, the Central Regional Minister, at her residence, where Mr Spencer Francis Taylor,
Acting Executive Director of the Central Regional Development Commission (CEDCOM) told them about the tourist sites and investment opportunities in the Region, and urged them to write about those to attract tourists and investors to the Region.
He assured them that when foreign investors come to the region, CEDCOM would facilitate and safeguard the investments through its one-stop-shop investment package.