Kakum Park Canopy Walkway Steals Show

A miniature of the Kakum National Park canopy walkway is the toast of visitors at the ongoing World Expo in Hannover, Germany.

For the five days that this reporter visited the fair, visitors from all over the world had queued up to climb the miniature of one of the world's few canopy walkways.

An official of the Ghana stand told The Accra Mail that initially it was free, but fearing that the canopy could collapse if climbing was not regulated, they decided to charge a token one deutsche mark. Even that did not discourage curious visitors. According to the official, the walkway records an average of 1500 climbers a day.

The canopy walkway which was built by a group of Canadian and Ghanaian experts is suspended between odum and acacia trees above the stand and easily catches the attention of visitors. Amid traditional patriotic songs, the Ghana stand is arguably one of the loveliest at the Expo.

'The canopy walkway is to give tourists a foretaste of what to expect when they come to Ghana,' the official explained.

Also on display are pictures of castles and forts that have become icons of Ghana's tourism industry. Every year, hundreds of tourists visit the Cape Coast and Elmina Castles to catch a glimpse of the monuments that once housed slaves waiting to be ferried to the New World.

Another tourist attraction on show here is the Wli Water Falls in the Volta Region, demonstrating water from the mountains gushing through rocks. The official explained that it is intended to open up Wli for development. As usual, the stand has been adorned with colourful kente and Ghanaian artefacts.

Ghana's focus at the fair is the promotion of tourism, perhaps to replace her traditional exchange earners, cocoa and gold, whose unpredictable world prices have become a nightmare for the government. Last year, tourism fetched more than $300 million and is expected to do better in the coming years if it is well packaged and aggressively marketed.

Under the theme 'The environment: a tool for accelerated development', Ghana hopes to turn tourism into an inexhaustible gold mine to make for the short fall of revenue from cocoa and gold. Ironically, Ghana's closest rival, Cote d'Ivoire, which dethroned her as the world's leading producer of cocoa, has the latest technology on cocoa production on display. To Cote d'Ivoire, cocoa is still the engine of their economy.

The focus on tourism, especially, the Kakum National Park and the castles and forts, is a forthright decision. Of the four walkways in the world, Ghana boasts of the only one in Africa. Apart from the walkway, vestiges of the extent of European colonial presence in Ghana are evidenced by the fact that 29 of the remaining 32 forts and castles dotted along the west coast of West Africa are found in Ghana. UNESCO has designated these monuments as world heritage sites.

But in a country where there is more talking and less action it remains to be seen whether Ghana can make any headway. At the time of filing this report, the stand had run out of tourist maps and information for visitors.

Under the broad theme 'Humankind-Nature-Technology: A new world arising', the Expo is the greatest event to be hosted by a united Germany since the 1972 Olympic games and 1974 football world cup. For the first time a world Expo is taking place not only at the site, but also throughout the Hannover region and Germany as a whole. It is therefore not surprising that the federal government voted $400 million to prop up the fair when it recorded a slow take off.