Korup National Park

Korup National Park

So, it’s a mere 6 hour journey from Limbe to Korup, but it’s ‘one of those roads’ the type where you spend more time out of your seat than in it and when you get out you find you’re covered in more red dust than is actually left on the road, or so it seems. Having arrived after a small hiccup with something to do with the steering on the 4x4 breaking (read 2 hour stop in a random town in the middle of nowhere which had a shop with a surprisingly good range of wines to buy!) we arrived Mbendgo where we managed to randomly run into some people Grahame knew – small world before meeting Chief Adulf (I kid you not). A Chief of one of the villages within the Park he gave us a run down of the history and biodiversity… and the next day having paid our way we were allowed to cross the suspension bridge that leads into the Park where we then spent a merry three days walking and camping in what turned out to be a rather dry rainforest inhabited by just one or two mosquitoes…

In the Park there are a huge amount of tracks cleared and then they have different camp sites so you can kind of choose your route and where you want to stay. Each camp is built by the river with a ‘drinking point’ a ‘bathing point’ and then the latrine/toilet is further down stream and this time last year would have been beautiful with huts for people to stay in. However, poaching is a big problem within the Park and a few months ago a poacher was shot dead by one of the guards and then being a local man the people in his village retaliated by literally tearing each of these camps to shreds; setting fire to anything flammable and knocking down anything that wasn’t, so each night we were camping in a destruction site – strange. So, a good three days of walking with the highlight being the waterfall we went to on the last day – beautiful and the green snake (the only bit of ‘interesting’ wildlife we saw in the whole days) that crossed my path enroute to it.