Paga Things to Do

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One of the very typical things you should see in the area north from Bolgatanga, are the houses with complex drawings on the walls. The village of Sirigu is famous for it, but in Paga you can see them too. Here you will see the local symbol, the crocodile, painted on the walls a lot.

People will offer you a guided (and expensive) tour through the village all the time, but along the mainroad you can see some of these buildings too. When I was taking a picture of then though, someone yelled at me that that was somehow forbidden, and so he told me in these exact words "next time you come here, I'll slap you!". Decide yourself if you want to take that risk :)

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The mainattraction of Paga are the sacred crocodiles that live there. In two "crocodile ponds" there are hundreds of them. There are many different stories about how these crocs became sacred, but the central point is that one day the crocodiles promissed the people of Paga that they would never hurt them again, if they would respect the animals in the same way.

Eversince the two are big friends, and the crocodiles are spoiled by the humans. It is said that the animals wander around the town at night and even lay their eggs inside the houses. Anyways, there are no fences around the ponds, so the crocs are free to go anywhere they want.

When you enter the area around the crocodile pond, the commercial circus begins. Five people attack you, all trying to make some money. You start with paying an entrance fee of 20.000 cedis ($ 2,-) per person, plus a camera fee of 5.000 cedis. And then you have to buy a (living) chicken too for 30.000 cedis.

Then all of you go to the lakeside and a crocodile automatically comes out. You can take dozens of pictures with it, all in the standard poses the guide tells you, and then the animal gets the chicken, eats it and disappears.

It's quite a nice thing to see, but way too commercialized so it gets annoying.

Another clearly commercially exploited thing in Paga is its Chief's Palace. In both Tamale and Wa I visited one too, and both times it was for free and I was welcomed sincerely and spontaneously. In Paga though, it was indicated with tourist signs, and there was a entrance fee I had to pay.

That is why I didn't feel like visiting this one. They started with asking an entrance fee of 80.000 cedis ($ 8,-) per person. You can bargain about the price, but it just didn't feel sincere to me. There are enough other places where you can visit a Chief's Palace in a more authentic way then here in Paga.

After dinner the crocodile doesn’t see reason anymore to amuse tourists, and lazily slides back into the water.

The whole ceremony took some 20 minutes, and I found it big fun…

I didn’t expect a breathtaking and too serious attraction , and that’s why I enjoyed, and that’s why the journalist of the Ghanaian Times (see my intropage) was disappointed…
I just passed by, slept under the stars, enjoyed the highly unusual experience at the Crocodile Pond and tried to make more out of my stay in Paga by visiting the Chief’s palace and the nearby Slave Camp.

So is Paga worth a long journey from – say – Tamale or even further south? I would say NO if you had only one day and not your own car, but I definitely would say YES, if you could stay at least 1 night in the region and see some more of Paga or the Upper East Region in general!!

After feeding the crocodile, I approached him with my camera. He was hoping to get it, as he widely opened his mouth.

I wondered what’s the real relationship between people and animal here. Are these crocodiles just an ordinary way of generating money, or were it really the ancestors souls that had to be treated so well?

Both could be true, I guess, but in a society where Christianity and Islam gets more and more supporters, there will be less room for the traditional beliefs. So it’s probably just the right time to protect the animals under an Eco Tourism Project and try to make some good money out of the legend!

When all photo’s have been taken, the patient reptile finally gets what he got out of the water for: the fowl!

And the crocodiles are really patient! According to the menu, groups up to 20 members can have their photo taken with just one fowl for all! In such cases, the bird at least died for a lot of people, but in my case it was only one, me!!

The way the crocodile swallowed the fowl was quite impressive, a concert of bone breaking sounds!

The main reason that – especially domestic - tourists come here is to have there photo taken while holding the tail of these friendly creatures.

On that Sunday afternoon I saw quite a lot of Ghanaians coming, mostly couples or families in private cars, dressed as properly as possible for the photo of their life. One after the other fowl disappeared from the box in the summerhut.

As most Ghanaians have no cameras (or have cameras but no film), the guides make very good business using their own. You have to pay in advance and can pick up or have send the photo’s next day.

By the way, the advertised “having your photo taken sitting on the back of a crocodile” has two conditions. The crocodile must be huge and the human tiny. In reality this is only feasible for little children in rare cases.

It depends on the seasons and the time of the day whether the crocodiles are fancy to show up soon, but eventually one will appears!

It lasted 15 minutes of hard work by 3 guides before a big, lazy reptile finally came out of the water. A rather young crocodile. The guide explained that Mondays weren’t the best days for spotting the old ones.

I was a bit disappointed because I wouldn’t be able to sit on its back (hmm), still I felt some excitement when the crocodile approached us! I’ve seen hundreds of crocodiles before but this whole thing was so funny…