Kpatawee Waterfalls Liberia

The Kpatawee waterfall, most commonly known among locals as the heart of Bong County, is a natural wonder not to be missed. The fall can be reached from a village in a tolerable time of 45 minutes.

The village is positioned amongst high rises and deep valleys. Many locals who do farming reside in the village, many of which generate income from growing rice and bananas. You will pass forests of banana plants, waiting for the sun to aid with their ripening.

An abundance of banana plants will appear ripened with red berries waiting to be picked, dried, milled, and exported. Amidst the hike you.

Due to this fact you would acquire many followers along the route, young children fascinate our sweaty faces and peculiar accents, trying to lead us further up the peak.

The change in terrain and altitude for that matter isn’t for the faint-hearted, or the ‘not-so-fit’ in my case. You have to bear a good sense of balance to cross the slimmest of paths segregating running streams from plummeting valleys.

Kpatawee waterfall falls within the rainforest zone of Liberia, as a branch of the St. John River, one of the six major rivers in the country. While the river erodes the valley in its upper sections, it accumulates sand and gravel downstream, leaving patches of bare land along its course, which provide wintering grounds for large numbers of common Sandpipers and Palaearctic migrant species such as Little Ringed Plover and Greenshanks. The endangered Three-cusped Pangolin and Water Chevrotain occur at the site too. The villagers value this area as a picnic ground, for hosting meetings, workshops, and retreats, but the area and its resources are also used for palm wine production, hunting, fishing, basket making, bathing, and other domestic uses. Within the site, the governments of Liberia and China undertook the Kpatawee Rice Project with the objective of introducing new rice farming methods to farmers, to discourage shifting cultivation. Threats to the site include the potential development of a hydropower scheme. The site is an ideal nature reserve and tourist attraction but has not officially been recognized for this purpose.