This is going to sound like one of those “When I was young…” stories, and for that I apologise in advance.  But –

I first travelled the Garden Route on my own when I drove my little second-hand Mini (a graduation gift from my parents) from university in Grahamstown to visit friends in Cape Town.  At that time – which would be, oh, about thirty years ago – the road was still a single lane with wide earth shoulders and brooding forests on either side.  The road was quiet around noon when I pulled over into a lay-by to have a snack and a cup of coffee somewhere between Wilderness and Sedgefield.  And as I sat peering over the steering wheel along the road and sipping the lukewarm and very sweet coffee, a leopard strolled out of the trees, sat down by the side of the road, hoisted a leg in the air and proceeded to have a thorough wash. I stopped breathing.  In fact I was too scared to swallow in case the movement scared him away.  He was about twenty metres from me and completely unaware of the presence of the frozen human being in the strange little car. For a short while he busily licked under his leg, then he lay down just like a contented cat and rolled over, rubbing his head on the stony ground and wriggling back and forth.  Underneath he was white with grey spots and it took all my self-control not to leap out the car and tickle that fluffy tummy. He pricked up his ears when he heard a faraway oncoming car.  Then he unhurriedly got to his feet, strolled back through the trees and vanished. The entire encounter had lasted less than five minutes.  But I felt quite desolate, as if my best friend had gone away forever.  It was a long time before I could move, and it was with a sense of loss that I set out again. The reason why I tell you this bit of ancient history is because the area that I have travelled through on many occasions since (but without ever spotting a leopard) has now been proclaimed a brand-new national park. But not an everyday sort of national park. There are only three other national parks in the world where people live inside the borders of a proclaimed park:  Italy, Canada and the USA.  So this will be a first for the African continent. The park will amalgamate the patchwork of existing parks Tsitsikamma, Wilderness, Knysna Lake Area, the Southern Cape Indigenous Forests and the fynbos Mountain Catchment Areas. The number of different terrains within the park is going to make for an interesting management experience.  It contains marine, coastal, lakes, indigenous forests and mountain catchment areas.  Possibly the most interesting thing is that you won’t even know you are in a park.  There will be no additional fences or gates.  The only change will be that the ecosystems will enjoy protection across the entire southern Cape coast.  The park straddles both the Eastern and Western Cape and is part of the government’s strategy to place 8% of the total area of South Africa under formal protection.

So what will you see that’s different, you ask.  Not much in the short term, is the response.  One of the problems that has always bedevilled conservation in the Southern Cape in the past has been the fact that parks have been subject to so many different, and sometimes contradictory, conservation rules.  Putting them all into one park will make sure that conservation is more successful and more efficient. However, what has happened immediately is a number of new hiking trails, boat trips and the repair of some dilapidated roads through the forests and over suspension bridges.  “The idea is to improve low-impact tourism development,” says Zanemvula Gozongo, spokesman for the Garden Route National Park.  “So we have developed more outdoor recreation sites, horse trails, mountain bike trails, a hiking trail with nine overnight huts.  The park was created to protect the environment and to ensure sustainable tourism.”  If you want to get the information from Zanemvula himself, best to phone him on 044 – 302-5600. Over the last thirty years, ever since I met and was enchanted by my leopard, the Garden Route has been developed and cultivated and touristified and signboarded to within an inch of its life.  There is no way that a dignified young cat is going to relax by the side of a busy congested, toll-roaded, One-Stopped highway.  Perhaps under this new all-encompassing conservation rule, with money being spent on the winding roads and the forest trails, the hustle and bustle can be contained.  Motorists will take the old roads instead of the new and will see past the shops and cafés into the dim woods beyond. And perhaps some distant relative of my first leopard is lying by the side of a forest track, rolling in the dust with a white tummy showing, waiting for me to come back.