The Tsitsikamma Forest, near Plettenberg Bay, has been attractive to tourists for, well, forever…. or at least several hundreds of thousands of years.  Not only are there middens made by very early Stone-Age man, there is also evidence that Fred Flintstone visited with his family on his world tour.  Therefore it should come as no surprise that this is an area which has been developed with tourism in mind since the days of the strandlopers.

Even the names of the old places give an indication of its antiquity:  Outeniqua means ‘the honey bearers’ in the old tongue, and Tsitsikamma means ‘place of abundant water’ in one of the San languages.  This forest remnant is the last piece of indigenous coastal forest of this particular type, with huge soaring trees dripping with Spanish moss, a forest floor pillared with enormous tree ferns, brightly coloured fungi with whimsical names, and shy animals like the duiker, bushbuck, leopard and porcupine.  This is an evergreen forest and therefore stays picturesque all year round, with hundreds of tiny little streams overhung with ferns and rippling over mossy stones.  The shafts of sunlight that come down through the canopy and sparkle off the water keep many photographers gainfully employed. This is also the home of Stormsriver Adventures, a tourism company that is trying its hardest to do everything right.   The company is BEE compliant, is a member of the Fair Trade organisation, and stresses through all its activities that it adheres to the highest safety standards and ethics. But apart from that, it offers some darned nice tours.  The most popular is probably the Tsitsikamma Canopy Tour, which puts visitors in a sling for a guided three-hour winch through the forest canopy of giant Outeniqua yellowwoods.  This is the first of its kind of Africa and combines a little adrenalin (but not too much) with a chance to do something really different.  The tour starts with a safety briefing and a kitting up, then it’s time to hit the cables.  From the launch platform you glide gently along to the first tree platform, feeling perhaps like a large pelican. The other denizens of the forest will ignore you as they go about their business, and your tour guide will introduce you quietly to who they are and what they are doing. The most remarkable thing about this tour is hanging high in the canopy where humans actually have no business to be, but being accepted by the forest animals, and listening to the sounds of the birds.  It is almost as if you can hear the forest growing. For the landlubbers, there is something a little more down to earth.  Before the Storms River Bridge was completed to become the engineering marvel that it is, there used to be an old road winding laboriously and peacefully down one side of the river gorge and up the other side.  For people in a hurry this was a pain – trundling slowly down hundreds of hairpin bends to a little stone bridge across the Coke-coloured water at the bottom.  Now that the suspension bridge is completed over the gorge, travellers can zoom over the top in less than a minute instead of the 40 minutes it used to take.  But in the process, something has been lost.  It might have been a time-consuming drive, but the old road had a sense of wonder about it. So Storms River Adventures has kitted out a special open vehicle to take people down the old Storms River Pass, to encounter the indigenous rain forest from the bottom up.  The road follows the old elephant trails that were turned into a road in what, in those days, was a magnificent feat of engineering by road builder Thomas Bain.  Visitors can experience the hush of the forest and fleeting glimpses of the almost legendary birds of the rain forest, the bright loerie and Narina trogon.  As a highlight, the truck stops right at the bottom, next to the old stone bridge, for a light lunch or high tea. Storms River, of course, is the starting point of the Otter Trail, which is one of those ‘must do before I die’ nature trails.  And there is a pleasant resort at the mouth of the Storms River. But the best testimonial for this paradise comes from the noted travel writer, TV Bulpin, who abandoned his normal dry style of description to wax a little lyrical about the coast:  ‘On the seaward side the great rollers pound incessantly on the dark rocks.  On the landward side the forest tumbles over the cliffs like a green waterfall, with arum lilies and other flowers providing splashes of colour like spray.  Through these high cliffs the Storms River has washed a narrow cleft through which its amber waters flow to the sea.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. For more information on Storms River Adventures, go to their website at www.stormsriver.com