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Whizzing through a forest canopy in the picturesque KwaZulu Natal Midlands is not for the faint-hearted …
My excited daughter dangles like a puppet on a string. I, in contrast, feel like a cornered sloth suspended on a branch with no escape from a predator. She takes off with breezy confidence, whizzing along the steel cable through the tree canopy, experting lifting her legs to pull herself up onto the first platform, as if to the manner born. The rest of our group follows with equal panache.
Except for me. I push myself off gingerly, exceed every speed limit I've never broken, and remember just in time to raise my legs to avoid crashing into the raised platform before one of the guides helps me up. And this is not even the real thing. It is the short practice run - called Last Chance - to test your nerve. Seven more to go, the longest 170m. It's too far and too steep to walk down.
This is the Karkloof Canopy Tour, an aerial adventure based in the rolling KwaZulu-Natal Midlands on the edge of the second largest indigenous forest in South Africa.
We drive from the Karkloof Road through an avenue of oaks, pines and azalea hedge to a pretty tin-roofed verandah house. A warm welcome then into a room for a briefing and kitting-up with a harness you step into, hard helmet and leather-palmed gloves. We climb into a 4x4 for the steep drive to the top of the forest. A short walk and it's onto the first wooden stilted platform. I feel more confident when I note how carefully everyone's gear is checked by our three guides.
Then you each get hitched onto the steel cable and a safety cable is attached to a second cable higher up. I sort of sit down and push myself into the abyss, letting gravity do the work. My right hand holds onto the attachment in front of you, my left - hence the leather-padded palm of the glove - is placed behind on the cable. The more you pull down on the cable, the slower you go, so the trick is to hold it lightly and use it to slow down just before the next platform. It is like taking your foot off the accelerator when approaching traffic lights.
One woman pulls down too strongly and stops mid-stream. That's a real challenge as she then has to climb, backwards, along the cable. One of the guides descends to help her. Everyone looks so young in our group though I'm told a 93-year-old man and his 81-year-old wife recently completed it. I still feel too old for these hijinks.
Ah, but it is beautiful. This is cool mistbelt forest with a very high rainfall, home to Samango monkeys, Knysna loeries, the elusive Narina Trogan and the endangered Cape parrot. Needless to say I see none of these. Just trying to keep body and dignity together takes all my concentration.
But help is at hand. "If you can't manage it, I'll come with you," says guide Pedros Sokhele after my nervous practice run. His previous job was in a Pietermaritzburg factory so he says this is heaven for him.
For the first serious whizz through the forest he sits close behind me, controlling our speed while I use both hands to hang on to the attachment. I feel like a monkey being carried by its mother. Tears of mirth run down my daughter's cheeks as we reach the next platform.
Actually it's quite exhilarating, once I know that Pedros is behind me. The rest of the party of eight - foreign tourists and locals - is blown-away, literally. They fly along the cable to the next stop. One guide is the trailblazer, the second copes with me and a third brings up the rear. It's all very organised and safe, each person being clipped onto a safety cable on arrival at a platform.
Once we've all made it, it's onto the next leg, whizzing past a sheer cliff with cascading waterfall on one leg of the zig-zag journey. Sometimes we are as high as 35m above the forest floor; when I dare to look around there is a sweeping view through the forest to fields, dams and cattle.
One slide is called the Rabbit Hole; you do indeed feel like Alice in Wonderland when she tumbled into one. Another is called Bums Up, no need to explain. The longest one is the Freeway.
There are eight slides traversing the forest, the system designed and constructed by a civil engineer to strict safety standards and a management plan approved by the national Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism to ensure the lightest ecological footprint, so to speak.
On we go, stopping after five slides for energy-boosting fruit juices and bars of chocolate, then dropping a few metres down a sheer cable to begin the homeward run.
It's a glorious feeling to get to the end, the last stop next to a gurgling brook where I can at last admire the lichens and wild flowers - and the dappled sunshine through the trees. Then it's a gentle walk downhill through the forest fringe, across a rustic bridge and the welcome sight of the house. We are met with wedges of toasted sandwiches, chips, salad and a drink on the verandah looking up at where we flew down from. The couple behind the project, Amoranda and Anton Barnes were living in Pretoria, hard at work in their electrical contracting business when they bought this 60 hectares of forest, intending it for their retirement. After a visit to Tsitsikamma Canopy Tour on the Garden Route and they knew they had to start something similar here: "Now we're working our, er, backsides off," Anton says.
It took eight months to build, ducking tree vines, climbing tall trees and carrying heavy cables through the forest. But such is its uniqueness in this province that since opening in September 2003 trips now take off every half-hour. Twenty locals work as guides, and there is a total staff of 25.
They are hard at work, too, protecting and replanting indigenous trees, the largest of which, Amoranda says, were ancient yellowwoods felled by the Voortrekkers in the 19th century for building materials. The stumps can still be seen.
Canopy tours originated in Central America's Costa Rica to enable biologists to explore the impenetrable rainforests. It was not long before this took off as an adventure eco-tourism activity and the country now claims to host the Original Canopy Tour.
But here in this corner of the Karkloof it is a unique experience, but it is not for sissies!
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