Canopy Tours

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There's something deeply special about indigenous forests. The lush luminosity of life played out in near perpetual shade, the thrust and smother of leaf and vine, the warm, dank scent of sweaty growth and languorous decay. Over the years I've relished it everywhere from the tangled ravines of the Drakensberg to the snowbound slopes of the Alps and the rainforests of Madagascar, the Malaysian peninsular, and most overpoweringly, the Amazon itself. But never have I experienced it as exhilaratingly as sliding high above a small but splendid stretch of it in the Karkloof, just over an hour from home.

The drive from Durban slides by with expressway ease, then we're slipping off a side road past the Howick falls towards Rietvlei, through mellow Midlands farmlands to a turnoff at the foot of the dark Karkloof hills. Two twisting, teasing kilometers of dirt through ordered pine and gum forests take us to a manicured clearing, and beyond it, at last, the riotous richness of the real indigenous thing, curling verdantly upwards to a cliff-edged slice of sky.

Anton Barnes, convivial owner of this private piece of paradise, greets us in a flower-trimmed cabin in the sunny centre of the clearing beside an old wagon and converted farmhouse. This is the headquarters of Karkloof Canopy Tours, second such operation in Africa. While we help ourselves to instant coffee and await the rest of our party, we catch up on how he created it two years ago, with Mark Brown - a civil engineer who helped design, manage and build two canopy tour systems around the world. These were in the rainforests of Costa Rica, where biologists, hungry to learn more of the diversity of life in the inaccessible upper reaches of the canopy, designed a set up of cables and platforms that allowed them to glide through it like latter-day Tarzans. Unsurprisingly, it caught the imagination of visitors and evolved into a popular eco-tourism activity, providing not only an incomparable holiday high for regaling the folks back home, but a raw awareness of the loveliness and precariousness of the world's endangered indigenous forests.

When Mark returned to South Africa, he formed Tree Top Tours cc with Ashley Wentworth of Stormsriver Adventures, and in October 2001 launched this country's first canopy tour on the Garden Route in the Tsitsikamma forest.

The moment Anton experienced it, he knew his stretch of forest should be the setting for a second, and invited the Tree Top Tours creative team to see it. The result was a partnership, and the opening of the Karkloof operation two years ago. A third has since launched in the Magaliesberg, but the Karkloof, with a full kilometer of the longest slides, is the largest.

A photo collage outside the cabin charts the massive feat of constructing it, drilling platforms into cliff faces and erecting towering metal pylons topped with wooden platforms. In a policy as green politically as it is ecologically, 20 members of the local community who worked on this have been trained to manage and operate it and act as guides. One of them, the charming Victor Shiliza, patiently explains the drill to us when the two remaining members of our party arrive, a British eye specialist called Kevin, and his daughter Isabella -- a rosy cheeked child of just seven.

Isabella's chatty presence eases the adrenalin-fuelled buzz that begins the instant indemnity forms are hauled out, and helmets, harnesses and leather gauntlets carefully fitted. Victor helps with a practiced recitation of the safety precautions in place-- our sliding cable has breaking a weight of 10 tons, the safety cable six, and the full-body harnesses, sliding pulleys and clips, two each.

All we have to worry about is braking, and our 'ABS brakes,' Victor grinningly informs us, are in our hands. As each platform approaches, we must pull down on the sliding cable with one gloved hand stretched out behind us. His partner, Shade Ntunzi, will slide in tandem with Isabella and brake for her. Father is visibly relieved.

Shepherded aboard a 4x4 and bonded by the bluff camaraderie brought on by shared adventure, we banter nervously, ostensibly for Isabella's benefit, as we bounce up the steep track to the drop off zone. A short, silent trek through sun-filtered undergrowth, and we're on a platform protruding above the trees, being hitched in turn to a safety column, then to twin steel cables that wink in the sunlight before they plunge into leafy darkness across a shallow gulley.

'Welcome to the Rabbit Hole,' says Victor. 'This is a short slide, just 40 easy metres. Sit back in your harnesses, keep your ABS arm straight behind you or you'll spin, and don't use it too soon or you'll have to swing around and monkey-crawl to the platform. Enjoy!' Shade takes Isabella first, and with a 'Yee-ha!' we're off like Alice on our other-worldly adventure, flying briefly above the forest then breaking like crazy and staggering, breathless with excitement, on to the platform where Shade stands reach to catch us. 'It's fun!' squeals Isabella for us all. But this, Victor tells us soberly, is Last Chance Platform. 'Please look well at the next slide, and if you don't want to continue, now is the time to turn back.'

The cables before us glint like silver snakes striking out to a platform high on a cliff some 150 giddy meters away, and Isabella grows suddenly silent. She whispers to her father, and to his eternal credit, he hugs and smiles his instant acceptance of her decision, and we applaud as she retreats with dignity, carried back across the cables by the kindly Shade. Hyped on excitement, her father shoves off after us, the wind whistling through our hair as we sail, each in turn, across the valley, the forest some 35 meters below us, and the Midlands rolling into the sunny distance in a patchwork of fields and damns.

Over the next three hours we ride six more slides, growing increasingly relaxed with each, and better able to appreciate our extraordinary birds' eye experience of the forest: a waterfall thundering 20 meters down a mossy rock face behind one platform, magnificent lichen-bearded stinkwoods, yellowwoods and ironwoods that zoom by, and the chatter of elusive Smango monkeys swinging somewhere alongside us. Pigeons call huskily, and a Knysna loerie and endangered Cape Parrot flash past, but the Narina Trogon keeps tantalizingly away.

We come to appreciate the waits, tethered to the open-sided wooden platforms, almost as much as the slides themselves, meditating on complex leafy mosaics in a myriad shades of green, and snowy butterflies twisting in shafts of sunlight.

Too soon we've reached Runway, the final platform, but there's more to savour on the short walk from the forest while we revert reluctantly from birds to beings. We pause on a wooden bridge above a dappled stream for a gleeful group hug, then step out into the sunlight of the chalet clearing. Isabella is waiting, and lunch!