Canopy Tours

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Our arboreal days may be long over on the evolutionary scale, but heck, there are a lot of people who still love swinging through the trees.

Hendrik Isaks is your shrink, your standby paramedic, your priest and even your mommy, because when you're dangling 30 metre above a wooded gorge, he says he's your one, your only, your everything.

Hendrik is a canopy tour guide with Magaliesberg Canopy Tour, the company that operates this North-West Province edition of a new adventure sport that has taken the country by storm. Canopy tours are the recreational sport that sees those who can hold back enough of a cold sweat getting strapped up in a harness and donning a helmet to slide across and through gorges in foofie-slide style.

"Up there I do sometimes play motivational speaker when trying to help some people overcome their fear of stepping off the platform. That fear is all in the mind. So far, I've never had a single person turn back," says Hendrik. He does add with a good-natured chuckle that there have been the odd throaty screams of "mommy" as the adrenaline junkies' feet leave terra firma.

Hendrik and colleague Sipho Mntande tear across the gorges at high speed, making it look like child's play. Sipho reflects on his first day of training as a guide and says that though the first slide was tinged with trepidation, the canopy tours are now a fulfilling job for him and great fun too. In addition to the slides, though, the aim is to give people a greater appreciation of the nature that occurs in the area.

Hendrik starts the tour by pointing out indigenous flora and the signs of active animal life in the area. He also shares stories and informational tidbits, for example he tells how the stems of a local plant, commonly known as "bobbejaan stert", are dipped in fat and used by many households as long-burning torches.

The actual canopy tour is about safety first for Sipho and Hendrik, who are at pains to explain the procedures, the precautions and to check and check again that all the pulleys, cable, clips and gadgets do just what they're supposed to.

But that's where the fussiness of procedure ends and the adrenaline rush begins, because the tours are actually safe enough for anyone who's game for it, providing they are over the age of seven. The Magaliesberg Canopy Tour has even accommodated an adventure-loving paraplegic by creating a harness for a chair, which they strapped her into, with a guide in front of and behind her. "She absolutely loved it," says Sipho.

While the canopy tours are all about a thrill in the beautiful setting of a dramatic backdrop, courtesy of Mother Nature, they started out with loftier intentions. The idea originated in Costa Rica, where biologists working in rainforests needed to come up with a way to explore the forests at canopy level. So they strung up cables, built platforms and were able to slide from platform to platform, collecting specimens, taking photographs and generally working with fresh new insight from their elevated research spots. Adventure sport junkies soon recognized this as the next best thing to bungee jumping and white-water rafting, and adopted the concept for what they billed as ecotourism with a twist.

Locally, a University of Cape Town civil engineer named Mark Brown pioneered canopy tours. He spent time in Costa Rica designing and building canopy tours when they first took off. Since his return to South Africa in 2000, three canopy tours have been established. The first slides were set up in the Tsitsikamma Forest, skimming across the giant yellowwoods there. The second set of slides went up in 2003 in the Karkloof Forest in the KwaZulu Natal midlands.

The newest in the set is located in the heart of the Magaliesberg, the town that boasts the world's oldest mountain range. Here, nearly a kilometer of cables have been set up over 11 platforms. They range in length from 20 metres to 140 metres, and they can either work up some serious speed or be gentle enough to stop in the middle for a few breathtaking photographs.

The canopy tours attract all types and all ages, and these days it's also necessary to book for the 3-hour adventure because popularity is growing rapidly, especially as the Magaliesberg is so close to Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Some of those who signed up recently included Ira and Heinrich Auf. The Johannesburg couple was boldly first in the group to whiz across the first slide. But it was smiles all round when they got to the other side. "After the first slide it just gets better and better," said Ira, as she and Heinrich took pictures to prove to their children that they did indeed go through with it.

For American visitor Jenifer Shanton it was all about the thrill, so much so she seldom applied the brake manoeuvre that the guides had showed. "It was awesome," was all she could muster behind her broad grin.

The ancient Magaliesberg Mountains have seen a lot in their time, and now canopy tour sojourners are getting to eye out the mighty mountains in a whole new way.

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