Evolution along theGarden Route

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Throughout its evolution from a haphazard collection of farms and seaside villages into an aggressively self-promoting tourist Mecca, South Africa's 'Garden Route' has remained obstinately on the tourism agenda. Although peppered with environmentally questionable developments, the region is still a visual feast and, with a new national park in the offing, there's a chance it may just stay that way.

The exact location of the Garden Route depends on who you ask, but for those driving up from Cape Town it is pretty straightforward - it starts just as the Mossel Bay oil refinery is safely in the rear-view mirror, where the road swoops down to the sea for the first time, and it ends after Storms River when all the fun stops.

Only the tour guides really push to include Oudtshoorn, but there is a good case for both Still Bay and Humansdorp (west and east respectively) to be counted in. The reality, though, is that the N2 highway has reduced the former to a sign whizzing past the window at 120 kilometres per hour and the latter to a dull glow on the horizon. Just as the highway has remodelled the itinerary of yesteryear, so has recent history wrought great changes on the Garden Route itself. Whether they are good or bad depends on your point of view.

The Garden Route has a lot to offer, socially and environmentally. It is still filled with treasures - steam-train journeys, oyster lunches, white-water rafting, thousand-year-old trees, wild elephants (maybe), hand-reared elephants (definitely) and landscapes to take your breath away. You can swim with dolphins at Keurboomstrand, drive back in time over the seven bridges on the Old Passes Road or join the 300 000 other people who visit the Big Tree at De Valle every year.
So much that appeals, and so many people who want a share.

Yet few seem to realise the profound demographic effects of the recent building boom along the Garden Route. With the inexorable decline in farming and forestry in the outlying areas compounding the situation, some towns are just a generation away from being wracked by problems usually associated with big cities. Water shortages, rising unemployment and mushrooming informal settlements are the most visible symptoms.

These contradictions are two sides of the same coin. The Garden Route is being loved to death by an ongoing influx of home-owners, all of whom hope that the development will cease once they have secured their bit of paradise. As long as they keep coming, builders and bricklayers will follow in their train. Eventually buyers will turn away from towns like Knysna and Plettenberg Bay, discouraged by traffic, punitive water rates and Ronald Macdonald's urban presence. Until they do, property developers will continue their assault on malleable town planning regulations.

But there is good news - a proposal to consolidate the most precious pieces of the western Garden Route into a new national park. The proposed national park is part of the South African government's recently publicised strategy to increase the country's protected coastal areas fourfold (to 20 per cent of the total) and inland areas by two per cent (to eight per cent).

Tentatively called the Lakes Area National Park, the park will consolidate, and if necessary rehabilitate, a mosaic of landholdings west of the Keurbooms River. These include marginal plantations held by South African Forestry Company (SAFCOL), indigenous forest managed by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, and land in the hands of both South African National Parks (SANP) and Western Cape Nature Conservation (see map on page 39). Should it become possible to link the fabulous Tsitsikamma National Park as well, then Eastern Cape Nature Conservation would also have to be involved in the project.

One of the most exciting things about the area is that, thanks to the relatively short distances between the watersheds of the Outeniqua Mountains and the sea, whole ecosystems could theoretically be conserved. Indigenous forest covers just 0.5 per cent of South Africa, and this area contains some of the finest remnants. On the region's poorer soils, the indigenous Cape fynbos is becoming increasingly scarce as it competes with commercial forest plantations, alien vegetation, agriculture and residential development. Assuming that the new park can attract sufficient funds to carry out the job, indigenous forest and fynbos will be re-established through land rehabilitation programmes.

The current leader of the project, Sarel Yssel of SANP, will need to be a consummate diplomat to avoid turf wars between agencies when it comes to ceding control of landholdings to the new park. He has the public support of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Valli Moosa, but SANP cannot go it alone. For a start, in traditional national parks commercial logging is prohibited by law, which would mean that the highly specialised felling of hardwoods in the indigenous forest would have to cease. For Michael Peter, Area Manager for the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, that would make no sense; decades of research have proved the viability of careful harvesting and the significant contribution it makes to finances and local employment.

The likelihood is that the new national park will be at least partly 'contractual'. On this basis, SANP would enter into agreements with the current owners to bring their land under SANP management, at the same time allowing, by 'contract', practices that might not otherwise be permitted by the National Parks Act. This is a relatively new tool in South Africa's conservation armoury and has been used successfully in the Richtersveld and Kruger national parks. In the former, the Richtersvelders are allowed to graze stock, while the Makuleke community has commercial rights in the northern Kruger Park.

For Yssel, a new national park on the Garden Route will provide urgently needed protection from the inappropriate urban development which has left deep scars on both the environment and the local authorities. The list of questionable developments is frighteningly long. Some, like Plettenberg Bay's appallingly situated Castleton, should never have got off the drawing board - generations of architects have counselled against fracturing natural horizons as has been done here.

Others have been executed badly, even if they seemed like good ideas at the time. Peet Joubert of SANP initially supported the now bankrupt Simola golf estate, only to despair when the developer ignored repeated warnings to strip only one fairway at a time. Heavy rain subsequently washed tons of topsoil into the Knysna lagoon, suffocating extensive marine life. Just a few kilometres away, the developer of Sparrebosch downsized the conference centre and 150-bed hotel, impacting on the new job opportunities that had initially convinced the local council to approve the residential golf course development. These employment prospects were to be the quid pro quo for the pressure that the 260-hectare 'Clifftop Estate and Country Club' would be placing on Knysna's resources. 'If you chop off one hand, who is going to wash the other one?' wonders Stan Davis, the new mayor.

Some developments have a nastier smell to them and are typically victims of what has become pejoratively known as 'incremental approvals'. Thesen's Island, in the Knysna estuary, is swapping a polluting sawmill (and about a thousand jobs) for several hundred houses and a new set of problems. Permission to rezone the island was first granted in 1998 and 101 conditions were set on that approval. Three years later, compliance with those conditions is still being measured - and will continue to be for some time. When the approval process is stretched over such a long period, it is almost impossible for third parties to keep up with developments or to question any concessions granted. One of the development's contractors recently negotiated a reduction in the standard augmentation fees which are levied on all new homes in the town to help pay for the provision of sewers and the like. Rightly or wrongly, there is a widespread perception in the town that concessions have been granted 'irregularly'.

After a few false starts, Garden Route residents have organised themselves to challenge both the developers and the municipalities that might be intimidated by them. Knysna, Plettenberg Bay and Tsitsikamma each have environmental forums that draw in people like Jenny Lawrence, educator and long-time environmental campaigner, and Kito Erasmus, a retired forest manager and self-confessed 'greenie' (who has seen the elusive forest elephants no fewer than five times), and they are gaining experience all the time. Elbie Burger, working with the Plettenberg Bay Community Environment Forum, scans new building proposals in her area, trying to identify the bad ones early in the process. Early is important because some of Plett's most controversial developments are relying on permissions that were granted several years ago.

The bottom line on development, according to Jim Saunders, an outspoken lawyer working in Knysna, is to ask which of the Garden Route's ecological systems should be preserved. A case in point is the Knysna estuary which 'cleans itself' by means of tidal flows that are no doubt strengthened by having to pass through the narrow Knysna Heads. (At other Garden Route estuaries where the flow is under less pressure, even humans have found the cloudy water and stench of rotting vegetation unbearable when the natural nutrient balance has been disturbed by domestic and agricultural run-off.) However, even this 'self-cleansing' process has its limits, and the effects of its failure are far-reaching; research indicates that pollution in the Knysna lagoon is already affecting the breeding success of migrant species like avocets and whimbrels in their native Siberia. The question to be asked is, should the Knysna estuary be allowed to remain naturally self-cleansing, or should it be made a 'managed' amenity area? Once this has been answered, it would be much easier to assess the suitability of new building proposals.

Some of Saunders' questions may well be answered by the new national park into which Knysna's lagoon and catchment area will fall. It is now up to him and other interested parties to come forward and help shape the thinking of the committee that will have to be responsible for monitoring the management of the park.

Sarel Yssel hopes that the new park will help conservators not only check rampant urban development, but also manage alien plants and uncontrolled fires in the Garden Route's unique coastal fynbos. In 1869 'a great conflagration raged for weeks from Mossel Bay to Humansdorp' and the subsequent replanting of pines and gums is still being regretted today. Newer and even more invasive alien species only make matters worse, and today fire and alien plants are fatally connected. In 1998 a terrifying fire at Soetkraal (40 000 hectares leased to Tsitsikamma National Park) fed off the accumulated build-up of hakea and black wattle. Fanned by strong winds, flames swept across the hillsides at breakneck speed, killing seven members of the local Working for Water project.

Over a hundred people are employed to clear alien vegetation at Soetkraal, and many more have been trained there since 1995. The task seems never-ending, with alien seedlings still appearing in areas which have been cleared eight times. Nevertheless, project manager Pam Booth is proud that the difficult work has significantly increased the flow in the Palmiet River (which supplies Plettenberg Bay), and that they are securing the integrity of the natural biodiversity. But for her, the most valuable legacy of the project (and others like it all around South Africa) will be the jobs and training it has provided to hundreds of men and women, each of whom has seen first-hand the role of conservation in land management.
Ian Hewitt from The Crags is living proof of that, having risen from chainsaw operator to deputy project manager at Soetkraal, but he is wary of the plans for a new national park. 'If they take more land out of forestry, what jobs will there be left for the people who make a living in the plantations?' Reacting to suggestions that the land will need rehabilitation for many years if it is to be returned to its natural state, he is unimpressed, commenting only that big contractors who bring in their own men and machinery will be employed, and the local people will be left out in the cold. The onus is on the new park to make sure that this does not happen.

Unemployment is the soft underbelly of the Garden Route. Farming and forestry no longer prop up poorer communities as they used to and people are feeling the pinch. The lack of jobs has been exacerbated in recent years by a steady influx of 'immigrants' looking for work. Although there is a widespread belief that these newcomers are from Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the reality is that the vast majority hail from Fort Beaufort, Humansdorp and other Eastern Cape towns whose depressed economies offer few opportunities for work.
By those standards, the schools, hospitals and building sites of the Garden Route are very attractive. One of Knysna's longest-serving stallholders moved from Queenstown in 1988 and now sells curios to tourists. For her and her friends on the market, the economics are simple. 'In a restaurant the work is hard and you get R120 [a week]. Stallholders can make R210 and the work is easier. In Queenstown there is nothing.' Even so, life is uncertain, as the imminent closure of the Thesen's Island sawmill shows. Theo Kluyts, whose family has been making furniture in the area for half a century, estimates that the sawmill workers alone spend two million rands a month in Knysna's shops.

Turn off Main Road in the centre of Knysna and you will wind your way up to Concordia, the poorer section of town (which, Michael Bertram of Knysna Tourism informs me, has the largest Rastafarian community in South Africa). Keep driving until you get lost. Chat to a few people, admire the outstanding view and then set off in a new direction. You can do this for over an hour and still not see everything. Eventually you will come out at the House of Judah café, opposite the road to Noetzie's exclusive beach and holiday homes. It is symptomatic of the post-apartheid social confusion that Concordia and its hidden extensions stretch as far as the town below it.

Up and down the Garden Route, 'townships' like Kurland, Concordia, Clarkson, Woodlands, Nompumelelo, Storms River, Coldstream, kwaNokuthula, Blanco, kwaNonqaba and others are expanding rapidly. They don't waste as much water as the golf courses, or create as much rubbish as the richer suburbs, but the pressure they put on the environment is all adding up. Juline Prinsloo, who manages a host of community projects at the old truck stop near the Bloukrans bridge (site of 'the world's highest bungee jump'), has been personally involved in the building of more than 2 500 government-sponsored houses since 1996, just a fraction of the total number of new homes erected in the Garden Route since then.

A well-preserved natural environment forms the backbone of tourism in the Garden Route. To secure its future, the industry needs to maintain this environment, and if it can draw in employers and employees from within local communities, it will go a long way towards achieving this. It takes a special sort of employer to pull the needy through the ranks, but some are doing just that. Storms River Adventures is proving that you can do well by doing good. It has plucked literally dozens of men and women from local towns and trained them to play a part in the Garden Route experiences of first-world tourists. Fronting for owner Ashley Wentworth in his absence, Mary-Anne Cunningham underlines the point by identifying Stanford Skosana, a registered abseiling and river guide, as Wentworth's former gardener. Neighbouring Forest Ferns, a worldwide exporter of forest plants employing 156 people, is following suit by training up local guides for a new trail along the Tsitsikamma coastline. Where the legendary Otter Trail runs west out of the National Park, the Dolphin Trail will run east.

The enthusiasm of these organizations is infectious and Tsitsikamma National Park's Elzette Bester revels in it. She needs only a couple of hours to convince you not only that Tsitsikamma is the most remarkable of holiday destinations, but that the eastern end of the Garden Route is in pretty good hands. If the proposed Lakes Area National Park gets the support it deserves, the same may soon be true of the western end.

The splendour of the Garden Route, with its lakes, forests and fertile coastal strip, has almost been its undoing. New champions have thrown their hats into the ring to ward off environmental threats, and between them they probably have enough clout to succeed. Specifically, part-timers like the Plettenberg Bay Community Environment Forum are shoring up local government while the professionals are going to try to overlay good management, in the form of a national park, on to great swathes of what still remains to be conserved.

The lifeblood of both is public support. If you are lucky enough to live on the Garden Route, now is the time to pitch in. If not, send a message of support to Sarel Yssel at the SANP offices in Wilderness. Better still, pack your bags and deliver it yourself - the trip will remind you why it's worth it.

NATIONAL PARKS ON THE GARDEN ROUTE

Wilderness National Park
This park encompasses a charming landscape of rivers, lakes, estuaries and seashore lying in the foothills of the Outeniqua Mountains. Watersports are an obvious attraction to the region and the park is geared to promoting them. It is situated approximately 15 kilometres east of George.

Activities:
Waterskiing, angling, yachting, swimming, birdwatching and walking.

Knysna National Lake Area
The exceptionally beautiful Knysna National Lake Area, dominated by the craggy bastions of the Knysna Heads and encompassing sandbanks, salt-marshes and reed beds, is home to a diversity of marine life, including the endangered Knysna seahorse.

Activities:
Fishing, waterskiing in designated areas, birdwatching.

Tsitsikamma National Park
Named after the Tsitsikamma mountain range which almost reaches the Indian Ocean, this park incorporates 80 kilometres of coastline and extends 5.5 kilometres out to sea. Classified as a marine park, it also supports evergreen forests, numerous rivers, immense gorges and a variety of plant and animal life. It is situated halfway between Humansdorp and Knysna on the N2 highway.

Activities:
Birdwatching, scuba-diving, snorkelling, nature trails, hiking trails, canoeing and swimming.

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Private Ferry & Steam Train
Private Oudtshoorn
Private Sunset Cruise
Private Tsitsikamma

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