Niki Moore
It’s a chance for tourists to get high in Eshowe, and it’s quite legal.
In fact, it’s encouraged and cheap. For the cost of R20, anyone can sit in the treetops and watch the birds go by, courtesy of Southern Africa’s first aerial boardwalk in Eshowe’s Dlinza forest.
The boardwalk is an elevated wheelchair-friendly walkway made of sturdy logs that winds its way through the iron plums, strangler figs and spreading albizzias.
From a sedate few feet above the ground it swoops up to under the forest canopy and finishes with a flourish at a 25m-high galvanised tower in the treetops with a view over the forest to the far-away mountains. And in the nearby trees, the black-collared orioles and Delagorges pigeons kick up one helluva musical racket.
Dlinza forest is a bit of a holy grail for birdwatchers. It contains the spotted thrush. There are people who travel stupendous distances like from Germany and Hawaii just to catch a glimpse of this unassuming creature.
The forest is one of the few places in the world where the spotted thrush is found. It is, therefore, the peg on which the people of Eshowe hang their title of the “capital of South Africa’s birding”. The town is reinventing itself as the hub of the wheel from which all birding routes radiate.
It’s quite easy for Eshowe to put itself on the global birding map. The town bristles with resident bird-fanciers. Local farmers have created conservancies of indigenous bush and riverine forest on their lands to cater for the feathered populations and their two-legged admirers.
Apart from the spotted thrush there are other ornithological goodies like the green coucal and narina trogon, the nicators and buff-spotted fluff-tails.
Hence the aerial boardwalk. Even before it was officially opened it had become the spark-plug that has fired up all the other impressive tourist ventures in the town.
Eshowe is literally a town with a wooden heart: the Dlinza forest lies in the middle of a busy commercial centre. This 250ha spot has a colourful history for instance there is a clearing among giant figs that Zululand’s Bishop WM Carter, just like Winnie the Pooh, designated his “thinking spot” in 1891. There are 65 species of birds in the forest, plus small mammals like the shy red and blue duiker. Binoculars, therefore, are a must for visitors as the other attractions are butterflies, insects, reptiles and snails.
Eshowe resident Jane Chennels was the instigator of the boardwalk: “I remember watching a documentary on birds starring David Attenborough,” she says, “where he sits up on a platform under the tree canopy in a rain forest. And I thought how fabulous it would be if we had a platform like that right in the trees of the Dlinza forest, where people could sit and get a literal bird’s-eye view of the environment.”
Once the thought had been planted, Chennels began to interest other people in her scheme. Richard’s Bay Minerals provided the spondulicks for the first phase a 25m-long boardwalk 11m off the ground. Uthungulu regional council weighed in with the money for a wooden walkway to join the boardwalk to the picnic spot. But this was just the beginning. Chennel’s proposal to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Sappi Forests and Wetlands Venture was more than just a pie-in-the-sky idea.
“What impressed us about Chennel’s proposal,” says the WWF’s Greg Laws, “was that it was the focal point for a whole range of environmental, educational and development ideas. She had brought in elements like the training of local people to become guides and caretakers of the boardwalk.”
From the beginning it was designed to generate tourist income, to create jobs, to empower people and to become an attraction for visitors to the town. And it also fits in with other ambitious tourist development schemes for Eshowe, like the museum mall development, the craft museum, the local brewery and the paper-making factory.
“It is what we call a cluster development: a whole lot of really interesting attractions all within a short distance of each other.”
The WWF approached Sappi for the R900 000 for the second phase 120m more boardwalk ending in the steel tower in the treetops. There was some change left over for a visitors’ centre, a curio shop and refreshment kiosk.
Every few metres along the boardwalk there are thoughtfully placed benches for visitors who get weak-kneed at the wonder of it all. Trees nearest to the boardwalk are marked with a name plate that identifies them tri-lingually (Latin, English and Zulu).
The aerial boardwalk is also a showpiece for the Zululand Bird Club, which has its headquarters in Eshowe. “The nearby Ngoye forest is home to the green barbet,” says bird club chairperson Pat Brenchley, “and it is the only place on Earth where this particular bird appears. We get visitors from all over the world that come to see this bird. While they’re here they will want to spend some time in the Dlinza forest and look at other rare birds. So now we have this amazing walkway through the trees that makes the international birding experience even more exciting.”
Apart from establishing Eshowe as the centre for bird-watching trails, there are ambitious plans to turn the museum and Nonqayi fort into a mall museum a one-stop shop for arts, crafts, food and culture.
The Vukani Museum is a large building that is a happy mix of cathedral and Zulu hut and it is a stunning showcase for the best examples of Zulu crafts. Next door is Adam’s Post a restaurant housed in a colonial corrugated-iron office building that was moved, panel by panel, from the town to its new site. There is a replica of the original Norwegian mission church.
Further plans include craft shops, a paper-making factory, a conference centre and some rather ambitious landscaping.
So even though it might have started that way, the residents of Eshowe don’t believe that tourism is just for the birds.