Pretoria - For South African engineer Mark Brown developing zip-line or canopy tours has been a long journey, which has involved detours from surfing waves,to making sandwiches.
Brown, 40, of Durban, was surfing around Central America when he got work on a canopy tour in Costa Rica.
“I realised this was an amazing thing to take back to South Africa. It gave me a reason to come home after two years.”
Money was always a problem, but not an insurmountable one, for the intrepid Brown, who cut his travel costs by hitch-hiking to Buenos Aires to catch the cheapest flight home.
Then, once he had identified the Tsitsikamma Forest as the ideal spot to set up a ride, he had to wait a year to get the go-ahead from the government to operate.
He also had to earn more money, so he started a sandwich-making business in Cape Town.
Once back in the forest, he got to work designing a tree-friendly rig, that was an improvement on what he had seen in Coast Rica.
“There was no penetration. No damage. Not a nail or a screw.
“We used rubber pads and water blocks.
“If you were to loosen it, the forest would still be pristine.”
Brown says the value of a canopy experience is that 70 percent of forest life – the spiders, the birds – live in the canopy layer.
He credits Ed Perry, aUS biologist in Costa Rica, for developing a pulley system to give him access to canopies.
Then it was taken to the eco-tourism level, “so that everybody should have the joy of being in this previously inaccessible realm of nature”.
His company, Canopy Tours, has six franchises – in the Karkloof and the Champagne Castle area of the Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal; the Magaliesberg in North West; the Tsitsikamma in the Western Cape; Magoebaskloof in Limpopo; and Malolotja in Swaziland.
Each is unique. The Tsitsikamma route has 700-year-old yellowwood trees; some platforms on the Karkloof route are on steel towers for the lack of Tsitsikamma-like trees; there are ledge walks along a cliff face on the Drakensberg and Malolotja routes; and the Magaliesberg route is over the world’s second-oldest mountain range.
Brown remembers how difficult it was to access a rock pool below a waterfall, over which there is now a cable on the Magoebaskloof tour.
“To get to it we had to jump off a waterfall, swim over the pool, climb up some rocks and abseil down a cliff.”
By December, Brown hopes to have another franchise up and running in the Western Cape’s Hottentots Holland Nature Reserve.
Its opening will mark the 10th anniversary of his enterprise.
“Hottentots Holland has a forested bowl and two waterfalls that are inaccessible.
“There’s also lots of fynbos and there’ll be a bridge over a waterfall between two cliffs.”
Safety is obviously the top priority, and Brown says his franchise prides itself on its routes being “over-designed”.
“I always get a third-party engineer to sign them off and do a double-check.
“The cables can handle 11 tons. They can easily lift a car.”
Then there’s maintenance on a daily, weekly and six-monthly basis – the last of which Brown does himself.
During their daily inspections, guides are generally on the lookout for any possible damage caused by rock falls or lightning strikes.
Brown says another “magic part of it all” is that the guides are people found in areas around the tours, who were once unemployed and unskilled.
“They have become the hosts. It wasn’t planned that way – it just worked out that way.”
On the nitty-gritty front, Brown says he has been working with the Department of Labour to develop industry standards.
More fun are his plans to extend the Karkloof ride by three additional runs, introduce tours at full moon and develop a treehouse on a cliff face in which people can stay. - Pretoria News