By Christian Selz

It was a bit disconcerting at first. The Drakensberg Canopy Tour, a zip-line glide between platforms perched in trees and on cliff faces, started at the grave of a man who fell to his death.
But the guide’s demeanour was reassuring. A mirthful grin stood out from under the visor of Thandanani Justice Mabaso’s grey baseball cap, on top of which he wore a bright yellow helmet with his initials, “TJ.”
And the deceased hadn’t been a zip-line tourist, thankfully, but a young mountaineering pioneer who met his end in 1938 while climbing one of the 3,000m peaks in the Drakensberg Mountains, the range with the highest point in South Africa.
Suddenly it got darker. Only scattered rays of sunshine penetrated the thick canopy of the ancient Blue Grotto Forest. Slender, impossibly tall trees stretched skyward, their trunks entwined with climbing plants and vines. A paradise for latter-day Tarzans.
No swinging on hanging vines here, though; modern Tarzans rely on steel and nylon. TJ and his assistant, Andries Mazibuko, kitted out their customers in full-body harnesses, pulleys, gloves and safety helmets, then hooked them up to heavy carabiners on three thick climbing ropes.
Even so, it takes willpower for someone with a weak head for heights to whiz through treetops and across gorges while suspended from a steel cable. TJ wisely didn’t give us much time to think it over.
One hand clutched a nylon rope — which seemed to get thinner the longer you looked at it — and the other lay on the taut cable for use as a brake. The fear of heights largely vanished at the long-drawn-out “zzzzzt” of the guide pulleys, which allow you to glide through the forest canopy as if on tracks.
The first stop was a wooden platform girdling the trunk of a giant tree, about 10m off the ground.
The second glide came very close to the splaying branches of tree crowns before heading out into an open, sunlit gorge. A few fleecy clouds sailed through the bright blue sky, but the gorge was windless.
The only sounds were those of nature: unseen birds twittering in the riot of foliage, and the gentle murmuring of the river Nkwankwa — punctuated by the gleeful shouts of zip-line tourists passing from trepidation to exhilaration.
Here, at the centre of the some 1,000km-long Drakensberg range stretching from north-east South Africa near Kruger National Park down into Eastern Cape province, rises Champagne Castle.
The country’s second-highest peak, it owes its name to a mishap that befell the two European mountaineers who first scaled it. They wanted to celebrate their arrival at the summit by popping a bottle of bubbly, but their guide accidently dropped it on a rock.
Mishaps aren’t to be expected from TJ. Even on the platforms, he makes sure that his guests are securely fastened at all times. No one has ever fallen during a canopy tour, an idea originated by scientists studying the upper-level ecology of Costa Rican rain forests.
Shortly before the end of the two-and-a-half-hour tour, TJ did, however, tell of an untoward incident. It involved Degma, a now former colleague who helped to lay out the course. Before spanning the steel cables across the gorge, the engineers shot arrows with strings attached from cliff face to cliff face. The arrows weren’t always easy to find in the dense underbrush.
“Degma got bored at some point, began to goof around and sniffed at a little white flower,” TJ related. The plant, which he called “snow white,” is a tree parasite able to daze people, he said. Degma fell asleep “so deeply that they couldn’t even reach him by radio.”
When he was finally found, the boss sacked him on the spot.
Degma may be gone, but his legend lives on. The platform built at the site of his undoing is known among the guides as “Catch a Doze.” — DPA