The famous Garden Route is one of South Africa’s prime tourist attractions, for both locals and foreign tourists, and well it might be. It stretches from the Storms River Mouth in the east to Still Bay in the west, (a distance of about 270km) covering some of the most magnificent coastal scenery in the country.
YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN : From my Hide – Drones to curb poaching and gadgets for oenologists
There’s much to see and do and now there is a new and very comprehensive guide book to help you along, it’s ‘A Guide to the Garden Route’, the completely revised and updated edition. It covers a lot of ground, both flora and fauna and on land and at sea.
About half the book is taken up with very detailed chapters on terrestrial and marine wildlife, then it covers the human history and, importantly, impact on the area, and then it’s on to what is termed ‘Experience the Wild Coast’ packed with details of what to see and do and how to see and do it.
There are lots of maps and a full index and even a postscript on last year’s devastating fires along the Garden Route. I don’t know how they fitted them all in, but there are also hundreds of great photographs, full colour paintings and black and white sketches.
We’ve seen the whole of the Garden Route by road, some of it both directions, and I have had the privilege of seeing some of it from a sailing yacht. I just wish we’d had this book back then.
And now for something completely different. I came across an interesting snippet of information the other day, the famous fallow deer in Britain was introduced by the Romans some 2 000 years ago. They must have done so to use them as a food source, and the deers’ numbers must have suffered to such an extent that a thousand years later, invading Normans also brought fallow deer with them.
Today of course fallow deer are found all over the place, including South Africa. There are six species of deer in Britain today, apart from the fallow deer there are two indigenous species, the Scottish red deer and the roe deer, and three more introduced species, the sika from Japan and Taiwan, the muntjac from Indonesia and the Chinese water deer.**
As a matter of interest, the main difference between deer and antelope (apart from the introduced fallow deer, we only have antelope here) is that deer have branching horns and shed them every year, while antelope have non-shedding horns.
YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN : From my Hide: An interesting perspective of life in space
Antelope are found throughout Africa and Eurasia and deer are found on all the continents except Australia and Antarctica. There are just two indigenous deer species in Africa, the Barbary red deer found only in remote northern corners of Tunisia, and the water chevrotain found in parts of west and central Africa.***
*A Guide to the Garden Route, revised and updated by Graham Thomson and Julie Carlisle, Jacana. Johannesburg, 2017. **The Scots Magazine. ***The Larger Mammals of Africa, Chris & Tilda Stuart, Struik, Cape Town, 1997, and the Internet.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter and Instagram
For news straight to your phone, add us on WhatsApp 082 421 6033
