A Surf & Turf Adventure

How much action can one adventurer fit into a weekend in the Wilderness Section of Garden Route National Park? Wild joins the ride as Letshego Zulu zips and zooms through fynbos and forest to follow her passion.

- Morgan Trimble

Guinea fowl ring a persistent alarm and I crawl out of bed for a peek at sunrise. White blobs scroll across a pink sky over the Touw River. After some eye rubbing, the blobs become egrets in a regal procession hundreds of birds strong. But there’s no time to linger over the parade. Adventurer Letshego Zulu is here to demonstrate just how much action can fit into one weekend in the Garden Route National Park. We’re due for our first activity, a paddle upriver.

Reading Letshego’s adventure CV is an endurance exercise in itself. It’s bursting with multi-day bike races and ultra-marathons such as the Cape Epic, Joberg2C, Comrades and Two Oceans. You name it, she’s raced it. A veteran of Survivor Maldives and Fear Factor, Letshego’s current reality is whipping Joburgers into shape with her business, Pop Up Gym, when she’s not adventuring. But canoeing isn’t part of her usual regime. Letshego’s friend and fellow fitness fanatic Karabo Mashele, who joins us for the weekend, confesses she hasn’t canoed since school.

After a lesson in not capsizing, SANParks canoe-expert Manfred Beukes gently shoves us into the Touw River, Letshego and Karabo sharing a canoe and me on a kayak. We navigate upriver, past our cabins in Ebb and Flow Rest Camp, so named because the river rises and falls with the tides. We paddle against a brisk headwind then, as we round a bend, the river smooths into shimmering glass winding between towering forested hills.

Between exclamations of how beautiful the day is, how peaceful the river, and who in the canoe is not doing their share of paddling, Letshego and Karabo strategise about a new project, an online channel called Let’s Adventure intended to introduce South Africans to the world of activities in their own country.