GREEN & GOLD
The coastal town of Mtunzini has a beautiful beach and a unique natural monument,
I’D probably only seen about two twitchy-nosed red duiker in all my years — their rear ends, mind you, making a quick getaway. By the time we’d erected the new tent in the dapples of some trees at Indaba campsite, I must have seen half a dozen. They strolled past the smattering of campers, casually chewing leaves and rolling their eyes like models.
Choosy duiker know a good spot when they see one. Mtunzini may be just 90 minutes from Durban, but it boasts some Class A coastal forest. The trees and all the critters within them are protected by the Umlalazi Nature Reserve and adjoining Siyaya Coastal Park, a swathe of largely untouched coastline (untouched for now, that is — some miserable capitalists plan to mine the dunes).
As soon as the tent (christened The Emerald Cuckoo) was done, we plunged into the forest. It was weirdly dry, sandy and intense, blurry with cicada screams. We made it about 150m before the first rare-bird sighting: two black-throated wattle-eyes in a creeper. And just above them, a Narina trogon, that shy, pretty bird explorer François Levaillant named after a Khoi woman for whom he’d fallen on his travels.
This corker of a forest path tracked gently up and down, only to burst into the light at the foot of a golden dune. Just over the top, waves crashed joyously upon an immense beach. Specks of humans could be seen swimming and fishing and we promptly joined them. No gentle bobbing about in these waves: swimming here was more like a round with a boxer.
Indaba is the smaller of Umlalazi’s two campsites. It turned out we’d pitched The Emerald Cuckoo roughly where Zulu chief John Dunn once held court under the red milkwoods. Dunn, a Scotsman, met Prince Cetshwayo and became his advisor in the mid-19th century. He was later granted chieftain status and happily adopted Zulu culture. Much to the dismay of his first wife, Catherine, he paid lobola for more than 40 wives and he fathered at least 117 children. He sentenced two of those spouses to death for infidelity — possibly under Indaba’s very trees.
Dunn made his cash hunting and trading ivory and guns. There are no elephants left in Mtunzini but a trail along the Umlalazi River does sport signs warning of crocodiles. Picnic sites lining a lazy loop of river were crammed with vervet monkeys and feeding families; three tame zebras cropped the grass. Perhaps they were the same striped family that hangs out in a local bar, another Mtunzini claim to fame. Further upriver, mangroves hugged the banks and the swampy bits beneath teemed with crabs.
The reason we’d scouted Mtunzini some years back was a dot in the map book and the words “palm monument”. It referred to one of SA’s few official natural monuments: a cathedral of giant raffia palms boasting some of the longest leaves in nature. The monument is
A cathedral of giant raffia palms … tips tickled the sky
just outside the park gates, down a short dirt track. A boardwalk took us into the heart of a shadowy, awesome grove; feathery tips tickled the sky 20m above our heads.
The raffia is also called the Kosi palm — after its other home in South Africa, Kosi Bay.
Ninety-eight years ago, a prison director sent seed to be planted in the Mtunzini swamp forest, hoping that prisoners could make “brooms and brushes” from the fibres, says the Palm and Cycad Societies of Australia website. Fourteen plants in 1918 grew to 46 in 1925. The population spread and became established, and with it came the rare palm nut vulture, a largely vegetarian bird that subsists on the fruit.
How I wanted to see those vultures. I wasn’t alone — at dawn one morning, we’d encountered another hungry-eyed birder with a guide, in search of the holy vulture. But scouring the palms produced nothing more than a large feather. A weekend creeping about the forest trails turned up a twig snake (thankfully not spotted by a herd of rubbish collectors on the same path) and a teeny baby duiker, plus a lot of plopping sounds by the river’s edge (crocs or fin foots, another desirable bird? Imagine the dilemma). But it was actually on the beach, just after a swim, that a lone vulture came cruising along, passing by just over our heads.
That’s Mtunzini for you. One of those rare get-it-all destinations: beach bumming with dollops of wilderness on top. — © Janine Stephen