Golf course cuts up hiking trail
September 27, 2005 Edition 1
Melanie Gosling
Developers of Pinnacle Point golf course on the Garden Route have destroyed kilometres of the St Blaize hiking trail set in pristine coastal fynbos along the cliffs.
The St Blaize trail, which starts from Mossel Bay, forms part of the longer four-day Oystercatcher hiking trail.
When the golf course was approved, one of the conditions was that the development would not have a negative impact on the public trail.
This highlights a more serious problem with development in sensitive areas: that environmental management committees, set up by the authorities to ensure developers stick to conditions of approval, are powerless to prevent environmental destruction.
Fred Orban, a member of the Pinnacle Point environmental management committee, believes such committees are mere "window dressing".
"There are a lot of representatives on these committees, CapeNature, the municipality, NGOs, the developers, but they just don't work. People say: 'Oh, but there is an environment management committee, so everything will be okay,' but it doesn't work like that.
We hold meetings, we make objections to what's happening, we say this is not allowed to happen, but the bulldozers just carry on.
There's a lot of talking, but nothing happens," Orban said yesterday.
Orban runs the Oystercatcher trail, of which the St Blaize trail forms the first day's hiking.
When he picks up his overseas visitors, who have booked over a year in advance, his staff must ferry them around the golf course earthworks where the trail is destroyed. The visitors object but there is nothing he can do, Orban said.
"Their greens go right up to the cliffs. The trail was meant to be a buffer between the golf course and the cliffs, but now the earthworks have obliterated the trail for about two to three kilometres. The golf course should never have been approved, but it was.
"The developers say they are going to fix it, but they haven't. What we need is to take out an interdict, but no individual has the money to do it, and the authorities do nothing.
"It is not right that some people can take what belonged to the whole country and destroy it," Orban said.
Lorna Watt of the Wildlife and Environment Society of SA, said: "We want to see this put right. It should never have happened."
But Ivor Stratford of Pinnacle Point Resorts said yesterday the provincial authorities approved plans for the golf course "footprint" to go over the trail in certain places.
He said parts of the trail would be rerouted so as to go onto the beach instead of over the cliffs.
However, he admitted there were "a few portions" of the trail upon which the earthworks had encroached.
"We undertake to rectify this," Stratford said.
