Spekboom is a small succulent shrub with round, jade-green leaves that you can eat, a slight sour taste, and a habit nobody expected: in the dense thicket of the Eastern Cape valleys it can store carbon at rates closer to a rainforest than a scrubland, because it switches the way it breathes between night and day and grows almost year-round. Elephants eat it from the top, and it responds by rooting from every dropped branch. That is the plant this platform is named for.
The landscape it builds is the Albany Thicket, a biome found nowhere else on earth: a dense, spiny, evergreen tangle in the warm valleys between the Karoo and the coast, from the Sundays River through Addo to the Great Fish River and the Kowie. Two centuries of goat farming stripped much of it to bare, eroding ground. Restoring it, by planting spekboom cuttings by hand across degraded valleys, is one of the largest ecological restoration efforts in the country. This guide is the stays inside that landscape, and the work your booking helps fund.
