Chris and Mathilde Stuart, published by Struik Travel & Heritage
Soft cover, 320 pages

This is a book to make you dream and drool. It describes 43 parks and conservation areas, and makes each one seem more inviting than the last.

Naturally, being a Knysnarian, I turned straight to the Garden Route National Park.

It’s amazing that even locals don’t know about this fantastic, massive new conservation area: many of them still talk about the old Wilderness the Tsitsikamma Parks as if they were still two separate things. But in fact they were incorporated (some years ago) into a much larger area – 157,000 hectares – that also includes the “Knysna National Lake Area and most indigenous forests and mountain water catchment areas between Wilderness in the West and the N2/R62 road junction in the east, and the area south of the N9 and R62 to the north.”

Here I found entries about the physical position, history, geology, vegetation, and wildlife of the Park – but no checklists of birds, mammals, or plants. For them, the book told me to go to www.parksandreserves.co.za – where I was promised “195 free species checklists covering mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish encountered in each location” (with last month – March 2012 – being the projected publication date. But when I tried it, the link didn’t work: I got a “This will soon be the home of…” message. Oh well – we all know what web masters are like.)

Still, with all the information that it DOES provide, and with 139 maps and more than 900 photographs – including a 31-page gallery of 323 mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, trees and flowers – I expect that ‘National Parks and Nature Reserves’ will be a well-mannered companion next time I’m planning a road trip anywhere in the country.

Which is why I think this is a book you’ll definitely want to lend to your guests: if they’re South Africans, it’ll reignite their curiosity about our National Parks. And if they’re foreigners, it’ll definitely make them want to come back for more.

Buy it here.