The Addo Elephant National Park took another giant step forward yesterday with the opening of a new southern access road, and celebration of its 75th birthday.

Speaking at a gala luncheon at the main camp after cutting the ribbon to open the Matyholweni Road, Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said one of the most exciting aspects of the park‘s development was how funds had been used to grow conservation and tourism and jumpstart community upliftment at the same time.

The road was constructed with the benefit of a R33-million poverty relief grant from the environment affairs and tourism department, creating jobs for 353 formerly unemployed people from surrounding communities.

“The community of Colchester, where the road branches off the N2 into the park, will benefit from the new influx of tourists that this road will bring,” Van Schalkwyk said.

Propelled by this new influx, B&Bs are already starting to appear in Colchester.

In line with the park‘s community upliftment strategy, no restaurants or shops were built at the new Matyholweni Camp.

Since the department began funding the park‘s development in 2001, 750 local formerly jobless people have been employed on various projects such as upgrading roads, clearing unwanted fences and installing new ones, and removing alien vegetation.

Some R79-million has been spent on funding this labour intensive approach, Van Schalkwyk said.

The park was established in 1931 as a 1 585ha reserve designed specifically to protect the last 16 elephants left alive after a government-sponsored culling operation. The crack-down on local jumbos to protect farmers‘ citrus crops left 120 animals dead.

Now standing at 164 000ha, the park conserves one of the richest arrays of plants and animals in the world.

It stretches from Darlington Dam in the north-east near Jansenville south- east across the Zuurberg and then south through the park‘s original core, to the N2 above Colchester.

Further key sections stretch from the Sundays River mouth through the Alexandria dunefield, the largest coastal dunefield in the southern hemisphere, and then further east through the Alexandria forest.

The minister said the park was negotiating with landowners in the area to realise the vision of a corridor linking the park‘s northern trunk to the coast at the Sunday‘s River mouth.

The aim is to extend the land component of the park to 236 000ha and to combine this with a 12 000ha rectangle of protected marine area in Algoa Bay around Bird and St Croix islands, which are already part of the park.

In completion, the park will be able to offer tourists “the big seven” – elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo and rhino as well as the great white shark and southern right whale.

Van Schalkwyk said this would be internationally unique.

Tourism has grown in the Addo Elephant National Park from 94 670 people in 1999 to 140 745 this year and, through this growth, the park is now generating about R9, 7-million surplus funds a year.

The Addo expansion is part of the department‘s vision of having a world class suite of parks ready for tourists arriving for the 2010 Soccer World Cup, he said.

The department will be spending R400-million up to 2009 on upgrading rest camps, gates, roads and fences and will be spending a further R175-million during this period on land purchases.

“These national parks are wonderful assets. We have lots of monuments, but these are our real monuments. We should be very proud of them.”