Photo: Horia Varlan

The Tsitsikamma National Park is a beautiful place to visit, and highly recommended to any visitor doing the trek from Cape Town along the Garden Route (which is so visually stunning it doesn’t feel like a trek at all).

But one of the main reasons you should visit the Tsitsikamma National Park is so that you can have your photo taken in front of the Big Tree. At 36 metres high, this giant of a tree is the world’s biggest yellowwood, and although it’s impossible to know exactly how old it is (without choppi.jpgng it down to count its rings), experts estimate it has been standing in this very spot for around 800 years.

These days, the Big Tree is visited by about 3000 to 5000 tourists a month, all with cameras in hand, who make the 700 metre trek through the indigenous forest on a boardwalk to see this giant and have their pi.jpgcture taken in front of it.

If not for the pi.jpgcture, though, you should visit for the sight of birds flappi.jpgng through the canopy, the buzz of bugs, and that indescribable smell of earth that you can only find while getting your feet dirty in a forest.