By Janine Oelofse

Tourism officials on Monday set up a gateway information centre in Tsitsikamma to target national and international tourists travelling between the Eastern and Western Cape.

Officially known as the Inter-Provincial Eastern Gateway Tourism Centre, the project has been bankrolled by the Western Cape tourism department and is aimed at encouraging visitors to explore lesser known areas of the two provinces.

It is the second of a network of five new centres in the Western Province.

Cape Town Routes Unlimited, with tourism departments in both the Western and Eastern Cape, launched the centre at the Tsitsikamma Total Petroport.

Cape Town Routes Unlimited‘s leisure marketing co-ordinator Minette Smit said Monday‘s launch was the first step in a move discussed at last year‘s tourism indaba in Durban in which coastal provinces agreed to co-ordinate efforts to make the tourism experience easier and more memorable.

The organisation‘s tourism operations manager, Marisa van der Merwe, said the idea was to welcome tourists, both national and international, to either province as they stopped at the Petroport, situated alongside the N2 highway between Plettenberg Bay and Port Elizabeth.

She said although the Gateway was at present housed in a marquee, a permanent log cabin on the site had been approved.

Welcoming representatives from various tourism departments, including the Eastern Cape, Bitou and Eden District, as well as Cape Nature and SANParks, Van der Merwe said the Gateway aimed to inform tourists about activities in both provinces.

Eden District municipality mayor Rudi Laws said the Southern Cape desperately needed a bumper holiday season to make money available for repairing the massive damage caused by the floods last month. He said the damage was in the region of R650-million.

The Herald