In the spring of 2008, on Charles Ndabeni’s first day as chief executive officer of the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency, he was well aware that he had inherited a pair of unprecedented and game-changing problems. The bigger one, by his reckoning, was that the province’s world-renowned biodiversity, which had been protected by a succession of South African governments since 1898, was in steep and alarming decline. The second was that tourists were no longer arriving in droves at the gates of either the Kruger National Park or the Blyde River Canyon, the major destinations in what had recently become a UNESCO International Man and Biosphere Reserve, and that there had been a marked drop in visitors to the province since 2003.