Storms River is a pretty small village with a few basic shops and headquarters for the park service and lots of guesthouses and holiday homes. Only the main road is paved and the rest are dirt and in the rains would be pretty boggy.
We checked into a rustic backpackers where we had a double room with an ensuite. The common areas in the hostel were pretty small and very dark but the wood fire was very welcome as we are still finding it pretty cold and it was raining on and off. We did have to share the fire with two of the owners' dogs who planted themselves in the walkway in front of the fire. One of the dogs had a toy that he would hold in his mouth and then nudge you until you threw it. There really was not enough space for the active dogs and the guests. There was a kitchen in a lean-to building on the side of the reception/bar area and as I cooked dinner I had to wear my raincoat and dodge the drips that threatened to extinguish the flames on the gas cooker. It really felt like we were camping.
We also had to use our sleeping bags over the bed to keep warm in the night as the quilts were only summer weight and the blanket provided was a mix of natural and synthetic fibres but not
very warm. We had tried to book online for other places but they had no double rooms so we were stuck with the rustic place.
Five kilometres down the road was the Tsitsikamma National Park where we were able to use our Wild Card, an annual card for park entries, park fees are higher for international visitors than locals. We walked the first day of the famous Otter Trail, a 4 day walk that is booked out a year in advance. We would have liked to do the walk but couldn't wait around for 2 vacancies and with the weather being so cold and wet it would have been no fun to ford the sea and river crossings. A lot of the trail was on rocks and sometimes it was hard to find the otter footprints painted on the rocks that marked where to go as they had been washed off by the thundering waves. 
We saw several blue duiker deer and dassies (rock hydrax) but no otters. On the return trip we got lost twice but John's good sense of direction soon got us back on track. Luckily the rain had stopped to make it a lovely walk.
The young man on reception was a Kiwi guy. He had applied to assist in an International Language school in Kenya but found the students were spoilt rich kids so he decided to travel and find odd jobs for his gap year (the year between secondary school and university). He would work on reception, run the bar, and cook the evening meal for guests who ordered it. This always included meat baked in the oven, as guests were always using the gas cookers, baked vegetables and home made bread. When we asked him about some of the walking trails he admitted he had never done any as he was stuck in the hostel on the bar all night and then sleeping.
We drove to Bloukrans bridge which is Africa's largest where we watched the jumpers on the 216 metre highbungy jump. Someone told us that a kiwi guy had set up the activity and we did see a huge Kiwi flag in front of an office.
On the Otter trail we met a group from the Intrepid Tours company and they invited us to meet them at their backpackers that evening. It was a lovely warm place that didn't make you feel like you were camping. Some of them had colds and had taken the option to have a room rather than stay in tents and several had bought hot water bottles for the trip.
One of the local canyoning operators, a black man from the village told us a lot about his life in the village. He recounted to us a story about a group of 9 lawyers who had done a canyoning trip in the early days of the industry. A flash flood caused them all to be tipped out and they all drowned and the park closed down any water activity operators for several years.
Each year he has to get a licence to operate and has to present all the paperwork showing that the guides are trained to International standards. They employ qualified staff from overseas and use them to train their staff and help run their operation.
He told us that they do a lot of work in the local schools to show the kids what kind of employment they could get in the tourism industry by involving the kids as much as possible and hopefully motivating them to stay at school and study hard with a plan for the future. Security is a lot less visible here and the hostel had no electric fences or high walls, just sticks tied together for a fence to keep stay cows out. The tourism operators get together and impress upon the young kids the importance of having a safe place for tourists and therefore ensuring a positive future for them by having a zero tolerance to theft etc.
