During apartheid, privileged whites came to wine, dine and gamble, waited on by Africans from the Transkei homeland. These days the casino looks tired, the carpets shabby and the rooms half-empty despite generous cut-price offers. It seems ironically appropriate, though, that in the craft shop of this monument to apartheid-era excess, adventurous young tourists meet local guides before embarking on one of the new South Africa's most remarkable tourism successes.

Amadiba Adventures (winner of the country's Community Public-Private Partnership Presidential Award and recently judged its most significant community tourism project by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism) offers a combination of hiking, canoeing and horse-riding trails through the untouched wilderness of the beautiful Wild Coast. Named after a Pondo king, Amadiba began in 1997 and directly involves up to 60 members of the local community as guides, caterers, ferrymen, camp-keepers and grooms.

Money earned through the project is reinvested in the community. "Because of the skills they have learnt, many Amadiba members have started secondary businesses like bakeries and craft shops," says Roné Visser of PondoCROP, an NGO involved in structuring the project. "Others have been able to send children to school or to pay to go themselves." There are plans to build more crèches, schools and classrooms in the area.

Amadiba's tours consist of one-day, four-day and six-day riding, hiking and canoeing trails, with a maximum of ten visitors on each trip. The four-day and six-day trails begin with a canoe ride across the Mzamba River, west of the Wild Coast Sun, to where sturdy, saddled workhorses wait. Apart from Lesotho's Basotho people, the Pondo, who inhabit much of coastal Transkei, are the only South African tribal group to use horses traditionally for ploughing and transport. 27 Pondo horse owners lease their animals to the project.

This isn't called the Wild Coast for nothing. Visitors (60% of whom are foreign backpackers and adventurous young South Africans) get to explore beaches dotted with ancient shipwrecks, walk the dramatic "Red Sands" petrified dune forest near Kwanyana and canoe rivers beneath sheer, jungle-covered cliffs. Day two of the trail involves a hike along the Mkambathi River, which cascades in a waterfall into the ocean. There are walks to caves still used by sangomas (witch doctors) and chances to swim in jungle-rimmed blue lagoons. Not surprisingly, Pondoland is recognised as one of the seven most biodiverse landscapes on earth.

Nor is the experience as rough and ready as you might expect. Camp accommodation is in domed tents with mattresses and duvets; dining rooms, toilets and showers (with hot and cold running water) are blended with the natural environment. Dinners include rich mutton stew, pap (maize meal) and imitwana (pumpkin leaves), and hikers can visit and eat in local villages at night. And there are always white sandy beaches on which to lie and ponder paradise by day.

So far, the six-day trail explores 120km of the Wild Coast but there are plans to offer a longer trek next year all the way to Port St Johns, the steaming tropical town 200km west of the Wild Coast Sun. For the moment though, Amadiba will be concentrating on shorter trails, easy even for those without riding experience. It's worth recalling that among the guides and caterers are Transkeians who once had to leave the area to find work in cities like Johannesburg and Durban. Now they are coming home.