Shorelines

A Journey along the South African Coast

We would like to thank everyone who gave us shelter, time and information along our journey. Shorelines is dedicated to the people who live and work at the water’s edge in South Africa.

Chris Marais & Julienne du Toit

Contents

Production Notes

Chapter 1: Alexander Bay

In the Sky with Diamonds

Chapter 2: Richtersveld

The Richtersveld Take-Away

Chapter 3: Khubus to Port Nolloth

Port Jolly

Chapter 4: Kleinsee

Here for De Beers

Chapter 5: Hondeklip Bay to Doring Bay

Misty Shores

Chapter 6: Elands Bay

Broke and Eating Bait

Chapter 7: Elands Bay to Paternoster

Home from the Sea

Chapter 8: Velddrif to Cape Town

Going Coastal

Chapter 9: Cape Town

Life on Long Street

Chapter 10: False Bay

Abalone Rangers

Chapter 11: False Bay

Penguin Town

Chapter 12: Cape Point

Famous Baboons

Chapter 13: Masiphumelele to Pringle Bay

Swamp Music

Chapter 14: Walker Bay

Mercury Rising

Chapter 15: Kleinbaai

Jaws For Life

Chapter 16: Gans Bay

Perlemoen Party

Chapter 17: Gans Bay to Arniston

Storm in an Egg Cup

Chapter 18: Arniston and Elim

Shipwreck Coast

Chapter 19: De Hoop to Witsand

When Oysters Attack

Chapter 20: Mossel Bay to Knysna

“Rasta Don’t Play Golf”

Chapter 21: Plettenberg Bay to Keurbooms Strand

In Charm’s Way

Chapter 22: Storms River

Cadillac Jack

Chapter 23: Storms River to Jeffreys Bay

Up in Smoke

Chapter 24: Jeffreys Bay

Sushi Surfer

Chapter 25: Port Elizabeth to East London

“Chickens, Plucked or Live”

Chapter 26: Morgan’s Bay to Trennery’s

A Walk on the Wild Coast

Chapter 27: Trennery’s to Umngazi River

Bay of Beans

Chapter 28: Port St Johns to Mbotyi

Gone Pondo

Chapter 29: Mbotyi to Port Shepstone

Rust Never Sleeps

Chapter 30: Durban to Ballito

Inner Zulu

Chapter 31: St Lucia

Dune Music

Chapter 32: St Lucia to Kosi Bay

Kosi Corner

Chapter 33: Aftermath

Storm Warning

Contact Details

The Reading Room

Glossary

Production Notes

Everywhere in the world, big things happen at the edge of the sea. It is the ultimate borderline between earth and water – a place of energy and change.

In South Africa, life along the coast is particularly dramatic – in many ways. More than 3 000 ships have come to grief on its rocky shores over the centuries. ‘First Intelligence’ wandered about here, leaving footprints and eating limpets and abalone. Later, the children of Strandlopers picked beautiful river-rubbed diamonds from its north-western beaches and kept them as baubles. Today, most South Africans dream of living near the water’s edge, where something like one-third of the country’s GDP is said to be generated. A better life, they believe, awaits them at the shoreline. Sometimes, however, it’s harder to survive down by the sea.

In the early summer of 2005 we set out on a 70-day trip that would span the 3 200-km coastline from Alexander Bay at the southern edge of Namibia in the west to Kosi Bay on the Mozambican border in the east.

Jules and I moved from landscape to landscape, village to village, issue to issue – but mostly from face to face. Sometimes, to get the coastal perspective right, we’d have to wander inland to places such as the Richtersveld, the Agulhas plain and deep Zululand. In the big cities, we chose cultural encounters: Long Street in Cape Town, the townships of Port Elizabeth and the Inner Zulu experience of backstreet Durban.

Along the way, we were often tempted to throw a stick of dynamite at some of the monstrous coastal developments we encountered – bad taste hard at work with its little face-brick fantasies. And believe us when we say Squatter Camp Chic is sexy only in distant photographs. Up close and in the rain, it loses all its charm.

Excessive wealth is just as offensive as desperate poverty. We saw too much of both in our journey – “golf balls rattling into tin cups to your right. And beggars rattling tin cups to your left …”

That’s the social storm warning of Shorelines. The rest of the recollections are things we found funny. And breathtaking, especially in the form of a visiting southern right whale showing off her new calf in Walker Bay. Or a moment touched by holiness in a fisherman’s chapel in Kassiesbaai. Or a flight over pristine blue waters along the Wild Coast, with more than 1 000 common dolphins at play down below. There is great beauty and wondrous humanity along our beaches and cliffs and crags, where the sea meets the land.

Wherever we went, we made new friends and learnt new things. We fell in very briefly with diamond divers, surfers, skippers home from the sea, fishermen, second-hand bookshop mavens, all sorts of developers, Rastafarians, Cadillac collectors, forest adventurers, Transkei nannies, sushi chefs, Zulu shield-makers, abalone poachers and their pursuers, shark-diving enthusiasts, golfers and greenies.

We heard about mice that surfed the waves, baboons so clever they were “one good Food-Channel programme away from baking their own bread”, a young woman who choked to death on a giant oyster in the middle of her wedding feast, diamond smugglers who used pigeons as flying mules, barrels of ancient rum tossed up on the beach, a Maasai warrior who walked from Kenya to Cape Town, and millions of delicious lobster that occasionally strode desperately from the sea. We went where crocodiles walk the beach, leopards stalk the shores and ghosts of castaways stumble into the mist.

We renewed our acquaintance with South Africa’s Robinson Crusoe, Ben Dekker of Port St Johns, who sent us this letter once we’d returned to Jo’burg:

Chris & Julienne,

About this coastal travel book you are busy with. I’m a slow thinker and it takes me a while to work out the thinking of listeners when I am doing most of the talking.

I have always been attracted to the people that travellers bounce off and describe – after having revealed enough of themselves to make the reader interested in their opinions. The places are secondary and only get real meaning from the people who inhabit them.

Does one not really travel from person to person, rather than from place to place? Even when you have found such in-tune travel companions as the two of you have?

Think about it. Might give a nice new angle to your book.

Ben.

Chris Marais & Julienne du Toit, March 2006

Johannesburg

Chapter 1: Alexander Bay

In the Sky with Diamonds

A rotund little homing pigeon sits in swirling mist on a road somewhere in Alexander Bay, looking upwards at the Richtersveld skies with pleading eyes, flapping his wings. But he’s carrying 50 uncut diamonds taped around his chest and his tiny flying muscles can’t manage the extra weight.

Approaching fast is a police officer, and you can hear his heavy tread on the tarmac. The bird, on the lam with nearly US$10 000 worth of stones, is a picture of guilty anxiety as it launches itself into the air, rises no more than a metre and flops back onto the road. It’s like the Getaway Car That Couldn’t. The officer, spotting the contraband on the pigeon’s undercarriage, takes aim with his service rifle. The shot can be heard for miles down South Africa’s mother river: the Orange.

Flame-winged flamingos shrimping at the river mouth share dark, knowing looks with dapper little avocets wading in the shallows. The kelp gulls, dressed like casino heavies in city suits, gaze philosophically out at the gunmetal waves of the heaving Atlantic Ocean. They know exactly what’s gone down. Rotten luck, old fellow. See you up at the Birdy Gates.

Early in September 2005, at the start of the Shorelines journey, Jules and I drove up the old ‘Seven & Sixpence’ Highway from Port Nolloth to Alexander Bay, with Carlos Santana on the radio and a great 10-week coastal caper in our sights.

What an extraordinary thing this was, to start a long journey from an outpost such as Alexander Bay, on the border with Namibia, with the prospect of ending it 3 200 km away on the other side of the continent, facing another ocean, at Kosi Bay.

As we arrived on the outskirts of town, the sun gave the earth a lusty good-morning kiss, leaving a pink lipstick smear on the horizon. I thought of the old-time Namaqualanders, poor as roof rats, building the smooth road over which our ever-trusty, ever-dusty, diesel bakkie was gliding. They couldn’t get jobs in the new, fenced-off diamond fields, so they worked here for seven shillings and sixpence a day.

These men could sense millions of pounds’ worth of diamonds lying under their feet. Many of them believed those diamonds should belong to them – the sons and daughters of this harsh country, who had endured more than a century of hellish heat and dust to shove their roots into the land.

But let’s go back, briefly, to our luckless pigeon, who by now was a mess of bloody feathers on the otherwise pristine main street of Alexander Bay. In the late 1990s, pigeons were smuggled into the restricted diamond fields of Alexander Bay, loaded with stones and sent on their way home, where willing hands would relieve them of their precious loads. It was such a ridiculously simple trick that it actually worked for a while.

In fact, when we ran this scam by some bona fide pigeon fanciers later, they scoffed and said:

“A serious pigeon breeder who wanted to smuggle diamonds would simply make them eat the stones, let them fly home and then give them a small pill to empty their innards.” Just as I thought.

An uproar erupted in the South African Parliament when it was announced that Alexkor, the government-owned mine at Alexander Bay, was losing US$200 million in stolen diamonds each year, most of them “strapped to well-trained homing pigeons”. The order went out, arrests were made and various homing-pigeon clubs (which, ironically, had been given start-up funds by Alexkor) were closed down. More than 900 birds were given the boot.

It emerged that one Jakob Holtzhausen, a machinist who worked in the binnekamp (inside camp) at the mine, had become a very keen pigeon fancier and something of an avian tailor as well – he’d developed a nifty little harness he could attach onto his flying smugglers. He would take one to the diggings in his lunchbox and, when he found diamonds in the course of his work, he’d load them into the bird’s harness. You can figure out the rest. Jakob went to jail for a year. From that point onwards, pigeons were shot out of the sky over Alexander Bay.

So you can imagine the kind of reception given one rather clinically named GB S82074.99, a British homing pigeon that famously strayed off course in mid-2002, when he flew in over Alexander Bay all the way from Derbyshire, England. Old ‘GB’ had been on his way to France when he was blown down to Africa in a storm over the English Channel and arrived 8 000 km later in Alexander Bay. He was captured, presumably strip-searched and returned to his owner, Englishman Harry Sinwell.

But much as I love a diamond-smuggling story, the inner beast needed feeding.

“Look at this marvellous breakfast menu,” I exclaimed to Jules just after we’d checked into a cavernous room at the Frikkie Snyman Guest House in town. The ‘special’ involved bacon, eggs, salami, lashings of ostrich steak – and deliciously sweet West Coast oysters, if you could fit them in. She gently nudged me towards the muesli.

“OK, I was just looking,” I said, still eyeing the Richtersveld breakfast line-up. “Do you think all that comes with a lightly fried porcupine quill?”

Nearly a century ago, the breakfast specials were very different in these parts. Then it was loose-leaf tea boiled in a billy and whatever you could shoot. In The Glamour of Prospecting, you’re truly on the diamond trail with old Fred Cornell, one of the legends of the Richtersveld. Fred knew there was something precious and shiny up at the mouth of the Orange River. Somehow the rich finds constantly eluded him, but he stuck to his guns, lived under the stars and wrote one of the best travel books you’ll ever cast eyes on.

Imagine yourself back then in a lonely spot up on the Orange River, having a quiet smoke in the moonlight. This is about as far from civilisation as you can get. Peace reigns and you get quite sentimental about your life. Perhaps a bit nostalgic for a cold beer. The flash of a saloon girl’s eye.

Suddenly, there’s the distant sound of a concertina. You go back to the campfire to discover your travelling partner (in Fred’s case, a likeable ruffian called Ranssom) being entertained by a grinning Owambo wearing a full German colonial-army uniform, right down to elastic-sided boots with spurs, heaving away merrily at his concertina, having just appeared out of the black night as if from nowhere. With him are two youngsters, capering away around the fire to the music.

Fred gives them tobacco and is mildly amused. On they play, apparently tireless. Pretty soon it’s past everyone’s bedtime, but still the concertina plays on.

“At last I had to turn out of my blankets and go for them with a sjambok,” he writes. “Only then did they quit, and I turned in again. But I had got a big thorn in my foot, and when I had got that out a scorpion got into my bed, and objected to my being there. Altogether a nice, quiet, idyllic night by the river.”

Fred Cornell mucked about up here for more than a decade, just one sniff away from the mother lode. He sailed to London to raise more finances for his prospecting, went for a drive in a sidecar motorcycle and was killed in a collision with a London taxi.

The honour of discovering the world’s largest treasure house of diamonds lay with other men, such as Dr Hans Merensky and his team of geologists. No matter for Fred:

“I have been richly compensated for the few discomforts and hardships I have experienced by the glorious freedom and adventure of the finest of outdoor lives, spent in one of the finest countries and climates of the world.”

Armed with all this lore and expectation, we presented ourselves at the Alexander Bay Mine Museum for a tour of the diamond workings.

“The diamonds, washed down the Orange River, mostly lie in a sediment of fossilised oyster shells,” explained the museum curator and tour guide, Helené Mostert. “To get to this sediment, one has to go through as much as 40 metres of sand and calcrete. Then you reach the gravel on the bedrock, which bears the diamonds.”

Most of the mining takes place in the sea off Alexander Bay these days, and the divers share their profits with Alexkor.

Helené told us what we couldn’t take in: no cigarette lighters, lipstick, lip ice, cellphones, skin cream or, of course, pigeons. She had packed a picnic basket (ostrich biltong, chilli bites and muffins) but warned us we had to eat the lot before coming out again.

Alexander Bay society used to be divided into binnekampers and buitekampers (people who lived inside the restricted area and those who were outside the fence). Before leaving the area on weekend pass, binnekamp families and their possessions were thoroughly searched, because diamond smuggling in Namaqualand has always been as natural as truffle-hunting in France.

Despite the restrictions and the bleak landscape they lived in, the male workers used to have a rich old time of it. Namaqualanders are known for their prowess on the dance floor. The absence of women in the early days did not stop the men of Alexander Bay from having a roaring good stomp to an old tune on a Saturday night. Like their counterparts in the gold-mining boom in Barberton, they would ‘bull dance’ until the dawn, tossing each other about with much gusto. At the village of Grootderm, the local headmaster held bull dances for the miners in his school canteen.

And when the womenfolk started filtering into the community in later years, they would end up being flung onto the rafters by their enthusiastic male partners.

“Go dance with your friends,” was a refrain often uttered by rather bruised wives. Those were the days of beach parties, with giant lobster screeching in 200-gallon drums of boiling water, epic fishing expeditions and the occasional overdose of Cape Smoke, a particularly vengeful black sheep of the brandy family.

Namaqualand is a vast, barren area of little more than 120 000 souls, a place that gets a total of 50 mm of rain each year. That’s about equal to a couple of moderate Johannesburg thunderstorms. “God didn’t give us rain – He gave us diamonds” is the old Namaqualand saying. And, according to writer Pieter Coetzer in Bay of Diamonds, many locals openly admitted to illegally dealing in the stones.

But at Alexander Bay it’s still taboo to swing your tongue too freely around the word ‘diamond’.

“We were taught to always use the word ‘product’ when speaking about, er, diamonds,” said Pieter Koegelenberg, who had given a quarter of a century to ‘the bay’. Children playing ‘diamond in the sand’ games were told to use the word ‘pearl’ instead. We discovered that a diamond-mining camp (did they call it a ‘pearl-mining camp’?) was a place of paranoia.

If the slightest bit of suspicion arose about you and your character, you were packed out of the village before the morning paper arrived from Springbok. As in company towns all over the world, you had to adhere to a very strict code of behaviour.

In earlier years, if your wife was caught having an affair with another bloke, you were all kicked out of camp. No notice, no polite ‘first warning’. Just take the next bus south to Port Nolloth and don’t come back. And woe betide you if they found diamonds on the soles of your shoes.

Young Ernest from Pampierstad near Kimberley was assigned to be our guard, to ensure we didn’t suddenly bend down and slip a likely-looking stone into a secret place. In the company of Ernest and Helené we drove through the Gothicgrey mining complex, a rusted dreamscape scoured by 80 years of sand, wind, fog and rain. There was still much rehabilitation to be done out here, but, ironically, the mining operations had protected some pristine areas as well. We came across beautiful stretches of stark coastline that were home to colonies of seals and cormorants, with the occasional spotting of jackals, oryx and ostriches.

The harbour master, Alvin Williams, said that although his business was mainly with the little diamond boats (commonly called ‘Tupperwares’ or ‘tuppies’) moored below his office, a Chinese fishing trawler in distress was once allowed into these waters.

“It ran aground and caught fire,” he said. “They couldn’t speak English. Security officers had to somehow let them know they could just not walk around freely and they could definitely not pick anything up.”

I asked him if he’d ever been offered a bribe to look the other way when sweet diamond gravel was being brought up from the sea.

“Listen,” he said, his eyes boring into my head. “You can give me a bottle of brandy and half a sheep and we can go and have a nice braai together. But in the morning I’ll still be full of shit – even more so than before.” Alvin, I later found out, had grown up with a choice: be a gangster in the dangerous social waters of Cape Town’s District Six or go to sea. There was no schlentering on Alvin’s watch, because he knew all the tricks in the book of crooks.

For lunch we stopped over at the local oyster farm and ate the sweetest little molluscs in the world. I had mine with a dollop of Tabasco, while Jules downed hers neat. Oysters within sight of the sea – what magical fare.

Nearly three million oysters were being cultivated out here in lagoons, fed constantly by the cold West Coast upwellings. Helené said Alexander Bay also had wonderful lobster, and suddenly the lustre of diamonds briefly dimmed in comparison.

After a few hours of driving across the sandscape of the diamond fields, we returned to the security-clearance area for a long session in interleading rooms with smoky mirrors of X-ray searches, rubber gloves and pat-downs. Obviously our protests of innocence and our open, honest faces were not convincing enough for the eagle-eyed security staff of Alexkor.

“Don’t worry,” said Helené, as we nervously entered the search area. “Whatever happens in there, you will get out …”

We spoke to local residents of Alexander Bay, which is heaven on earth for a select group of hardy individuals such as Etienne Goosen, who spends his time riding waves on the sea and diving for diamonds in its depths.

“When we’re out there, it’s very physical, but the surfing also keeps you fit,” he said. “And when you’re on the boat, it’s really cool. You’re with your mates, chatting and hanging out together. It’s not really like work. The good thing is no one competes – we’ve all struggled at some time. We all know what it’s like. And we’re all generally incoherent by ten o’clock.”

Another local, oom Tommy Thomas, took out his fiddle and played a mournful version of ‘Amazing Grace’ for us in the middle of the street outside his home. And then he told us that the Namas of the Richtersveld would inherit Alexander Bay and her riches one day. How, I asked.

“Go and see the people in Khubus,” he said, mysteriously. I had the distinct feeling that all kinds of pigeons were coming home to roost …

Chapter 2: Richtersveld

The Richtersveld Take-Away

Sometime in 1960 the circus comes to Alexander Bay. It’s not the giant, tumbling caravan of bearded ladies, roustabouts, dancing elephants or six-foot ringmasters with booming voices that can summon snakes from deep holes. It’s just a little blue bread van trailing a folded tent. An old photograph – taken in the overexposed noonday light of the Richtersveld – shows the dusty vehicle, a side-on glimpse of the driver, a middle-aged midget on the running board and a brunette in a red button-down jersey next to him, an enigmatic smile playing on her face (or is she just squinting into the sun?). The sign on the van says Marianis Mini Sirkus.

What was the show like? Who was the short person? Did the brunette do something intriguing on a trapeze? The two reigning circus midgets in South Africa at the time were Tickey the Clown and his rival, JoJo. But those guys came with skaters, jugglers, cowboy acts, bagpipes, a convoy of pantechnikon trucks, an army of roadies and a trampoline. And there probably was a woman with facial hair somewhere in that crowd. Marianis, in comparison, seems to have been a bit of a one-trick pony, but the records state that Alexander Bay received the mini troupe graciously.

This was a desert town that danced until floorboards broke, rated Mutiny on the Bounty as its all-time favourite flick and feasted off giant lobster and oysters. If you weren’t a fisherman up at Alexander Bay, people labelled you eccentric and you were probably given ‘the raised eyebrow’ as you passed on the street. The fishing was so good that a new manager, a total amateur with rod and reel, went off to the mouth of the Orange and caught himself a monster 24-kg cob one day.

“Even the fish are sucking up to the boss,” someone said.

Helené Mostert and her three-year-old son Gideon came to pick us up at the Frikkie Snyman Guest House just before dawn, in a 1978 vintage Land Rover. It was clear Gideon was hoping to inherit the old road warrior one day.

“Cars are his obsession,” said Helené. “On his third birthday, he asked me for a driver’s licence.” We drove to the Gariep (formerly the Orange) River mouth, a traditional party spot for the locals. On the way, we passed pink lagoons packed with thousands of flamingos. Jackal tracks and the odd flamingo feather on the sand told us there had been some bird predation in the night. The rain pelted down, we ran for the vehicle and Helené discovered she was low on gas. So that’s how we ended up in one of the mining villages outside a friendly household where she went in to secure a lift to acquire more fuel.

Young Gideon, in the meantime, used this opportunity to hop into the driver’s seat and practise. He adjusted the rear-view mirrors, fiddled with the indicators and shifted gears. Jules and I watched in discreet horror from the back seat. Was this tot going to abduct us? A true kid-nap? Was he going to drive us into the sea? Just as he was beginning to toggle at the ignition keys, his mom returned to say she wouldn’t be long now.

“Do take him with you,” we urged.

Helené lifted Gideon out of the Land Rover and we were saved. To us, Gideon will forever be, in the true tradition of Alexander Bay nicknaming, Vroom Vroom Mostert. It was no strange thing in the old days to stand about at the security gates of the mine and hear the guards greeting fellows called Beeskalf (bullock), Ystervark (porcupine), Peperhout (pepper tree wood), Spook, Bokram (billy goat), Regterbeen (right leg) or Linkerbeen (left leg). Each of these names had some sort of a background, part of the legends of the thirst lands.

The rains moved on up the coast to Angola and in the late afternoon Helené took us to her favourite spot in all the Richtersveld: Lichen Hill. It’s an extraordinary outcrop of very clever little plants and lichens that live off coastal fog. She showed us how cunningly these odd-shaped plants hid from the sun.

We found ourselves in a world of succulents, stone flowers, window plants, lizards’ tails, euphorbias and Bushman’s candles, which have pretty leaves that harden to form sword-like thorns for defence. It suddenly flashed on me.

“Jules, I think I know why Fred Cornell never found diamonds up here. He was too busy with the other stuff. Like this stuff.”

But one man’s seaside resort is another man’s Siberia. If you were a cop, a 12-month stint at Alexander Bay was seen as punishment duty.

It was well past my bedtime at the Frikkie Snyman. Jules was fast asleep and I was having a small whisky. I was also reading what initially looked like a boring company hagiography called Baai van Diamante (Bay of Diamonds), commissioned by Alexkor and written by Pieter Coetzer.

I soon discovered Mr Coetzer to be some kind of genius, and a hardworking one at that. He delved deep into the history of Alexander Bay and interviewed more than 300 people who had lived, worked and fished here. I needed the help of a few more drinks to cut through the company bumph and then, as on any successful fact-prospecting mission, was rewarded with a rich seam of anecdote. I don’t know if he’s aware of it, but Pieter Coetzer is sitting with a cracker of a travel book. Something as potentially charming as The Glamour of Prospecting.

In his chapter on the policing of Alexander Bay, entitled Die Lang Arm van die Gereg (The Long Arm of the Law), Coetzer says that the first lesson taught to tenderfoot cops was that wine, women and song were off limits up here.

“This is a chance for young men to pay off debts and let bank balances grow,” the commanding officer would bark at them on parade. For which, one obviously reads:

“There’s bugger all to do up here. Stay sober, do your job and save your salaries.”

So you had the cops on one side, protecting the State’s diamond interests and living like slightly pickled sand rats dreaming of home postings. On the other, you had Namaqualanders of all hues, who felt in their hearts that the diamonds were really their birthright. Hmm. An interesting scenario, in anyone’s books.

What did the naughty Namaqualanders do? They stole. They smuggled. They finagled and they schemed. You couldn’t keep them down. The minute you bust them on one scam, another would raise its meerkatty head. Jail them, and they would be hailed as local heroes the minute they walked out of prison. They kept fast cars (the Austin Baby was the getaway favourite in illicit diamond buying) that could skim over the skanky roads like boatmen over stagnant pools, while the police lumbered behind in State vehicles.

The cops then bought a fleet of Austins to keep up. So cheeky were the smugglers that they stashed diamonds in the radiator of the district commandant’s official car. And when this car was sent down to Port Nolloth for repairs (for these were the new regulations), it came back a little lighter. But the ‘repairmen’ also made sure that the DC’s vehicle had something else wrong with it. Pretty soon, it would have to return. Probably with more diamonds in the radiator, right under officialdom’s nose.

If you were the South African government trying to keep control of diamond stocks so the market would not be flooded, all this to-ing and fro-ing over the fence was no joke. Very few law enforcers officially found it amusing when one man trained an ostrich to wait for him on the other side of the fence, pouch the flying bag of diamonds like a good slip catcher and then stride off home with the booty. Of course, the impoverished, sunken-eyed majority of hard-bitten Namaqualanders toiling on the Seven & Sixpence Highway dined off that story for years.

They stuck diamonds in their legs, in the heads of sheep, in the heels of their shoes, behind eye patches and up their noses. There’s the famous story, told to us by someone down south, of two brothers who worked at Alexander Bay, one in the binnekamp and one in the buitekamp.

“Both smoked a pipe. Every week, they were allowed to see one another in the visiting lounge, so they devised a plan to use identical tobacco pouches. The one coming from the inside brought the diamonds, the other took them home.”

And we mustn’t forget our lonely little pigeon with the excess baggage, trying to take off from the main street of Alexander Bay.

We left Alexander Bay before the sun came up, heading east along the Gariep after a mandatory stop at the SA–Namibia border post to signal the official start of our Shorelines adventure. The full stop on the trip would come months later, when we were in sight of the SA–Mozambique customs offices north of Kosi Bay.

Near dawn, we were at Beauvallon, a lush Alexkor farm. I went over to the fence to photograph a couple of male ostriches that boomed at me like plumed lions. We saw a sign that read: Grootderm Handelaar.

Jules was oddly fascinated by this nowhere spot. “How would you like to work in a shop called Large Intestine Retailers?”

The ostrich tried to eat my 18-125mm lens. When I wouldn’t let him he flounced off in the direction of some girl ostriches and began writhing and thrumming his neck in pleasure in front of one of them, fluttering his black and white wings like a feathered Folies dancer somewhere in the Pigalle district of Paris, where the red lights mean ‘go’.

The object of his desire, meanwhile, looked like a drab, grey feather duster pecking absentmindedly at the ground.

“Come play,” he said to her in ostrich-mime.

“I’m busy trying to eat this stone,” she replied in same.

“Let’s make love,” he persisted, whirling in his fandango, a blur of wings and lascivious looks. How could she resist?

“Naah.” No nookie for Mr Fabulous today. We thanked them for the show and continued to Brandkaros, a huge citrus farm and tourist camping site on the river. The heady aroma of orange blossoms hit us.

“It smells just like happiness,” beamed my wife.

Driving on, we saw reckless 4x4 tracks heading over the delicate terrain. Then we passed ruined landscapes where the mining companies had had their way. It struck us that these post-Apocalyptic heaps of tailings would be perfect 4x4 playgrounds. If the muscle-car brigade went there instead, the vulnerable succulent deserts of southern Africa would be eternally grateful.

We arrived at Cornell’s Kop along the Sendelingsdrif road to the Ai-Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park. I was thrilled to see something named after our Fred at last. The hill is ringed with rather exquisite false quiver trees, some of the last of their kind left in the world. Somewhere around here is a deep hole allegedly connected to the Gariep River, through which the Big Snake occasionally meanders. The monster, often spotted at the Augrabies Falls in times gone by, is said to rule the river. I do not possess a fondness for snakes, so I wasn’t keen to find this hole.

We’d strayed inland to flesh out the facts behind an astounding land claim that promised to shake the foundations of the South African mining world. The Richtersveld community of nearly 5 000 souls, mostly diamond workers and roaming herders, had claimed 85 000 hectares of mainly coastal land in the Northern Cape that had been taken from them in the 1920s when diamonds were discovered. The claim area included the Alexkor fields. The claimants not only wanted the land returned to them, but also more than US$200 million for diamonds extracted over the eight decades of the mine’s existence.

A 75-year-old Nama elder, Oom Gert Domroch, stood up in the Land Claims Court in Cape Town and, through an interpreter, said:

“Among our people, there is nothing like this taking away of land. You may not take away someone else’s thing. You have to ask. I remember it as it was told to me by the old people. There was no discussion, no negotiation. It was simply taken away.”

“What should be done to put this right?” asked the community’s attorney Henk Smit.

“I think the person who took a thing from you must put it back,” the old man replied. In October 2003 the Constitutional Court declared that the Richtersvelders had a right to restitution and compensation. At the time of writing this book, the claim was still unresolved. To outsiders, it seemed the government was playing a waiting game of ‘Who’s Got The Deepest Legal Pockets’ with the claimants.

“We will not drive around with Mercedes-Benz cars,” said one of their spokesmen, Floors Strauss. “We will not give cash handouts. We’re going to use the compensation to make sure that we will provide jobs, educate our youngsters and develop a sustainable Richtersveld.”

And by God, didn’t the Richtersvelders need a diamond dollar or two? That was the gist of our thoughts as we rattled into Khubus, a dusty mission settlement in the east. A car wreck lay upside down at the entrance to the village. At the Tourist Information Centre, no one had time to guide us. We were briefly told that half the people in Khubus had no jobs and that the church was a nice place to visit. But Tommy Thomas back in Alexander Bay had given us the name of one Willem Slander, so we made enquiries and ended up knocking on the door of his house.

We heard muffled voices and clicking and muttering on the other side of the door, as if dozens of safety locks were grudgingly being opened. A small, wizened man in a Toyota cap peered around the corner. He emerged from the dwelling, closing the door firmly behind him as if there were a secret life inside, a no-go zone for us strangers.

“It looks peaceful out here,” remarked Julie, trying to kick-start a conversation.

“Not so peaceful,” the old man said. “If the wind wasn’t blowing so bad, you’d see the kids up there on the hill, lighting up.”

“Lighting up what?”

“Dagga, Mandrax, even this new Tik thing.”

I shuddered. For the dreaded crystal methamphetamine (street name: Tik) to have made its way so far north was a shock. It has a 94% addiction rate, induces psychotic behaviour and is often used by gangster gunmen just before a hit.

“It has also been called ‘Hitler’s Drug’ because it was allegedly used by the Nazis as a combat pill to fuel aggression and help soldiers stay awake and remain focused for long periods,” say researchers at the SA Institute for Security Studies. The Tik Generation? Up here, in lonely Khubus?

As we scuttled out of town, a youth wearing a baseball cap bearing a stitched-in marijuana-leaf emblem stepped into the road and stopped us with an imperious air. Were we going to Sanddrif? No, we were heading south to Lekkersing. Where were we from? What were we doing here? The slurred questions came thick and fast. Who was he, we countered. And what was that on his cap?

He smiled and said something vaguely Richtersveld-Rastafarian:

“Die Aja Baas.” The Big Holy Boss. He had a dead look in his eyes. You just knew. No amount of diamond paybacks would ever bring a sparkle back to them again …

Chapter 3: Khubus to Port Nolloth

Port Jolly

I have lived with this image of the Richtersveld for decades. It is the portrait of an aged woman, perhaps old before her time. The face is plump and folded, the smile is gaptooth-marvellous, the eyes are squinty yet glinting with humour. The whole delicious array of facial features is framed by a faded pink bonnet, standard headgear for the Dames of the Dry Land.

The fantasy continues as she invites me into her yard. She lets me photograph her in the late afternoon and the soft light plays lovingly on her wrinkles. We drink strong bush tea in tin cups and laugh together. Small gifts are exchanged, in the spirit of the encounter.

Like a zealous television-licence inspector, I had scanned the streets of Khubus in the northern Richtersveld for any sign of womenfolk wearing traditional bonnets. But it must have been the Bonnet Brigade’s day off, because the lanes were bare and the doors were closed and even the kids who were said to hang out on the hill behind the car cemetery and smoke stuff were nowhere to be seen. So we took the dusty road south to Lekkersing in the search for a bonnet. We only found out later that you had to book well in advance for the people of the Richtersveld to dig inside their family wagon chests and dress up like their ancestors for you. They don’t sit around the old matjeshuis smoking goat tobacco, wearing bonnets and generally being ‘19th-century crusty’ every day of the week. And certainly not for nothing.

Like a typical low-rent tourist, I had come roaring into town in my shiny pickup truck (OK, maybe not so shiny), dispensing smiles and asking dumb questions and expecting all the locals to shuffle into cultural-village mode. How naïve. This is the hot, dry country. You only rush about when it’s absolutely necessary. The mostly unemployed townsfolk are poor, often miserable, occasionally drunk and entirely without a sense of humour about rich, romping tourists and their invasive ways.

“Blast that bonnet picture,” I cursed.

“Forget it,” advised Jules. “Let’s concentrate on what really happens to us.” I drove on in a huff and promptly got us hopelessly lost in the wide wastes of the Richtersveld.

We came upon two Land Rovers that looked packed for an around-the-world-andback trip. Someone in this khaki ensemble would know the road to Lekkersing. Or, at least, the words to ‘You Are My Sunshine’. They looked as though they carried a global positioning system in every pocket of their war-correspondent jackets. I made for the driver of the lead vehicle and nearly choked in wonder and surprise.

“Pieter du Plessis, you old bastard!” I shouted. Out here in the Richtersveld, profanity works a charm. The last time I had seen this cheerful, swarthy young man had been eight years previously in the jungles of southern Borneo. He had been the star of Team South Africa in the daunting Camel Trophy race. I was one of the steaming, heaving media guys covering this celebration of mud, sweat and gears. It was Pieter who charmed the girls from Balikpapan to Pontianak in Indonesian Kalimantan and won the Team Spirit award with his partner, Sam de Beer. Pieter now earned his crust as a specialist overland-safari guide.

I rushed over to his guests, a party of Belgian tourists, and told them about Pieter, Borneo and me. They could have been a little more impressed.

Oh God, I thought. I’m romping again.

“It does not surprise us,” the alpha Belgian said, with an accent one could only describe as Franco-Asterix. “You South Africans all know each other.”

I noticed that there was a wooden snake wound around the edges of the windshield of the Belgians’ Land Rover and one of the doors bore a sign saying ‘Live Specimens In Transit’, but I said nothing at the time. Later on, when we’d all shaken hands and parted, it was a different story.

“Forget alarm systems and tracker devices and gear locks,” I enthused at Jules. “I’m gonna get us a wooden snake and a ‘live specimens’ sign. Then no one will ever break into the bakkie. Who likes to tangle with a snake, especially a snake curled up somewhere in the luggage?”

Babble, babble, blah, blah. Some days you just wake up and behave like an overheated Labrador puppy, running in all the wrong directions at once and peeing on the carpet to boot. I think it had something to do with the knowledge that we’d be sleeping in Port Nolloth that night. The tree house of my rowdy youth.

Just up the road, the barren veld turned into a sea of soft green, dotted with clumps of purple succulent flowers. We walked around silently for a while, the sun on our necks, the buzz of insects at our feet. The Land Rover convoy had become two distant puffs of dust.

The village of Lekkersing was backstage Richtersveld. We saw tin-roofed houses cooking like pizza ovens in the summer sun and a diamond-quartzite mine that had ripped chunks from the land. We found a man walking in the street and asked about someone called Willem Diergaard, another contact from Alexander Bay.

“Who wants to know?” he asked, glaring at me. I shrugged and drove on, past shops wistfully named Goeie Hoop and Paradise. Again, not a bonnet in sight.

The Richtersveld is fabulously rich and obviously flawed. It has diamonds, copper and all manner of minerals. It has the desert wilderness, which enchants adventurers. The Big Five (lions and such, also called ‘charismatic megafauna’) might work for a first-timer to Africa. But once you’ve been to a vast dry space like this, you become like Fred Cornell, the lyrical prospector. You’ll think up any excuse to return on a belly safari to marvel at the small things of the desert. There is also the Gariep and its fabulously fertile banks, which can feed the entire province and still have enough left for export. Possibly most importantly of all, this area has a very interesting nomadic culture, which could draw thousands more visitors each travelling season.

So why is the Richtersveld home to 5 000 of some of the most dispirited, broken people you ever saw? Why can’t all this latent wealth and opportunity heal the community?

“Chris, that’s like asking why diamonds can’t heal the Congo,” said Jules as we drove on and spoke about this supremely sad irony. “Why oil can’t heal Angola.”

“And why there are no bloody people with bloody bonnets on!” I shouted out of the window, adding my five cents to the discussion.

Just then, on the road between Steinkopf and Springbok, we encountered something that defied the eye. A team of burly road workers were hard at their task with pick and shovel – and two of them were wearing the classic Richtersveld women’s bonnets to avoid the sting of the mid-morning sun.

Jopie Kotze, maverick publisher and legendary owner of the Springbok Lodge, couldn’t explain it.

“Maybe you’ll find the answer in one of these books,” he said, waving at his vast collection of local literature. We duly plundered his shelves. I paid him, using my plastic debit card. Then we saw some more books and I paid him again. Then we found another straggler we just had to have.

“I’m beginning to really like this little card of yours,” Jopie said with a smile. He sat behind his counter like a Namaqua pasha, dispensing satire and social comment with great largesse.

“I’m a museum piece,” he flung at us, as we prepared to stumble out under the weight of some rather intriguing books. I asked him how the Namaqua flower season had gone.

“Great,” he beamed. “We had more tourists than flowers.”

We entered Port Nolloth behind a bakkie driven by a Rastafarian guy with what looked like 3 metres of hair under an enormous crocheted doily. Port Nolloth is where I used to come as a young man on a break from the city, to throw my name away and behave badly. It was my Tijuana, my secret place, where I could be silly, wild and foolish without anyone raising an eyebrow. This was a town of hard cases. Nothing I did could ever top these guys, who have been ripping it up since the Cornish miners came here in the Victorian copper-quest era. Port Nolloth has seen it all.

Is it the mist? Is it the sand? Is it the wind, the pure rock ’n’ roll of a diver’s life, the little scandals, the diamond scams plotted in back rooms? Or is it just the moonlight romance of a bell buoy tong-tonging away in the channel as the little diamond boats weave in from a wild tangle with the Atlantic Ocean? Port Nolloth has to be one of the most seductive, bad-ass towns in Africa. The men, with their gaunt faces, seafarers’ beanies and faded jeans, have the air of Montana cowboys about them. And something in the foggy mien of Port Nolloth enhances the women as well. Girls of the frontier. Feisty as hell.

There are many names for this town. Some, referring to its wall-to-wall party reputation, like to call it ‘Port Jolly’. That’s quite apt, since it was named after a guy who came here in a boat called The Frolic. Others, mindful of its hard-bitten reputation as a drug den, call it ‘Snort Polloth’. But most of the locals just call it ‘Port’, and leave it at that.

The daylight hours were almost done. We went for a spin down to the docks before checking in at the Bedrock Guest House on the seafront. There was great excitement on the loading jetty. One of the diamond boats was sinking for some reason. Only its nose and captain’s cabin jutted out of the waves. The people on land were trying to haul it back out with a 4x4 and a suspect length of rope. I asked one of the bystanders what had happened. He looked me up and down, taking in my sandals and Hawaiian pub-crawling shirt.

“It drank too much water,” he said, turning away to talk to a more sombrely dressed local. I couldn’t care less. Do me a favour – I was in Port Nolloth, for heaven’s sake.

Unloading the bakkie was a mammoth task, which I performed with long teeth and a slow trudge. As I came back for a second load, I saw a grizzled old fellow chatting up my wife.

“They wrote about me in the Rand Daily Mail more than 20 years ago,” he was saying to Jules. “It was a really big article.”

“I know,” I said, coming up behind him, excited as all hell again. “I wrote the piece. Hello Alfie.” Another episode of It’s A Small World was about to begin.

In the mid-1980s, Alfie Wewege was a strapping man, the unofficial ‘king of the divers’, and he had opened his home, his bar and his personal life to me, a wide-eyed reporter from the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail morning newspaper. It was actually Alfie who got me hooked on Port Nolloth. And here we were, two decades later. Back at the start of it all.

We shook hands with gusto and then threw caution to the winds and exchanged manly hugs.

“Come to supper,” he said. “Meet my mates Geoff and Lara. We’ll catch up.” He strolled off. I stood in the middle of the road. Two teenage girls, who had been watching us and giggling, came sauntering past arm in arm, singing:

“And I can’t help falling in love. With you-hoo.” Well, I thought. I’ve had a day of familiar faces. Borneo Camel Man and King of Divers’ Row. Manly hugs are definitely in order. Mock away, girls.

We purchased two bottles of red wine, one bottle of whisky and a large bottle of Coke for Alfie (who had wisely taken the Dry Road after years on the Rowdy Road). We arrived at the beachfront house of Geoff and Lara Lorentz, in the middle of a rather jolly birthday celebration for Pam, Lara’s mom. The Lorentz family were living in the original house owned by Jack Carstens (whom you’ll meet along the way). Jack and his crew found the first Namaqua diamond. Geoff Lorentz was one of Port Nolloth’s most experienced divers. The Carstens magic had obviously rubbed off on this genial man.

Although the sign at the front door said “Out Of It People Not Welcome”, Geoff and I began drinking whisky. A lot of whisky. We sat in the kitchen, surrounded by waves of raucous conversation and an overlay of Pearl Jam at top volume.

“I’ve been a millionaire more than once,” he told me.

“And then he gives it all away,” added Alfie.

“I’ve got a scrap yard of old boat parts in my garage,” said Geoff, pouring me a triple. “People come rooting around here for stuff they need to get their vessels going again. We all have to help each other. I love this job. Every time we go past that bell buoy in the channel, I think this could be the trip. It could happen today. The big one. But tell me. What do you think of Pearl Jam?”

“It’s an acquired taste,” I replied, blinking across at him with the eyes of a tired old owl. “Here. Play this Springsteen instead. Now what’s the work like?”

“It’s a job for kings. Sometimes, you find yourself in perfect weather conditions. You’re in the right spot, the gravel is beautiful. It’s also the shittest job in the world, when it’s misty and cold and blustery out there.”

I then caught up with Alfie before the booze caught up with me. He’d been all over the oceans of the world since I’d last seen him, mainly working the prawn boats around Madagascar. Jules and I had also recently been to the ‘Great Red Island’, so we rabbited on about that mystic place for a while.

“What’s so wonderful about being here?” I slurred at Geoff. As if I didn’t know.

“It’s the whole life. Being out at sea with your friends. And it’s this weird place called Port Nolloth. It has a separate reality.”

“You can say that again,” Lara chimed in, having attacked a bottle of reasonable red with the help of my wife, who had given up the technological battle with her digital recorder and was making chicken scratches in her notebook. “Have they told you about the Desperate Divers’ Wives Club yet?”

Oh man. My head was swimming. I had to get some fresh air. I stood up from the table and fell face down onto the floor. Jules helped me up.

“Excellent!” cheered Lara. “You mean your husband does that too?”

The events of the day, not to mention more than a wee dram of something Scottish, had overcome me. Jules and I sang something from Woodstock as we walked arm in arm down the road. I could hear the bell buoy tong-tonging out to sea in the mist, where what remained of my good name was floating off in the direction of Uruguay. Life couldn’t get much better. This, after all, was Port Nolloth. The tree house of my youth …

Chapter 4: Kleinsee

Here for De Beers

In the morning, I awake with a monster-class Port Nolloth hangover.

“I wonder how the other guy feels,” I say to Jules, referring to Geoff Lorentz. She is lurking in the kitchen of our Bedrock Cottage, brewing very strong coffee. “Let’s go and have a look.”

With a serious case of the morning-afters, we crab-walk gingerly up to the Lorentz house. Mother Pam and the lusty Lara are in fine fettle.

“Oh, Geoff went out in the Blues Breaker (his tuppy) very early this morning,” is the astounding news. “The sea calmed down and conditions are perfect for work.” They give us tea in the courtyard. Pam, who should still be comatose after her birthday carousing, has just been leading an aerobics class for seniors. She is full of beans.

“Some time ago, the police conducted a huge IDB raid on the whole town,” she tells us. “The channel into Port Nolloth was closed. Geoff was at sea at the time and had run out of provisions. So I convinced the cops to fly out one of their helicopters, hover over the Blues Breaker and gently lower a pot of stew, a change of clothes and three bottles of Old Brown sherry in a net bag down to the boys.”

Whenever the Blues Breaker brought its gravel in to the TransHex plant, Lara became the sorter. For the rest, she raised their children, cooked hearty meals for the crew, waited for Geoff and worried when their boat was caught out in foul weather – just like the other Port Nolloth divers’ women. Lara and Geoff had been married for five years and adored each other.

“I sometimes grope him in the sorting plant,” she said, over a second cup of tea. “Geoff has to remind me of all the cameras in there, pointing at us. They must have some interesting footage by now.”

When a steamy little town like Port Nolloth lies between two obscenely rich diamond fields restricted by either the government or De Beers, it’s obvious that the inflow of illicit stones will make its way through its streets. It has always had the reputation for being the Casablanca of the Northern Cape.

Drugs were the new diamonds, we now heard. The night before, Geoff and Alfie had told us about the increase of hard drugs in Port Nolloth. Before, it was not unheard of for a diver to indulge in a marijuana joint or two. Alcohol, however, had traditionally been the escape substance of choice up here.

“Now we’ve got Nigerians in town, selling all kinds of drugs,” Geoff said. “And let me tell you, there are very few things more dangerous than a Mandrax-smoker diver.”

The divers went out in the tuppies maybe four days a month, when the Atlantic Ocean calmed down enough to let them in. Once out at sea and over a likely-looking section of gravel, the divers were faced with a daunting, very physical task. They descended in wetsuits deep into the Benguela Current, where it was dark, icy and uncertain. Once they reached the bottom of the sea, they shoved large steel nozzles into the gravel.

Things happened down there, in the undersea obstacle course of gullies, potholes and traps. Sometimes, huge rocks were dislodged in the ‘search-and-suck’ operation. In January 2006, 42-year-old Derrick du Plooy was pumping gravel in the sea off Alexander Bay when he was crushed to death by a huge rock that fell on him about 5 metres below the surface.

At sea, divers suffered injuries to joints, cracked ribs and burst eardrums from the rockfalls and decompression. On land, they faced boredom and booze. Now it was the drugs. And no one wanted to go out to sea with an addict, who could endanger everyone’s lives in so many ways.

As we left Port Nolloth, a ruby-red BMW roared past us (the driver had left the baffles at home) towards the jetty, its inscrutable smoky windows wound right up, with heavy hip-hop blaring out through disco speakers. Was this a Nigerian drug dealer, or just another crazy Namaqualander letting off steam?

Our destination that day was De Beers’s Kleinsee, part of the world diamond industry, a business that extracts 120 million carats of rough diamonds from the planet annually. Just more than 20 tonnes of diamonds are sold to producers for US$7 billion. Once they are cut, set and ready to appear in a Manhattan jeweller’s window, they are priced at US$50 billion. Really good business for a generally useless little piece of carbon.

The amiable De Beers public affairs manager, Gert Klopper, arrived at the gates of Kleinsee to help us through Security. Suddenly, from the rowdy roughand-tumble of Port Nolloth, we were in a neat, box-like, litter-free town where people kept to the speed limit. There was not a Nigerian drug dealer in sight.

On the mine tour, we heard that De Beers was rehabilitating its disturbed areas.

“In 50 years’ time, people won’t even know there was a mine here,” we were assured.

Back in the late 1920s, while diamond fever was sweeping the northern reaches of the West Coast, a teacher called Pieter de Villiers was on another mission. He was building a farm school near the mouth of the Buffels River at a place called Kleinsee. One day, by chance, he kicked a diamond out from the ground.

And so Kleinsee Mine was born, with Jack Carstens as the pit manager. He tells of the nights when ‘the crooks’ would arrive at the diggings to steal the diamond gravel from under their noses. His Namaqualander guards carried electric torches, their ‘wizard devices’. The guards thought you could immobilise a man if you shone your torch on him.

In A Fortune Through My Fingers he relates a conversation he once had with a guard called Jan. Jan tells Jack about some ‘crooks’ he had found in the section called the Main Area:

“I torched them and they didn’t fall over so I went quite close to them and then they ran away and I couldn’t catch them.”

Other crooks who escaped with Kleinsee diamonds had it easier. They didn’t have to endure any form of the quaint ‘Namaqua Torchlight’ torture. In July 1932, a consignment of 10 000 diamonds worth about £53 000 was nicked from the Bitterfontein post office on the way to Kimberley.

Dressed like dude miners, we climbed into a bus and drove past the faceless, windowless, final-processing plant, where no human skin touched a diamond. It was all done with conveyor belts and quarantine gloves under the constantly watchful eyes of many cameras. Not a touchy-feely kind of process.

Further along, we came to the bedrock, where the diamonds were. Massive suction units were being used to hoover up the gravel. Our guide, Mariska Theunissen, said the workers here were encouraged not to bend down.

“And if they do, it’s considered very good manners to immediately hold up their hands to show what they’ve picked up.”

We came to the main event of Kleinsee: the dragline, a monster machine that loomed above the skyline and needed its own transformer station to power it.

“Every Sunday, when they start it up, the lights all over the town of Kleinsee go dim,” said Mariska. The dragline saved a lot of spadework – its 36-tonne bucket could eat 72 tonnes of soil with every bite. Every year, it was stripped down and serviced from top to bottom by 150 technicians.

As we toured the massive mining area, we learnt more about working and living in Kleinsee. For one thing, there were no speed freaks on the diggings.

“Every driver has a magnetic ID device that he must use whenever starting a vehicle,” said Mariska. “This monitors how long he idles, how fast he drives, how much the engine is revved and whether he’s hard on the brakes.”

Back at the Welcome Centre, we asked Gert about Kleinsee’s water source. Most of it came from the Gariep River, he said. But they also took water from the nearby Buffels River, which was notoriously brackish.

“Let’s just call it water with attitude,” smiled Gert.

“People get used to the brackish taste,” added Jackie Engelbrecht, his colleague. “When they leave Kleinsee, some of the older people like to add a pinch of salt to their coffee because they’re so used to the mineral taste of the water.”

We saw the museum, founded only after a local farmer had shot a leopard. He had it stuffed and then discovered there was no place to display it. So the raccoon-eyed leopard now stood stiffly next to a diorama of brown hyena and a collection of startled stuffed birds.

Jules and I drove over to the Houthoop Guest House, about 15 km out of Kleinsee. While we were unpacking the bakkie, a large group of German bikers arrived in a cloud of dust and bonhomie. They stripped off their leathers and settled themselves in sunlight, knocking back beer after beer. It turned out they were a swashbuckling gang of gay dentists and doctors from various parts of Germany. Every year the Dauntless Docs took themselves off on motorbikes to some exotic part of the world.

The grounds of Houthoop were festooned with homespun homilies in the form of dozens of signs. In the course of five minutes, I learnt that:

•  “A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist”

•  “Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again”

•  “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away”

•  “Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night”

Veronica van Dyk, the owner-manager of Houthoop was, we discovered, the compiler of the wisdoms. For dinner, this incredible woman gave us steaks, salads, rosemary potatoes, pumpkin fritters and all the garlic prawns we could eat.

The next morning, it smelled like France wherever we went. Floors Brand was on hand to guide us on a great field trip through the De Beers estate – a trip that, thankfully, would at last have nothing to do with a diamond. This was day eight of our Shorelines adventure, and almost every single waking moment had been about diamonds. And they’re not really forever. I read somewhere that if you dropped them at just the right angle onto a hard floor, they could shatter. But enough, already, about diamonds.

“Sorry about the garlic,” Jules told Floors.

“Don’t worry,” he assured us. “I had garlic all over my mashed potatoes last night.” Bonjour, then.

The tall, grey-haired Floors was the retired estate manager for Kleinsee. Only 12% of the 400 000 hectares owned by De Beers in these parts was under mining. The rest of it was dunes, shipwreck coast, succulent gardens, seaside hideaways, secret smuggling bays, old legends, mystery stories and, at this time of the year, hundreds of bonking tortoises who had suddenly discovered a dash of speed. Like I said, no diamonds. Thank you, Lord.

We parked at the wreck of the Border, which went down in dense fog at high tide on 1 April 1947. All that was left of this cargo ship was a rusty hull on the beach. But the weather was stormy and grey that morning – with the West Coast at its least forgiving. The perfect atmosphere for a shipwreck tour. I photographed a hardy Mesembryanthemum crystallinum (its English name was lost to me) battling through the layers of thick rust on the deck of the Border. Life escaping out of the dead.

I heard crunching and swung about in alarm, one of my Canon cameras nearly taking my nose off. It was the good wife, who had discovered the joys of jumping on a bed of dry, black mussel shells in her hiking boots. Like a little girl who has found a large sheet of plastic wrapping paper that pops. Floors, bless his soul, didn’t bat an eyelid. Knowing we’d had one mine tour too many, he just let us play with our rust-bed succulents and dance on our crunchy mussel beds.

We drove on and stopped at one of the many bays, where drifts of plovers ran up and down at the edge of the wild, breaking waves. Scouring winds drove the warmer surface water away so that the icy water deeper down was forced upwards, carrying plankton and nutrients with it.

“This is the Benguela Current, what they call The Upwelling,” said Floors. “This is what makes the waters off the West Coast so rich.” This, obviously, was why so many seals regarded the area as prime coastal property.

We continued and found a Strandloper midden where the ‘old people’ used to quaff piles of limpets. Floors showed us how to tell the difference between ‘natural death’ limpets and ones that had been hammered open by hungry protohumans.

On the way back to the vehicle, he called us over to observe the difference between Gazania lichtensteinii and Gazania meyerii (one leaf is slightly larger than the other).

“The best way to appreciate Namaqualand is on your knees,” said Floors.

We found the wreck of the Arosa (it went down on 16 June 1976, which was also the day Soweto erupted and the freedom fight for South Africa officially began). It was a concrete-carrying vessel that was allegedly run aground on purpose. Then Floors showed us a wreck that carried the rather Disney-esque name of Piratiny, a 5 000-tonne Brazilian steamer that floundered off these shores in June 1943, possibly sunk by a German torpedo.

Weeks after the shipwreck, a heavy storm blew up, leaving the beaches covered with luggage from (and pieces of) the Piratiny, which included quantities of dress materials and bolts of silk. Several months later, at the church-communion service, all the local children came uniformly dressed in clothes made from the Piratiny flotsam.

We found Noup, a tucked-away cove where diamond divers used to hole up in a collection of eccentric, weather-beaten cottages – all facing the noisy sea.

“I’ve slept here from time to time,” said Floors. “It feels like the ocean is just waiting to burst in through the front door.”

Driving through the De Beers game farm, we encountered a number of very preoccupied male angulate tortoises intent on crossing the road at high speed in search of willing womenfolk from their tribe. Normally when one shoves a wide-angle lens into a tortoise’s face, he withdraws into his shell. Not these fellows. They glared up at me like movie stars dealing with paparazzi: if you value your big toe, you’ll get out of my way …

Floors was concerned with questions of land ownership in the area and with making sure that the sandveld had every chance of recovery and survival. He was acutely aware that De Beers was unpopular in the region. Many local farmers suspected the company of acquiring land here in the past in underhand ways. Floors had also been De Beers’s man in negotiations to hand over the area between the Groen and the Spoeg rivers to the National Parks organisation to be part of one massive conservation district.

It was a day of miracle and wonder with the grizzled, amiable Floors, whom we’d come to like a lot. He also showed us that the oft-maligned De Beers (and there are many reasons to take issue with this diamond giant) had, ironically, kept a huge section of the South African coastline pristine and free (for the time being) of developers and their grubby little millionaire condo-plots.

Time spent in the company of Floors was also a window into the soul of the true Namaqualander. Like the hardy succulents of his region, Namaqualand Man is minimalist, stripped down by the elements of his environment, living by his own rules.

His is not a world of duvets, wide-screen TV sets or sushi bars. Just give him a karos (buckskin blanket), a sad old song and a plate of stormjaers – little doughball dumplings rolled and fried in fat.

That night, the threat of stomach bombs was far from our minds. Our hostess gave us chicken tortillas – and some parting words of wisdom:

“Most of us go to the grave with the music still inside us.”

Chapter 5: Hondeklip Bay to Doring Bay

Misty Shores

Summer, 1855. The old jetty at Hondeklip Bay at low tide. Chained to its piers are three miserable souls, part of a drinking club that tore up the town the night before. Their mates are in the local lock-up, also suffering the effects of too much Cape Smoke brandy.

It all begins the day before, and sounds like a damn good idea. The group of men, copper drovers who have battled across the sands from Springbokfontein (now Springbok) with their loads, invest in a 16-gallon cask of brandy and form a drinking circle around it on the beach. At first, there is much merriment. Then they all fall into a deep depression, have another round and become ‘general disturbances’, making sleep impossible for the few locals.

The magistrate, a large and powerful man called Pillans, is rousted from his bed and emerges from his hut a very angry person. Grabbing torches and a couple of deputies, Pillans soon has the drunken drovers rounded up. He has most of them thrown into the small goal and the trio that can’t fit in are hauled back down to the beach and chained to the piers. They watch the morning sun through a haze of Cape Smoke and remorse. And there’s also the small matter of rising waters.

Winter, 1866. The old jetty at Hondeklip Bay at high tide. Roped to its railing is a ship’s captain with a death wish. He waits for the right wave and flings himself down into the sea, one end of the length of rope tied to his waist and the other to the jetty. Hours later, his lifeless body is found bobbing in the waters around the pier.

Captain Johan Daniel Stephan had brought the Jonquille to the mouth of Hondeklip Bay, where it lay at anchor. It was a great mystery to everyone that the Jonquille had run aground on one of the reefs – the young captain was familiar with the bay.

But no lives were lost, some of the cargo was recovered and the rest was well insured. It seemed a small matter, something that happens practically every day along this unpredictable West Coast.

On 4 August 1866, the Argus newspaper in Cape Town reported thus:

“Readers will remember that, a few days since, we reported the wreck of the schooner Jonquille at the mouth of Hondeklip Bay. We now regret having to add that Captain Stephan, her late commander, died by his own hand on Thursday last. We are not aware of the precise cause, which led the unfortunate man to terminate his existence, nor are we aware that any censure had been passed upon him for the loss of his vessel, but it would appear that the fact must have weighed upon his mind and led him to the commission of this rash act.”

Letters between Captain Johan Daniel Stephan and his father, head of the shipping company, were found:

Dear Father,

I had sooner expected my death than that I should lose the schooner, and as I was so certain I have been sadly disappointed. I am the lost son, and you will see me no more …. Believe me, I am sorry, but my time has come, and I shall go where the schooner has gone.

Captain Stephan’s father receives this letter and replies:

Dear Son,

Come on by the first opportunity direct to Cape Town. Be not much concerned about the loss sustained, as long as your brother and yourself have retained your health. What gladdens me most is that you and the crew have been saved. You will continue as ever, like all the others, one of my beloved children.

By the time the father writes this letter, the son has been dead for two days. Much later, it emerges that one of the flukes on the Jonquille’s main anchor had mysteriously snapped, leaving the vessel free to run onto the reef. It wasn’t Stephan’s fault at all.

We had no clue of this deeply moving historical background to Hondeklip Bay on the day Jules and I drove in. This information came to us later via a retired skipper with a sharp ear for history. For now, all we saw as we approached the harbour at low tide was a collection of brightly painted little houses, with a ghostly mist descending.

A man with a collie dog walked past on the beach. The collie headed straight for a beached fishing boat, peed joyously on the propeller and trotted off after its owner.

The sea line, only metres away from us, became invisible. The cloak of mist lifted slightly and revealed a flotilla of bobbing tuppies with their suction pipes hanging aft like large intestines. Hondeklip Bay has its own mad diamond-diving fraternity.

An ancient mariner of sorts arrived and sat down near us. He wore a blue worker’s overall and a white cap bearing a South African flag and the words:

“Put Children First Now”.

His name was Ivan Don. By day, he fished. At night, he was the guard at the old lobster-packing factory. Which was a bit sad, because the rock lobsters were fished out of this area more than 20 years ago. Even the West Coast Upwelling could not withstand the constant overfishing.

“Now there’s just a couple of rowing boats that go out for hotnotsvis, harders and a bit of snoek,” he said. We asked about the jetty, which seemed to be absent.

“A big storm came in 2002 and washed it away,” he said. “The surge killed three men in a rowing boat, then crossed the road to the Post Office and ruined the petrol pump forever.”

Jules and Ivan chatted away casually, with the fisherman giving colourful insights into life in Hondeklip Bay, until she asked him about the fishing quotas in the area. He told her about his fishing permit, but when she threw in a few more questions, he clammed up and gazed out at the misty coastline.

“Don’t worry, I’m not a Fisheries inspector,” she assured the man. But the brief connection was over, and we drove on. Hondeklip Bay. Dog Stone Bay. How did that name come about?

John M Smallberger explains it in A History of Copper Mining in Namaqualand. It seemed there once was a stone around here, a large boulder shaped like a dog. Then a bored traveller painted the stone red. Time passed and foul weather removed most of the paint but for small traces in the crevices of the stone. A prospector came by, looking for copper. He saw those remaining red paint spots, knocked off what was the ‘dog’s ear’ and sent it back to his employers for analysis.

There’s no record of that particular prospector’s later progress in life. He probably found himself another day job shortly afterwards.

We drove past a house where an old woman stood on her porch, keeping her head down and steadfastly ignoring us.

“Maybe she also has a fishing permit that needs checking,” I joked. But, really, fishing permits are a serious matter all along the SA coastline. You’re only a dumb townie if you joke about them.

We left Hondeklip Bay and drove past mining grounds that looked as though they had never seen a rehabilitation programme. On the Waterval– Kotzesrus road, we came upon a farm that sorely needed a break from the hundreds of sheep and goats that had grazed it bare. This place was crying out to become part of a national park for a millennium or three.

And then we were at Groen Rivier Mouth amidst a collection of Zozo dwellings, construction huts and steel igloos. Even the lighthouse was tatty and painted an uninspiring combination of dirty yellow and black. Gullies ran rich with empty beer bottles. Rotting caravans were parked within sight of the breakers. Their owners sat under shade cloth, eating and talking in low tones. As we drove past, sundry strips of netting twitched as hands moved them aside for a better view of us. Deliverance By The Sea.

But what a setting. We had driven in along the riverside, passing orderly ranks of grazing flamingos feeding in the lagoon. Never mind all the bonking tortoises along the way, this place also had amorous European bee-eaters lined up on telephone wires. The succulent Karoo vegetation led down to cliffs, beaches and rocky outcrops where dassies lived in their dozens. This place was just waiting to become another overdeveloped millionaires’ playground. Jet skis and time share and golf and white mischief and selling off-plan and high security walls and levies and such. Heaven on a schtick.

“Please let it be a national park one day,” I begged no one in particular.

We wanted to talk to some of the Groenrivier community, but how could we break the obvious ice? I thought I’d lure them out with my lost tourist act, cameras swinging from my neck, baseball cap flipped around, a look of dumb wonder on my face and my feet trudging aimlessly down the road. It’s the way I normally dress and behave, so it wasn’t much of an act.

It worked. Pretty soon, there was a rustling in the homesteads. Out came Hilda, her husband Buks and their son Jacques, who also went by the name of Catfish. Hilda asked me to take her picture. I obliged, although the sun was at a terrible angle for portraiture and I could do her face no justice.

They were among the 70-odd families – mostly from Garies in the hinterland who used the Groen Rivier Mouth as a weekend-party venue.

Then we met the only couple who had moved in permanently. John and Zanne McDonald walked up and introduced themselves. He was tall, with shaven head. She was short, with floppy hat. They were both friendly and invited us back to their spot.

Openly admitting to being ‘white squatters’, the McDonalds had been living at Groen Rivier Mouth for six years. They left the strait-laced confines of life in a mining town and now revelled in their higgledy-piggledy surroundings.

They were well organised, though, and had hooked themselves up with solar power and inverter batteries. Major rolling-power blackouts would be like tits on a bull to them.

“You want to watch the sport?” John offered. And although I was dying to do so (being media-free and travelling has its down side in the cricket season, I find), there was a job to be done. Which was basically to find out how the hell these folks had ended up squatting in Paradise.

“Let me show you something else,” said John, leading me into his house, where a giant lobster and all its magnificent appendages adorned the south wall.

“We get them bigger than that,” he said, unconsciously rubbing his tummy as if a well-presented Thermidor had just made its way down there. “We put limpets on a hook out just beyond the rocks. Then all we do is reel the lines in. You’d better have a net big enough to catch them all.”

Right. A great sea view on the right, cricket on telly to the left, cold beer in hand and a crayfish tail for supper. You poor bastards, I thought bitterly. Where’s mine?

We all sat down in their shaded porch. I saw a car pass slowly outside. Now who could that be? I moved a strip of netting out of the way for a better view. I was becoming a Groen Rivier Mouth local, after no more than 90 minutes in this place.

“And there are our pets,” said Zanne, pointing down at a colony of dassies on the rocks. The McDonalds fed them with apples, cabbages and carrots. Although unofficial, this was probably the healthiest McDonald’s outlet on the South African coastline.

“What if the government chases you from this place?” I asked. “You know you don’t really have a legal right to stay here.”

“We’ll just sneak back in again,” they all chimed – one big happy lobster-eating, beer-drinking, good-timing, dassie-watching family of gypsies living in dwellings in reduced circumstances with the happiest of hearts. We thanked them and drove off in search of life and lunch at the Namaqualand village of Garies.

“It’s Sunday – we’re closed,” said the grim-looking woman at the Garies Hotel, a rather tatty grande dame of an old country establishment.

“A small, quick drink at the bar, perhaps?” I ventured.

“It’s Sunday – we’re closed.” All right then.

We drove on to Bitterfontein and sat silently outside the local railway station for a few minutes, remembering our Port Nolloth buddy, Alf Wewege, who had met a ‘weekend darling’ from the Lonely Hearts pages of a farming magazine right here 30 years before. She’d looked a lot older than her photograph but had made up for it with a couple of bottles of mampoer, said Alf. So they had a passionate time at the Bitterfontein Hotel until her train arrived a few days later.

Continuing past Papendorp and Lutzville we came around a corner and our breathing simply stopped at the sight. The most extraordinary scene opened to our right, as the sun began to set over the ocean: a classic ‘beauteous bay’, shaped just perfectly, lined by an appropriately aged fish factory and punctuated at one end by a lighthouse in full working order, its beam flashing back and forth like comfort itself.

This was Doring Bay, an inlet that could have been part of the Scottish Hebrides. Except when you looked to the left and landwards at the motley collection of drab, mongrel homes.

“Jules, you know I’m no friend of developers,” I said.

“That I know,” she replied.

“For once, though, I have to say this place needs to be completely knocked down. Then they must decide on one classic seaboard style and get an honest developer up here. I’d be the first to buy property in Doring Bay.”

The Van Wyk family who ran Die Anker Guest House led us to their self-catering flat. We turned in early and lay on the bed watching the Doring Bay lighthouse beam play backwards and forwards across our curtains. After eight days on the West Coast, we were becoming accustomed to falling asleep to the sound of crashing waves.

The next morning, we corralled our filthy washing into one bag and made for the laundry at Strandfontein, a holiday-home village up the road.

My anxious notes that evening:

“Strandfontein is like a Stephen King novel, one where the whole town seems to be inhabited by vampires who sleep in their coffins by day. They are tended by housemaids who sit and laugh ghoulishly at strangers in the Laundromat.

“And there’s us and our sack of laundry in this zombie town. I ask the cabal of maids for help, but they look at me with stony eyes. And when I stalk off, they titter.

“But we are determined to wash these smelly clothes. So we drive down to a little shop by the beach and get new coins, washing powder and advice on how to use the machines. Very creepy. Must get out of here soon.”

As we drove out of Strandfontein, Jules looked back at the ocean.

“Stop.”

I pulled over and we both jumped out, taking turns with the binoculars. Not too far out at sea, a southern right whale breached, like a huge dancing giant, flinging itself above the horizon again and again. A private show for us – because no one else was looking …

Chapter 6: Elands Bay

Broke and Eating Bait

Autumn, 1997. The West Coast hamlet of Elands Bay wakes up to a foul-smelling invasion from the sea. It is D-Day for the West Coast rock lobster (some fools like me mistakenly call it crayfish) and thousands of them emerge from the depths, gasping in a crustaceous manner. For a local fisherman, who is legally allowed four tails a day, it’s a sin to see 2 000 tonnes of young and tender lobster arrive in this pathetic fashion. For the seafood-craving tourist who pays hundreds of rands to land one on his dinner plate, it’s equally shocking. Instead of temperamental chefs preparing the delicious tail, boiling and garnishing it and then presenting it with a flourish, massive front-end loaders are hauling piles of dying lobsters away to be dumped.

In the summer of 2002, about 1 200 tonnes of lobster come marching out at Elands Bay again, demanding oxygen. This time environmental officers, policemen, the army and the navy are called in. Even members of the public pitch in where they can. They save a hundred tonnes of lobster, rushing them to commercial holding tanks or flying them by helicopter out to more aerated parts of the sea before they die of exposure.

And back in the cities, we stare at the newspaper photographs of kreef piled up on the beaches. Our mouths water, and we find ourselves reaching for the mayonnaise sauce. Is it safe to eat a ‘walkout lobster’? Sometimes. And then sometimes not. Not good odds for the seafood lover.

What causes this mass walkout? Ironically enough, it all comes back to the upwelling, that glorious wind-driven process that forces nutrient-rich cold water up from the depths. It’s feeding-frenzy time for marine life and everyone along the food chain has a party. But as the upwelling matures, sometimes diatom blooms are born. They literally consume all the oxygen in the water as they decay, leaving the local sea life very short of breath.

If you go for a cyber walk through Internet World, somewhere near the corner of Loopy Canal and Crazy Street, you’ll find a whole bunch of sites that will tell you the ‘Red Tide’ comes from other quarters:

“And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea.” – Revelation 16:3.

The end is nigh. Prepare for your doom. That kind of stuff.

We were sitting down for supper at The Cabin Restaurant back in Doring Bay, discussing lobster matters. Owner Elize van Wyk was doing something magic with a kabeljou in the kitchen. Even though it was her husband Reynold’s 67th birthday, he was happy to join us and talk about West Coast life. Lobster, in particular. Kreef.

Outside, a kick-ass storm was lashing the West Coast like a fishwife beating a straying husband. Furious, wind-driven rain bulleted onto the windows. At sea, the whitecaps came galloping onto the beach. I shuddered with pure delight to be here, out of the storm. With something fishy happening in the kitchen and something cold to hand.

Reynold told us the story of the old canning factory down by the lighthouse.

“In the 1930s the North Bay Fishery Company set up its operations at Doring Bay,” he said. “To secure the land, they paid a certain Mr Bleeker to moor his canoe out in the middle of the bay and stay there for six months so that permanent residence could be claimed. They set up a corrugatediron-roofed factory and built about 20 houses for their workers – wood panelling inside, corrugated iron outside.

“Not one of these homes has been demolished. In some of them, however, the corrugated iron has completely rusted away and been replaced by brick. But mostly, the wood panelling inside has been retained.”

In those days, only poor folk ate rock lobster. The middle classes used them as bait. Ironically enough, the French were paying local fishing companies top franc for good tail. That’s probably why, to this day, the prices are still too rich for local tastes, and most lobster caught in South Africa is exported.

“We used to take them out from under the rocks, twist the tails off and use that for bait to catch hotnotsvis,” said Reynold. Then he leant over the table towards us, lowered his tone and added, in a conspiratorial whisper:

“But I, for one, have always loved eating kreef.” It sounded like dining on lobster was something you did privately back then, so the neighbours would not think you were ‘broke and eating bait’.

The Van Wyks arrived here from Lambert’s Bay in the mid-1950s. It was a time of plenty for the lobster industry. Everyone had a job.

“In fact, they brought in 500 Xhosas from the Transkei to help catch the kreef,” said Reynold. And then the resources were completely overfished in the quest for larger dividends for shareholders. And, of course, bigger bonuses for management types. Soon there were very few little tails wagging out from under the rocks. There was no work. But most of the 500 Transkeians stayed on in the hope of something happening.

In the 1980s, with the lobster industry on the rack, young people began filtering out of Doring Bay in search of a life somewhere else. Houses emptied and a stillness settled on the little cove again.

“We lost people and buying power,” said Reynold. “Things became petty. I once sold baby food to a coloured mother after one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and another shop reported me to the authorities. I received a stern warning from the magistrate. This small-town mentality …”

I was in too good a mood to climb further down the wormhole of lobster-town politics that evening, so I enquired after some West Coast biltong: the famous bokkoms. Reynold immediately brightened.

“Here,” he said, flourishing a bag of the stuff. “I’ve got a guy who vacuum-packs it for me.”

I have to say my first encounter with bokkoms was not as bad as the time I had to drink deer-foetus whisky in a Borneo bar with a bunch of oil workers, back in my bold and silly youth. But it wasn’t a highlight, either. It was tough and smelly and bony and not very nice at all.

There were still two chunks of this ominous, dark fish flesh in the packet. Jules and I sneaked a look at one another. What to do with the smelly stuff? We could definitely not use the bokkoms as car deodoriser. We could also not eat another piece. But nor could we just leave it there on the bar counter. Reynold would be deeply hurt. So we carried the bag of stinky fish with us to the dinner table, where the delightful Elize brought us firm-fleshed, fresh kabeljou and veggies. The bag of bokkoms lay reproachfully near the salt cellar. And was conveniently forgotten when we left the restaurant.

Walking out, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck tingling. I half-expected Reynold to come running up, saying:

“Guys, you forgot your bokkoms …”

The next day we left Doring Bay (after startling the Van Wyks by giving them each a warm, Jo’burg farewell hug) and headed off inland for another ‘tree house moment’. Let me explain. It’s when you develop an obsession with something obscure. An experience you want to capture and take back to your tree house and look at and polish when days are dark – and friends aren’t answering the phone.

So it was with the Heerenlogement, a seemingly obscure cave on the Trawal road about five rooibos tea farms from Doring Bay. This was the Holiday Inn of the 1700s. The Benbow Arms of the 1800s. A stopover for adventurers, crooks and prospectors. It had a freshwater spring and grazing on the hill slopes. It could be guarded. From the mouth of the Heerenlogement you could see forever.

The famous Oloff Bergh passed through here in 1682 on his way to the north in his search for copper fields. It must be noted that Oloff’s trusty guides (I don’t know if they were Bushmen, Strandlopers or Khoi) actually showed him the cave. Most Africa explorers of old had to be led to the sites they eventually discovered – a fact that carries its own strange irony.

Just more than a century later, the Heerenlogement hosted its most flamboyant guest, in the form of naturalist (hunter, endearing character, ‘soft touch’, baboon-lover, general show-off and possible philanderer) François le Vaillant. The Frenchman arrived in splendour, ostrich feather in his wide-brimmed hat, the scheming Chacma baboon Kees at his side and a retinue of Khoi and their wagons in his wake.

They stayed there for a week, eating dassies until they could take it no more. François le Vaillant’s name was scratched on the inside wall of the cave, along with others like Bergh and Andrew Geddes Bain. For my money, it’s the most significant, mysteriously misspelt graffiti in South Africa.

Lunchtime at Lambert’s Bay, and we trooped out to Bird Island to watch the gannets in their multitudes. Nearly 25 000 of these ‘mad geese’ were going through the entire gamut of gannet protocol: sky-pointing, bowing, preening, feather-nibbling, hovering and squawking as they landed and took off. Who wants to be a gannet air controller?

There’s an old West Coast yarn about the local form of capital punishment, back in the days of the guano hunters. You strapped a fish to the condemned man’s forehead and floated him out to sea, where a dim-witted diving gannet would gouge his brains out with his beak. We also heard (and this was, quite possibly, a true story) of a guy who drove his inflatable dinghy through a flock of rising gannets and was speared through the neck.

Several weeks after our October 2005 visit, the endangered gannets at Lambert’s Bay deserted Bird Island en masse. Conservationists confirmed that the exodus was provoked by seals attacking nesting birds at night. About 300 breeding gannets were killed within a few weeks. Seals had been reported attacking the birds at sea off the island. Studies show that up to 10 000 gannets may have died through seal predation between 1998 and 2002. But the seals had never attacked the (estimated) 11 000 pairs of nesting birds on shore, despite the presence of a growing seal colony on the island since 1985. An entire gannet-breeding season at Bird Island was lost, with gulls eating up the abandoned eggs. Bird Island gannets make up 14% of the world’s gannet population. The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism has since issued permits to shoot seals – mostly adolescent males – that attack the seabirds.

But the tales of the guano collectors on this vast coastline were the most gripping. At one stage, more than 500 competing guano boats were moored off Ichaboe Island, further north, off Namibia. A typical squabble between guano hunters would begin with someone tossing a rotten penguin egg at someone else. Then a live penguin would be hurled in anger. Then out would come the cutlasses and pistols. Artificial fertiliser arrived in the 1960s and the bottom fell out of the guano market. So to speak. And all the crazy men left the island.

After visiting the gannets, we returned to the mainland, fell on a lunch of fish and chips like wolves (those wolves, obviously, who eat fish and chips) and remembered a previous visit to this place, when the air was thick with the stench of fish being processed. We mentioned this distinctive aroma to restaurateur Isabel Burger, whose husband worked at the fish factory.

“That smell? That’s the smell of our money.”

The real smell of money around here lay in the ‘chips’ side of the fish-and-chips business. There were more potato farmers up here in the sandveld than you could shake a dipstick at. Those very farmers were having a potato convention in Elands Bay when we chugged into town and took up temporary lodgings at Die Bottergat (The Butter-bum).

“Pin a tail on me, call me a weasel,” Jules kept chanting (this, for those who don’t know, is her ‘I’m Very Impressed’ song) as she moved through the charming little traditional cottage. She raved over the succulent garden outside, the massive hearth inside, the quaint family photographs on the walls, the bottles of Voortrekker Inflammation Oil and Cape Dutch Chest Drops, the paraffin storm lanterns and the yellowwood cabinets. From the rafters hung bunches of dried flowers and tumbleweeds and mobiles and decorations made from sea-urchin shells and bits of motherof-pearl. We could picture happy families here, on rainy days, working away at these mobiles.

But why the name, we asked the caretaker, Hentie van Heerden.

“A Mr Van der Westhuizen bought the plot in the old days for next to nothing and built this cottage,” he said. “When his children inherited it, the place was worth a small fortune. They said they had landed ‘with our bums in the butter’. Hence the name.”

The waves at Elands Bay, Hentie said, did more than occasionally cough out tonnes of lobster.

“It’s a great surfing spot. The waves form a left-hand tube that spits you out in the general direction of Lambert’s Bay.” A left-hand tube? Mmm. As opposed to a right-hand pipe? The wondrous world of surf-speak still lay before us like a foreign country.

“How about some snoek, then?” suggested Jules, and off we went to the Elands Bay Hotel. On the porch, two ravenous surfers stood devouring large quantities of sandwiches, chips and coffee, gazing intently out at the waves. That left-hand tube thing again.

The snoek was fresh and firm and very tasty. It has always been my favourite fish, mainly because it has big bones that you can see and extract right away. None of that Sneaky-Pete, barely visible, skinny-bone shit that sticks in your craw and makes you search your own gullet with a mirror and tweezers in the dead of night. Snoek is honest eating. I like snoek.

We had questions for Celeste Kriel at Reception. Firstly, what happened to the tail of the fat hotel dog? Secondly, had she ever seen a snoek run?

“That’s Kisha. We’ve tried to put her on a diet but it doesn’t work. Her tail was bitten off in a fight, back in the days when she still could move around.

“I’ve seen a snoek run, believe me. In August the snoek ran for the first time in many years. You could not believe the excitement. I just had to drop everything and run to the beach and watch. The fishermen were hauling in snoek after snoek, singing and laughing as they worked. It brought tears to my eyes.”

We promised Celeste we’d return that evening for drinks at the bar. Heading out to Leipoldtville for the afternoon, Jules and I came across a couple of Xhosa fishermen and their slim pickings of hotnotsvis. Simon Mxeba and Themba Metu had come here more than 30 years before from the Transkei to fish – and simply stayed. They were far from home. Hentie told us earlier that when the Xhosa workers were first shipped over to the West Coast to begin their new careers as fishermen, they were taught to row the little skiffs in Verloren Vlei. Over the years, they became expert fishermen, plying the Atlantic shoreline off Elands Bay like salty sea dogs.

“For better or for worse, this is now our home,” they said. The West Coast had crept into their souls.

We continued past swathes of potato farms eating up the sandveld (and not in a nice way) into the quiet village of Leipoldtville, named for the father of C Louis Leipoldt, the legendary man of letters. And of cooking, as my travel mentor, the late Lawrence Green, writes. In On Wings of Fire, he says Leipoldt liked to eat hippo meat, dikkop stuffed with orange, breast of flamingo, lizard, squirrel, hedgehog, giraffe tongue and pickled swallow. Regular ‘critter cuisine’. I wonder what he would have thought of Reynold van Wyk’s bokkoms back at the bar in Doring Bay?

Chapter 7: Elands Bay to Paternoster

Home from the Sea

I’m at the top of a hill overlooking the sweep of Elands Bay, a sunset spot of note. I can see a pink mist of flamingos wheeling and turning towards the reed banks of Verloren Vlei, a clutch of surfers catching the last waves of the day and the Piketberg rising in jagged lilac relief on the far horizon. I can even see the Fisheries Compliance Officer in the distance, arriving at his tiny shack. He is probably the most closely-watched person in Elands Bay. Everyone always knows where the Fisheries Man is – at any time of the day or night.

Jules is not far away, deeply involved with a sandveld succulent. We’re going down to have a sundowner shortly, and all is well with our world.

Then my cellphone thrums like a beating heart and an SMS comes streaming through:

“It’s Teazers teazing time @ Teazers nationwide. Free entry 6/10 & 7/10 till 7pm. Book ur table. New girls call 084TEAZERS 2 view. Don’t speed 2 ur nearest branch.”

“Who was that?” asked Jules.

“It’s Teazers. They want me to come over for a lapdance.” I was on their mailing list. Somehow my business card had found its way into one of their clubs. It must have been while I was doing a story or something.

“No titty bars for you, young man. We’re going drinking,” said my stern yet wise wife.

We arrived at the Elands Bay Hotel in the midst of Happy Hour, where a potato farmers’ convention was in full swing. The potato heads all turned and looked at us as we arrived, saw we couldn’t possibly be potato industry inspectors and continued making small potato talk while watching the ubiquitous Paris Hilton on TV with the sound turned off and the Eagles singing ‘Hotel California’ very loudly on the sound system.

“You know, I sometimes worry about Paris,” I told Jules over the din. “When is that girl going to get a real job?”

Unbeknownst to us, there were serious issues at play here among the potato conventioneers.

In some places up here in the semi-desert, the water table had dropped by as much as 14 metres and was below sea level. This meant salt was being drawn through the soil and was turning the borehole water brackish.

In 2005 the Verloren Vlei – the most prominent wetland in the area – was in trouble. Water levels were sinking. The reason? Overextraction of water by the potato farmers.

An interviewee in an article in the Cape Times of May 2005 remarked that it was like “exporting water inside potato peels”.

“Everyone is losing,” said Rina Theron, Potato Farmer of the Year (2000). “The water and the sandveld are vanishing, the farmers are struggling, retailers are forcing us to accept prices below production cost and the middlemen are ripping off consumers.”

Even the potatoes themselves were losing. They had become prey to half a dozen malicious viruses.

“My fellow farmers fail to see the problems for what they are,” Rina continued, when Jules contacted her later. “When the water quality and quantity decline, they just say ‘Next winter the rains will be ample and the boreholes will fill up again.’ It’s gone beyond that now. We need to work on a holistic solution. Farmers need to plant fewer potatoes for a better price.”

No one mentioned the possibility of growing something else. Or doing something with the last vestiges of sandveld magic, which lay in the rearing shadow of the distant Piketberg, the huge blue gums and the old reed-thatched homes, in the tang of the sea overlaying the grace of vlei and water lilies.

After a brace of cold beers and Old Brown sherries served in no-nonsense wine glasses filled to the brim, Jules and I relaxed and became one with the pub. Kurt Petzer, the barman, told us that the locals used to come in here and shoot holes in the wall for target practice. But the pièce de résistance of the Elands Bay Hotel bar (won’t someone please give it a name?) was the prosthetic leg hanging from the ceiling. With a cap belonging to a Cape Stormers fan swinging jauntily from the toe.

“That belonged to a guy who used to drink here,” said Kurt. “He ran a tab at the bar, and if he couldn’t pay up he’d leave his leg behind as surety and take himself home in his wheelchair. Unfortunately he died without settling his tab, so the leg still hangs there. I don’t know what a second-hand false leg is worth these days.”

“One helluva conversation piece,” I said, and snuck in a little shot of Jack while Jules wasn’t looking.

We took the small two-person party back to our lodgings. The next morning I pushed the alarm button instead of the light switch and all hell broke loose in Die Bottergat. Fifteen minutes later we were on the road out of Elands Bay, in disgrace and sucking on tins of iced rooibos tea while nursing industrial-sized headaches. We passed the flamingos of Verloren Vlei amid much bickering, hooting, trumpeting and honking. The birds made a bit of a noise as well.

By mid-morning we were moving through our first densely developed coastal zone, a place called Dwarskersbos. Huge billboards selling dreams off-plan shouted down at us. “Own the Beach” vied with “Have a Whale of a Time” and “So Much to Do and So Much Time”, an interesting deviation from the last words uttered by Cecil John Rhodes on his deathbed.

By lunchtime we were gulping down snoek at the Laaiplek Hotel on the Berg River. I read to Jules from Lawrence Green’s On Wings of Fire, which in turn was quoting from the journal of a German traveller, Dr Martin Lichtenstein, who had discovered his first Bushman woman at the Berg River, skinning a hare:

“The greasy swarthiness of her skin, her clothing of animal hides, as well as the savage wildness of her looks and uncouth manner in which she handled the hare presented altogether a most disgusting spectacle. Now and then she cast a shy leer towards us.”

“Wethinks the man protests too much,” was our consensus of opinion. Perhaps, like many Africa travellers caught lusting after ‘a dusky maiden’, the good doctor had been away from the home fires too long. Besides, no one in living history – or on any of the shows on the Food Channel – has ever managed to skin a hare elegantly. Flaying wabbits is not easy on the eye.

After lunch, we drove over to Harbour Lights, a self-catering establishment owned and run by René Zamudio, whose family line ran rich with legends of the West Coast and beyond. René himself had a colourful sea history. He was regarded as a pioneer in the pelagic-fishing industry, having plied the waters from Guinea Bissau and Morocco to Australia and the North East Atlantic. And now, after three decades at sea, he had come home to Laaiplek. And he didn’t miss his life on the ocean for a moment.

“You must be here for the Stephan story,” said René, a tall man of 70 years, with eyes that constantly scanned the horizon in the way of a retired skipper.

Stephan? At that stage we had no idea what René was talking about. So we sat on the stoep outside our room and talked over a tin of cold rooibos tea. Just in front of us was moored a small lobster boat, with rafts of seabirds lazing on the jetties. Upriver lay the port, with all its fishing boats. Above us the gulls and terns cavorted, while kingfishers hovered on blurred wings over the water. We skipped nearly two centuries back in time, while Oom René read to us from various historical research papers he had collected. Much of the material came from a document called A History of the Stephan Family of the Western Cape, researched and written by iconic travel historian Eric Rosenthal back in 1955.

The Stephan family, originally from Germany, arrived in South Africa in the latter part of the 18th century and soon began trading with the farmers of the desolate West Coast. In exchange for grain and fish, they shipped in all manner of supplies for the isolated farming community. The ocean off the West Coast was a treasury of sea life. In those days, penguin eggs were ‘three bob to the hundred’ and lobster were abundant and used only for bait and feeding the poor. Penguin eggs, you’ll remember, were also the weapons of choice among battling guano hunters of the day.

How tastes had changed. Today, penguin tourism was more lucrative than penguin cuisine. But a lobster was another story, with some upmarket restaurants charging you R200 a tail or more.

René, whose father was also a sea captain in these parts, had been compiling research on the enterprising Stephans. He uncovered some poignant events, which began with the suicide of Captain Johan Daniel Stephan up at Hondeklip Bay.

According to reports, it took the family years to recover from the tragic death of the young skipper.

The most enthralling character in the Stephan clan turned out to be Oom Carel Stephan, born in 1843. As a young buck, he fell in love with Marie Rochier, whose parents farmed near the Berg River. They disapproved of Carel and would not give their permission for a marriage. So, in the true tradition of ‘the old days’, Marie went off and drowned herself in the farm dam. Out here in the Wuthering Heights atmosphere of the sandveld.

On that day, a heartbroken Carel swore he would never marry. He bought a condemned French barque called the Nerie, towed it to the mouth of the Berg River and made it his fortress, warehouse and home. From here he traded and managed the Stephan empire, seldom socialising. He ruled his work-force like the Godfather and called them “my children”.

Oom Carel kept a much-loved parrot up there in his floating quarters, like Captain Hook. Upon the bird’s demise, he went off to the local carpenter and ordered a tiny coffin to be made to fit the parrot. He ordered all his clerks to attend the funeral. The local missionary, who also enjoyed the patronage of Oom Carel, had to read the formal service, almost as though the parrot had been a human family member. But that was the West Coast in those days – you always expected the unexpected.

Oom Carel used a Khoi runner called Piet Danster to relay messages. Piet carried a little whip, which he would use on himself when he felt he was slowing down on the run. He would regularly embark on 80-km runs, cheerfully negotiating the routes between Stompneus Bay, Lambert’s Bay, Hopefield and Saldanha Bay.

Then came the Anglo-Boer War, and Boer general Manie Maritz rampaged up and down the West Coast with his flying commandos. They helped themselves to stores from the French barque, made their way north to Lambert’s Bay and fired a couple of shots at a British gunboat. This was to be the one and only ‘naval engagement’ of the Anglo-Boer War.

At nearby Vredenburg, the Boers looted shops and came away with knives, sweets and savouries. Then they hit the local hotel and one of the commandos got so jolly they had to leave him behind, snoring under the bar counter. He woke up with a special thirst the next morning, presumably surrounded by some very irritated burghers.

The Stephans had a store in Vredenburg. The cash from the store was hidden in a secret hole in the pulpit of the local church. No one thought to look there. Oom Carel, meanwhile, decided to sandbag his ship in anticipation of future attacks. Unfortunately, all that weight broke the old ship’s back, and she sank into shallow mud, scant metres from the hotel where we had enjoyed lunch and Dr Lichtenstein’s racy river memoirs. Oom Carel, one presumes, took up new lodgings on dry ground.

“Goodness,” I exclaimed, just as the sun was setting. “And where does your father fit into all this?”

“He worked for the Stephan brothers and did most of his salvage operations in a boat called the Luna,” said René, whose clan hailed from the French-Spanish border lands.

When a Portuguese mailboat, the Lisboa, went down on 24 October 1910, near Paternoster, it was René’s father and the Luna who went to her rescue. All 250 passengers survived; three crewmen drowned. The cargo consisted of barrels of olive oil, red wine and a number of fighting bulls, destined for the arenas of Lourenço Marques. Even the bulls were brought ashore, and they no doubt strengthened the bovine gene pool of the West Coast over the decades to come.

The wine, however, enjoyed another fate. Paternoster’s Italian fishing community went to ‘check up’ on the wine barrels that had washed ashore. After a week-long absence, their wives went to look for them. The fishermen were found in a cave, having ‘secured’ the casks of hearty Portuguese red. They were reportedly in a sorry, sorry state.

“Now,” René said the next morning. “Would you like to try some bokkoms?”

Jules and I had had a dodgy virgin experience with fish biltong back at Doring Bay, but we were hardy troupers on the road and willing to try again. So off we marched to bokkoms Lane, centre of the West Coast dried fish industry.

All along the river banks, there were piles of silver harders left to dry on poles after a good soaking in brine. Paul Marais, one of the last bokkoms barons of the river, said the money in his business was lousy. Not like in the past, when everyone on the farms ate bokkoms as part of their rations. Somewhere in the sheds, they were also packing snoek heads, which someone in this world regarded as a delicacy. Thank God no one asked me to snack on a snoek head.

“OK, are we going to do this bokkoms thing?” Jules nudged me in the car. We were driving towards a speciality shop near the harbour. I wasn’t keen at first, but once we’d bought a bag of the stuff and parked where no one could smell us, I tucked in. Unlike the tough little fish from Doring Bay, this lot were fleshy and yielding to a middle-aged tooth.

So there we sat within sight of the sea, eating bokkoms in the correct way by nibbling the flesh from the bone.

In fact, that evening I sat on the porch chatting to René, gamely chomping clumps of bokkoms and washing them down with gulps of Jack Daniels as the cormorants swooped over the boats on their winding way home upriver. Bliss by the water. Then my cellphone called and it was fellow writer, drinking partner and co-conspirator Pat Hopkins, on the line from a disreputable watering-hole in the south of Jo’burg. I told him about the Teazers SMS (just in case he had a moment to rush out and catch the early show) and he told me to go to Paternoster.

“Where you must visit the Panty Bar.”

I promised him that we would waste no time in getting there the next day …

Chapter 8: Velddrif to Cape Town

Going Coastal

I’m sitting on a jetty overlooking the Berg River at Velddrif waiting for the sun and feeling a tad peckish. Last night’s supper of bokkoms and bourbon is but a careless burp in the wind. I would really like Mrs Hildagonda Duckitt to appear live from the pages of Cape history and serve me breakfast. Boy, did this auntie know how to cook.

She was the Martha Stewart of the late Victorian era in the Cape, the lifestyle guru everyone listened to. And you always wanted to travel with her, because Mrs Duckitt came well stocked. For instance, when she visited a farm on the Berg River (recounted in the rarely found Hilda’s Diary of a Cape Housekeeper), her picnic hamper contained: “bread, butter, hard boiled eggs, corned breast or ribs of mutton; frikkadels, that is minced mutton, with bread-crumbs, spices, etc, made into little balls and fried – they are excellent for travelling”.

In the midst of this cosy pre-dawn cuisine dream, I watch the fishermen chug in and cheerfully begin unloading the night’s catch of harders, hotnotsvis and yellowtail. Is that a snoek before me, down in the hold? The fishermen are laughing and mocking one another and competing and singing softly while they work. A truly beautiful sight, and I’m getting ready for that sunrise so I can take postcard pictures of this lot and march off with my iconic images of the typical Cape fishermen bringing home the bounty from the sea.

In Fishermen of the Cape, Frank Robb says:

“The Cape Coloured fisherman is … a small man with a hardbitten face deep-etched by sea and sun and too often further ravaged by shoreside dissipations, with a mordant wit admirably expressed in the vivid ‘Capey’ dialect, and with a fish-wife who is a bold, flaunting harridan-witch with a gift for invective enabling her to hold her own in any slanging match.”

This quote – which would probably not win Robb any PC points in the New South Africa – was ferreted out by Lance van Sittert, writer of the excellent thesis Labour, Capital and the State in the St Helena Bay Fisheries (1856–1956). Robb continues:

“In South Africa too, fishermen have acquired a novelty value on a par with ‘Bushmen’ and other ‘primitives’ whose lives appear … intertwined with Nature. This association, in the case of fishing, sustains a thriving local tourist-, coffee-table publishing- and amateur art industry, dedicated to faithfully reproducing in curios, postcards, books, paintings and photographs the essentially timeless nature of fishing.”

What I think he’s saying is that the tourist industry – for example, outsiders in general and populist hacks like me – buys into the myth of the Cape fisherman without giving a shit about his real life, his real problems and the question of who puts food on the table when his quota is retracted or the fish don’t run.

There are also a couple of centuries of background to consider: alcohol abuse, labour abuse and the ever-present Company Store. You know how it goes. Work for me, here’s a tin shanty for you and your wife to make lots of little future fishermen in. Here’s a berth on a boat and a credit note for my shop nearby. If you run over your limit this month, don’t worry. We’ll write up a tab for you. And you’ll work forever to try to catch up with your debt to the Company Store. By the way, here’s some extremely cheap liquor to drink on that one day off when you’re not out at sea pulling in fish for me. Welcome to the family. Like any family, it will occasionally be hell on earth. But you will always get just enough to eat, just enough to exist on.

In this way, the employer’s money never leaves the homestead. It just circulates from the boss to the fisherman to the Company Store and back into the boss’s pocket again. And they’ve been doing it all over the world for centuries now.

But it wasn’t always a case of dronkverdriet (alcoholic melancholy) and hard times in the local fishing community. Robin Lees wrote the classic on the industry, called Fishing for Fortunes. She tells of the boom times of the late 1940s, when crews were making big money out at sea.

“For the first time in their lives, the fishermen had money to spend, money to squander as recklessly as they wished. They spent it on sweets and sometimes on shoes for their children; on smart clothes and shiny gadgets. They spent it in the new cinemas and shops that had opened in every village … and in the bars, peppermint liqueurs and expensive whiskies were ordered in large glasses instead of cheap wine by the gallon.” They would buy a brand new car, crash it and walk back to the dealership for another one. Happy days. Briefly.

In the St Helena Bay district, a mysterious tragedy played itself out – more than once. In 1936 nearly five dozen false killer whales beached themselves on the sands around the bay. It happened again in 1981, when 65 false killer whales came ashore. Of these, most were females, with worm encrustations around their ear holes.

One of the theories explaining the bizarre beachings is that the whales had erroneously swum up the deep Cape Submarine Canyon, which runs perpendicular to the coast and ends near St Helena Bay. But the real question is why, once beached, the whales persistently refused to return to the sea – even when they lay exposed and literally cooking under the hot sun.

“And let me tell you about another bloody tragedy,” I raved as we drove on. “It’s called Paternoster.”

Back in the 1980s, my late friend the photographer Herman Potgieter came here and shot classic images of fishermen’s cottages around Paternoster, a sleepy little village. These photographs stuck in my brain and, a decade later, lured me all this way to the West Coast. When I arrived, I was devastated. I could not find Herman’s cottages anywhere. Yuppie suburban rot had eaten most of the village. Prince Tourism had simply ridden up on his big white 4x4 horse and kissed Princess Paternoster to life.

“And then she immediately turned into a cane toad,” I said as we drove in from the east.

The bourgeoisie were still well represented in Paternoster, riding around in lycra-wrapped family packs on purple mountain bikes and sipping cappuccinos on the porches of their ‘fisherman-style’ shuttered homes amidst the faux seine nets and chintz.

Today the Somerset West Photo Club was out en masse, cheerily stalking the main beach and fish market in search of iconic shots – as I was – of those wizened old fishermen and their boats.

But we had been to Strandfontein. After the pre-Christmas ghostly sterility of Strandfontein, Paternoster was just fine. At least some fishermen still lived in the village among the moneyed encroachment of weekend warriors from Cape Town. At least the ‘Shoo Wah Brigade’, with their Land Rovers and their private-school kids and their red setters, had mostly built their homes in the West-Coast fisherman style.

“And there’s always the Panty Bar,” I exulted as we parked outside the Paternoster Hotel and walked in according to Pat Hopkins’s instructions. But we were early for opening time, so I read some Hopkins, Eccentric South Africa, to Jules:

“The crowded pub is decorated with such appalling taste that it takes on an appeal of its own. Signs like ‘Fuck the seals. Save the fishermen’ and ‘Traffic cops are proof that prostitutes do fall pregnant’ compete for space with panties and G-strings collected from honeymooning brides, plastic flowers, rubber breasts, penis candles …”

At Saldanha Bay we checked into a self-catering spot for mice that offered ‘generous duck frontage’. As we packed our nine million pieces of luggage into the tiny space, three dark-eyed ducks came waddling up for a scratch on the head. And maybe something from one of our tucker boxes. They blinked happily in that mindless smiley-beaky way that ducks have. I closed the sliding door on them. They began pecking insistently on the glass and then, to really get our attention, commenced to crap all over the show.

Jules and I had been room-trapped by possums in Tasmania, a brown hyena in Botswana and a crazed (I still think it was rabid) cat in Springbok. Three small ducks were not going to get the better of us. I went off to Management and requested their removal. Done.

We drove up to the top of a hill overlooking Saldanha Bay, where we encountered a man smoking the largest dagga spliff in the world. It looked like a giant steaming carrot wrapped in the day’s newspaper headlines and it seemed to make the bearer very happy as he weaved across the tracks of the Great Sishen – Saldanha Railway Line.

Saldanha Bay was first famous for its lovely guano, stashed on Mad Goose Island nearby. In the 1830s, Mad Goose Island was a blur of activity as the guano hunters bustled about, shovelling shit for a living.

The mainland settlement used to be a motley pile of impoverished fishermen’s shacks. Then the fishing industry discovered the bounty of the Benguela Current and the town grew. The South African Navy built a base there and, after drinking water was piped in from the Berg River, an exporting harbour was developed. And the millionaires’ yachts began arriving in the bay, on wings of craven canvas.

By lunchtime we were ensconced at The Slipway Restaurant down by the jetties. The dress code said “no overalls”, but you could smell the wealth as the moguls puttered in on skiffs from their ocean-going palaces to come and mingle with the common folk. Feeling pretty Greekish, we drank beer and ate a medley of snoek, hake, calamari and garlic mussels while Abba sang ‘Mamma Mia’.

We dozed off in the sun as beady-eyed gulls kept a watch over us. Then there was a slight commotion inside. A couple in their seventies lurched out of the restaurant as pissed as fowls. Their table heaved with empty wine bottles. She was on a collision course with a wall when her grinning partner – red face, mariner’s cap at jaunty angle – grabbed her elbow and steered her straight.

“Let me tell you something, buddy,” she roared at the old guy. “They won’t forget us here in a hurry.” Oh, please let that be us in 20 years’ time, we prayed.

Feeling reckless after a great session at the seafood trough, we headed off for a place called Tieties Bay, just for the drive. But we got sidetracked by a sign to Jacobs Bay. Wanna go there? I asked. Jules nodded and off we went.

We drove around a corner and found a colony of white mansions on the left. To the right was a perfect little bay, with five tiny fishing boats bobbing in the water like bathtub toys. A restaurant nestled into the rocks on the other side of the bay, dangerously close to the waterline. We went in. Perhaps there was ouzo on offer. Inside, we heard sales talk from the bar:

“Now onto that you add the commission, and the final figure you’re looking at is …” There was a table packed with brochures and what looked like completed deeds of sale. Jules picked up one of the flyers:

“Beachfront Properties. We sell: Pristine Properties, Development, Apartments, Homes, Plots with stunning beachfront views in all coastal regions of South Africa.”

“Let’s run away,” I muttered to my wife.

“Can I help you?” A large man with slate-grey eyes and a big aura approached.

“Are you the manager?” was all I could muster.

“No, I’m the owner. Wynand Odendaal’s the name.”

We explained ourselves. Couple on the road, writing a book on the coast, just arrived out of the blue, yadda yadda. Wynand Odendaal, clearly on a marketing high, expansively showed us around his restaurant and the clump of chalets outside at the back.

“Here’s the chapel. And here are my cards.” One said he was the CEO of Beachfront Properties. The other identified him as the pastor of Select Ministries. Pastor Odendaal had a big fish inside the restaurant, signing an offer to purchase the property for a lot of money. He told us how he’d made a killing here, but it was just another day at the office for him.

“In my church, I teach people how to make money God’s way,” he said. “In Jeremiah, it says ‘Come not with money. Come with faith and anointing.’ That’s what I do. You never use your own money – that’s the overemotional thing to do. Use the bank’s money. If they commit themselves to your project, you know it’s going to work.”

How had he become so successful, we wanted to know.

“Because I was once poor,” he said. “I own a Mercedes-Benz sports car but I’m not sentimental about it. If one of my missionaries wants to use it, he can. You know, the more I give, the more I get. It’s a nightmare,” he laughed.

What made him choose to go coastal?

“God spoke to me. He said Buy Beachfront.”

I have never been able to hide my emotions. My craggy old face is an open book. So the good pastor spotted my disbelief instantly, and in turn displayed just a small degree of ‘irk’.

“I know God’s voice.” And who were we, really, to argue? We were the people down there in the diesel bakkie, he was the guy in the big German car.

Why, we wanted to know, did so many people own second houses by the sea? Houses they hardly ever lived in?

“When the Saambou group collapsed at the Millennium, a lot of Afrikaners lost faith in banking,” said Wynand. “They put their money into property instead. Coastal property.” So these sad little manicured-yet-unpeopled seaside villages along the West Coast were all sound investments. We obviously had so much to learn.

As we drove off, Jules observed:

“In the old days of St Helena Bay, the rich whites lived up on the hill and the poor coloured fishermen lived next to the sea. Now it’s the other way around.”

There was no one to sell us tickets at the entrance to the Cape Columbine Nature Reserve, except for a stuffed penguin lurking on the desk inside the office, staring out at the Atlantic with glazed eyes. At the lighthouse we met up with a Mr Piet Steyn of the Somerset West Photo Club. We took him to our stuffed office penguin and he was delighted.

The next day (still no ducks in sight) we went to a resort called Club Mykonos for lunch and ran away in terror from the crowds and the prices and the uninterested waitresses. We stopped off at a wonderful spot called the West Coast Deli Shop and loaded up on oriental snacks, chilli-bite biltong and Mrs Ticklemouse’s chocolate crunch.

Our afternoon was spent driving through the glorious West Coast National Park. Thank God for this place up here, a piece of natural beauty preserved among the insane sprawl of uninhabited holiday mansions of Langebaan. More than 70 000 birds flew down to this lagoon from Russia every year, we were told. In fact, when we stopped at the Geelbek Information Centre in the park, two Russian women were wandering about inside, utterly entranced by the displays. Chewing on more Ticklemouse products, we proceeded to Kraal Bay, where the 117 000-year-old Footprints of Eve had been discovered. Two ancient beach bunnies draped on nearby rocks told us we could find the original footprints in the Cape Town Museum. So off we went …

Chapter 9: Cape Town

Life on Long Street

August 1997, the French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Hurricane Season in The Big Easy. It has been a night to remember. Early dinner on the balcony of the Café Royal (corner of St Peter and Royal): for me it’s Creole Barbecued Duck, served with red-pepper jelly and smoked-sausage jambalaya. Here, check out the menu. Might I suggest the Creole File Gumbo with red beans?

Down to the clubs on Bourbon (locals just call it ‘The Street’) for a little Zydeco swamp music, some blues and a peepshow along the way: “Topless! Bottomless! See ’em as God made ’em, folks!” yells the sidewalk barker outside Big Daddy’s Bar. A drive out to the legendary Tipitina’s to see the Neville Brothers singing those sweet Louisiana jailbird songs of our youth. One for the road back in the Quarter at the Old Absinthe House Bar where the ever-lovely, smiling Sunshine Corrigan dishes out late-night daiquiris, cigars and advice to the lonely and the lovelorn.

And now we’re chatting quietly in the enclosed garden of the Audubon Cottages in Dauphin Street among the banana trees. Soft rain is sifting down through the leaves, the jovial madness of the French Quarter is but a murmur beyond these walls as we sit, my friends and I, at peace with the world.

Eight long years later, I sensed the same wild street magic as I looked down from the balcony of a crazy backpacker establishment in Long Street, Cape Town. Could this be Bourbon Street Extension?

We blew into Cape Town from the West Coast on Monday 10 October (World Egg Day), feeling a little ragged around the edges. Sixteen intense days on the road and here we were at a BP Express filling-station convenience store outside Bloubergstrand, clutching Wild Bean cappuccinos, blueberry muffins and biscotti in celebration. The staff behind the counter were so chatty we thought they’d swallowed Ecstasy tablets for breakfast.

“Welcome to Cape Town,” our counter lady said. “And you must visit [insert forgettable name of venue here], they’ve got Real Animals! Lions! Cheetahs! And you can pat them, too!”

We blinked in alarm. Thanks, we will.

Caffeine drip in place, we drove into the City Bowl, causing at least 10 traffic incidents that would have occasioned major road rage back home in Johannesburg. The Capetonians were calm and forgiving. They didn’t lift that middle finger. No rotten penguin egg was tossed in anger.

We found our way to 255 Long Street, to an upstairs affair called Carnival Court. I had booked us into this establishment to get the feel of backpacker travel and of the legendary magic mile in general. At the top of a nearly vertical flight of stairs sat young Ntombi, who told us where to park our bakkie safely away from the little prying fingers of the street children.

Out on the street, we met the guardian of the block. The soft-spoken, lean Shamiel (Sam) Samson was a former Navy man and he looked the part.

“Welcome to my place,” he said earnestly. “There is no crime on my block. I sort things out myself.”

What about the infamous street children, we wanted to know.

“They’re like my kids,” he said. “And I see all the people on the street as my customers.”

Reassured, we commenced to drag our luggage up the stairs to our room. On the way, a young German backpacker mistook me for the manager and asked me some questions I couldn’t answer. Room No. 3 looked out over an alley, a barbed-wire rooftop (an anti-street-kid measure) and a slice of Long Street. The clean room was equipped with basic bed, desk, chair and cupboard. We lay back on the bed and observed the evocative shapes of the stains on the walls. I could see Antarctica and Greenland. Jules found Tristan de Cunha and the Azores.

“And if I close my left eye and turn my head slightly … there! I can see some of the Philippines,” she added. I hauled her up off the bed to go exploring the caverns of Carnival Court.

On our floor there was a foosball table, a multilingual library of tattered backpacker literature (take one, leave one), the Zanzi Bar, where tattooed youngsters played pool beside an old fireplace, and photographs of street children on the walls everywhere. The best feature of Carnival Court, the spot that took me right back to the Café Royal in New Orleans, was the filigreed metal balcony, which ran almost the full length of the block. From here, in good company and with something cold to hand, you could view Long Street in all its colour and intensity.

Charl Henning, the young night manager, was the guy who allowed us into Carnival Court. They did not usually take bookings from South Africans, but because of our writing mission they let us stay.

“This place used to be a bordello,” he said. “Our first backpacker customers four years ago were Japanese hippies who were into trance and pot. Then there was a Malaysian who slipped sleeping potions into everyone’s drinks and rifled through their rooms while they lay passed out. But there’s not much of a crusty element at Carnival Court any more, although some people still come in and try to book a room by the hour.”

Hookers and hustlers. That was the reputation of Long Street for as long as I can remember. I used to come play here in the clubs back in the 1980s, when the street was dark and dodgy and you rubbed shoulders with sailors and prostitutes.

“That’s changed,” said Charl. “Backpackers, bookshops and breakfast places have arrived.”

Angela Church, an attractive 22-year-old serving drinks at the Zanzi Bar, was a bit of a Sunshine Corrigan – a neighbourhood connoisseur.

“Long Street is a wild card,” she said. “All kinds of people walk down this street. I often see a guy who dresses up in 17th-century clothes, complete with ruffled shirt and velvet coat. There’s another fellow who comes around here who is amazingly well read but is homeless.”

Angela, a student of media, literature and film at the University of Cape Town, was doing a special study on street people.

“Humans are human because of their interaction with other people,” she said. “But street people are not seen in that context.”

I went out onto the balcony of the Zanzi Bar with my beer and sat down. Jules strolled out to join me and we began talking about our Shorelines trip. Were we really going to make it all the way around the coast of South Africa? More than eight weeks of wandering still awaited us.

“Me, I could just park here for months on end,” I said. We sat and eavesdropped on Long Street in the late afternoon. The peak-hour traffic flowed uphill, the packs of skateboarders weaved their way downhill and the aroma of a small dagga cigarette wafted up to us.

“Look!” Jules urged, pointing at the street below.

He was unmistakably Maasai. Tall, impossibly thin, like a long-legged heron, braided hair, shukka over the shoulders, fly whisk and milk gourd to hand, thousand-miler sandals on narrow feet. He came loping through the traffic on Long Street, eating up the road with Serengeti strides.

I flew down the stairs of the Carnival Court with my camera and found him shopping at the Long Street Superette. He clutched a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk under his arm and stood at the counter waiting his turn, on one leg.

“Jambo!” I said, unleashing my entire Swahili vocabulary in one breath.

“Habari!” he replied automatically, looking down at me with a smile. And then we switched to sign language.

“Hello strong man,” said a guy from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Maasai warrior. “Have a banana.” And then I simply somehow lost my Maasai.

I went outside and found Sam Samson.

“If you see that guy in the red tablecloth again, please come and tell me.” He said he would.

We later found out the Warrior of Long Street was Miyere Miyandazi, who had walked all the way from a village near Lake Naivasha in Kenya to Cape Town to protest against human-rights abuses against his tribe and the erosion of the Maasai culture in general.

Everyone in Cape Town seemed to know a little something about Miyere. He’d been spotted in the city and all around the Peninsula. He caused a special sensation down in Kalk Bay outside the Olympia Café, where the bicycle yuppies gather for baguettes and designer coffee. Miyere had stood on one leg for hours (it seemed like days to the customers) outside the café, simply staring in through the plate-glass window.

“And there’s a cow he visits regularly,” said Angela Church from behind the counter at the Zanzi Bar. “It’s somewhere up on Signal Hill.”

By the time our dinner guests arrived, I was in a joyous froth about Long Street. We had a leisurely curry supper across the road at Maharajah’s and ended the night with a party at the Long Street Bar, just below Carnival Court. The next morning, I telephoned one of our group, journalist Geoff Dalglish, to wake him up for his early-bird flight up to Jo’burg. How was he feeling?

“You’ll be hearing from my lawyers,” was his throaty reply. OK. So it had been a good party, then.

We had breakfast at a place called Lola’s, where a young girl sat in the far corner, sobbing gently into her pashmina. We went on a bookshop safari that took in eight great establishments on Long Street. Jules and I had to make constant stops at Room No. 3 to offload our new second-hand (I haven’t got my tongue around ‘pre-loved’ yet) purchases, and one could sense that the book vendors of Long Street were happy.

One of the shops was Clarke’s Books, an ancient establishment that had a creaky upstairs room lined floor to ceiling with the written word. I was instantly transported back to the village of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, the centre of the second-hand book universe.

We fell in with Cathy from Serendipity Bookshoppe, where I bought Tintin in Tibet for Jules, who unashamedly gave me a rather pleasant French kiss in front of everybody on Long Street. Right then, I felt the spirit of New Orleans rise up in my soul, and I thanked God for the fine wife he’d sent me.

I was so taken by the sensational snog that I left my credit card on Cathy’s desk.

Down a crooked alley of antique shops we found a place called Proseworthy and almost broke out the champagne on the spot. Nestled in amongst other works was a book for which we’d been hunting for more than a decade: Eugene Marais’s Road to the Waterberg and other Essays.

I wanted to pay but my credit card was absent.

“Ah, you’re the man they’re all looking for,” said Proseworthy’s Joanne. “Cathy from Serendipity has been calling all the way down the street after you. Your card’s with her.”

We continued to the Long Street Book Shop, where David Smith said:

“Ah. The Long Street tom-toms have been a-beating. I know about you and your card.”

“Yes,” I replied. “There’s a certain Jopie Kotze at a certain Springbok Lodge up north who also knows the card.” I bought Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary from David.

At Select Books, near our reach of Long Street, we met David McLennan, also known as ‘Mr Book Man’ by the street children.

“They know everything about this street,” he said. “A few months ago we had a problem with the plumbing at the back. We needed a long pipe to clear the blockage but had no idea where to get one quickly. I asked the street kids for help and within minutes they were back with the perfect tool.”

Within two days the book dealers of Long Street had become friends. They started giving us some of their books and magazines for free. It felt like we’d stumbled into a village in the middle of a big city.

We lunched at the Café Mozart in Church Street near Greenmarket Square, where waiters in red aprons bustled in and out of the kitchen with concoctions of food so beautiful that it seemed an awful shame to eat them. I had smoked-springbok salad with avocado and feta cheese. Jules had a Moroccan dish of poultry and roast vegetables and then we went off to shop for loud shirts and funky necklaces in this street that sounded just like a husky Tom Waits song.

There were Gabonese masks (try one on while they plait your hair into braids), World War I gas masks (Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – I think not), hippo teeth, stuffed voles, ships in bottles and a special on trumpets, there was a session at the Turkish Baths, an old-school haircut executed by Carmine at the candy-striped barber shop, carved doors from Mali, a shop called White Trash, hot snoek and slap chips, another chocolate expresso and then we found ourselves in the company of our friend the writer Pat Hopkins, drink in hand, back at the Long Street Bar. Hopkins was nearly robbed of all his possessions by the street kids on the way back to his digs on Greenmarket Square in the early hours. But he turned on them like an angry badger, so they wisely slunk back into the shadows.

The next morning, Jules and I did a dawn patrol past the sherbet-coloured homes of the Bo-Kaap as the suburb was waking up and packing kids off to school for the day. Bergies (street people) sat nursing their heads on the pavement, offering us some of their Cape Calypso Late Harvest for R10 a sip. Further along the road, a Palestinian flag snapped in the early-morning breeze, and the owner of the house said:

“We’ve got guests from the Gaza Strip.” And went back inside to chivvy her children along. I was starved and said so. We both agreed on greasy samoosas for breakfast. The man at the Biesmiellah Café said to wait 20 minutes and then he’d feed us the best samoosas in town. They were truly worth the wait.

At the Rose Corner Café the lady behind the counter sold us a Muslim cookbook called Boeka Treats (snacks to break the Ramadan fast with) and we returned to Long Street for more breakfast of the pepper-steak variety at the Halaal Pie Corner.

We darted past St George’s Cathedral to visit the flower sellers of Adderley Street. Jean Solomons, who had been flogging flowers here for 40 years in the family tradition, said she sold roses to “naughty men” on Fridays.

“On Mondays, I sell to the women, who like to take flowers to work.”

Scant metres from Carnival Court was Adult World on Long Street. Jules had never been to a porn shop in her life. We entered a universe where terms such as ‘cramming for the big one’, ‘sweet bullet of passion’ and ‘polar hump’ had their own special meanings.

“Some of our best clients are rugby players who like to dress each other up in frilly maids’ uniforms,” said the lady behind the counter, shocking me to the core. From the Currie Cup to the ‘C’ Cup. We walked out, just in time to see a laundry van come barrelling down Long Street bearing the slogan:

“Everyone has dirty laundry …”

Chapter 10: False Bay

Abalone Rangers

As a Cape fisherman, nothing really surprises Achmat Hendricks out on the inky waters of False Bay. But he’ll never forget the day ‘the Japanese’ came to sea with him.

“The first catch of the day is a little steentjie. One of the Japanese women on board takes a knife out of her bag and stabs it near the gills. I’ve never seen anyone kill a fish so fast. They don’t even take the scales off. They just fleck it open and start eating it raw.”

Achmat steers his boat out into open waters, his jaw having dropped at the sight of the ravenous guests falling like wolves on the fish. Didn’t they have enough breakfast? He realises this is no sight-seeing tour of the legendary place where the Atlantic and Indian oceans butt waves, with a little fishing demonstration thrown in for fun. This is an alfresco instant-sushi experience. These guys want to eat from the seas today – and by their ‘lean and hungry’ look, they plan on dining on both oceans.

“Then I catch an octopus. If you know your octopus, you’ll know it doesn’t die quick. I usually turn it inside out and it can sometimes take a whole day to die. This woman, this same woman, just bites it around the eye and it dies immediately. And then they eat it.”

Jules and I had come down to the Kalk Bay harbour on this, the twentieth day of our coastal trip. We had arranged to spend a morning on the Pelagus, a sleek, 7-metre offshore patrol boat run by the marine and coastal division of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT). These were the guys who made sure there would be enough to eat from the sea today – and tomorrow. By all accounts, it looked like an impossible job because of the pressure, both local and foreign, on our fish stocks around the coast. Everyone, it seemed, had jumped into a fishing trawler and was steaming towards “South Africa’s teeming seas,” as National Geographic magazine put it. Factory boats and long liners and ski boats and netters were all about, sucking up the stocks. They came from Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, Norway, Japan and other keen seafood-gobbling nations. A fish war was looming. Today, we were going on a patrol around False Bay and beyond to see what the poachers of crayfish and abalone were up to.

I had never been able to get excited about abalone (known in South Africa as perlemoen), simply because I’d never tasted one. To me, they were slimy ashtrays (the shells make great soap dishes and ashtrays and button pots) but to more than a billion Chinese people their flesh is ‘coveted cuisine’, prestigious wedding-feast side-dishes, prized aphrodisiacs and such. I mean, when is Viagra going to catch on over there? The sooner the better, I say. Then the pressure might just be off our rhinos, seahorses, sharks and perlemoen. Assorted bears and tigers too.

Like the feisty lobster, the abalone used to be poor folks’ food. The wandering Strandloper communities ate them 6 000 years ago and left shell middens all along the coast. In those days abalone were bigger than Texas steaks. Today, the Chinese market likes them bite-sized and box-shaped, neat little portions for high-status events.

And although South Africa steamed into the New Millennium on the tracks of sinking interest rates and unprecedented economic growth, it was still almost impossible for the lower-income groups of the country (meaning most of its citizens) to climb on that particular gravy train and benefit from it. In fact, most poor South Africans didn’t even know where the station was. As we travelled along the shoreline of the country, we heard how some individual wheeler-dealers palmed in millions simply by making a telephone call. Mainly, however, we heard how a family of five was struggling to live on a social grant of little more than the equivalent of US$100 a month. And whether you were a billionaire or a pauper, you paid the same prices at the store.

So, like the Namaqualanders who believed they had a right to their diamonds, the people of the southern coastline poached abalone day and night and sold them to the massive, infinitely voracious Chinese market. The natural stocks of abalone began to disappear. And I hadn’t even tasted one yet.

While we were waiting for the DEAT patrol boat, we chatted to Achmat Hendricks, who was preparing his gear for a day on the waves. His hair was tousled and his eyes were still half-lidded from slumber.

“I sleep on my boat,” he said. “I had a little domestic tiff with my wife – something about who earns more – and so I ended up living here. When the storms come to False Bay, the boat does bobble about, but that’s fine. The only problem I have is when I occasionally sleep at my daughter’s place on land – it makes me really giddy.” Achmat suffered from the well-known ‘disembarkation disease’.

The 58-year-old Achmat showed us the healed furrows of deep cuts on his fingers – the sign of a snoek fisherman who works with hand lines. But, as in all of Africa’s fishing waters, the traditional methods were giving way to the hi-tech ships and boats of first-world owners.

“The fast ski boats with their electronic fish finders are massacring everything here,” he said. “And as for the long liners – there is so much wastage that many of us make a small living by just following them and hauling out the dead fish in their wake.”

Jules and I walked down to the edge of the water, where two raggedy men were hanging gutted, headless snoek out to dry. One of them, David September, said the space under the cold, cement gutting table was his home.

“It’s where I lay my head every night,” he declared, grinning through marvellous gap teeth. “Ali [indicating his mate] and I are the Fish Fleckers of Kalk Bay.” He said it with great professional pride, and then added:

“Can we look after your bakkie while you’re gone?” I said fine.

“And, can we wash it for you, meneer?” OK then.

David September’s face creased around a wide smile:

“Plesier van die oggend! Kar was en oppas!” – The pleasure of the morning. To wash a car and look after it.

I thought that David September, who slept under a concrete table in a storm, could teach your classic Cape Town waitress, an impossibly superior form of life (with the exception of the Long Street variety), a thing or two about the service industry.

The Pelagus pulled up to the quay and Captain George Solomons, a kindly, solid-looking man with searching eyes, welcomed us on board. Leading us down to the galley, he introduced us to the chef, Robert Prinsloo, and offered us a five-star breakfast. On their longer, five-day trips, Robert also had the privilege of being the only crew member allowed a daily fresh-water shower – the rest had to make do with salty sea water.

“Just name it – we’ll prepare it for you.” The tempting aroma of fried bacon and eggs flowed through the galley, but we were mindful of seasickness and declined the feast on offer.

Joining us on the Pelagus was the DEAT marine inspector, Thembiso ‘Osborne’ Thela. The eight crew members, all dressed in orange overalls, were shy, mostly middle-aged gents who had been crewing together for years. We donned life vests and Captain Solomons said:

“My men are just as informed as I am – feel free to ask them anything.”

The day’s mission was to be a ‘visible policing presence’, to check on fishing permits and to keep a sharp look-out for abalone poachers and shark-fin hunters.

“Once we found a boat with 20 dead pregnant sharks on board,” said Captain Solomons. “We managed to cut 26 live babies from their bodies and released them into the waters. Maybe some of them made it.”

The captain left us in the able hands of Chief Engineer Billy Arnold, a nuggety Port Elizabeth man. Was this a dangerous job?

“Being linked to law enforcement makes us a target,” he said. “They’ve thrown stones at me, they’ve mugged me and they’ve shot at me. But we’re not afraid of these people. We’re doing a great job.”

We began cruising down to Cape Point. Jules and I had not packed our sea legs, and we could feel the curry supper from the night before planning a great escape from our bodies. But the story was spellbinding. Did his family ever come under threat from poachers?

“My family is far away,” Billy said. “Even so, I once got a panic call from my wife to say a group of poachers were out on my lawn, calmly having a braai.” It was a clear warning. We know where you live.

China spent so much cash on the abalone that the ‘alpha’ poachers had the best boats, the finest equipment and the biggest engines around. They took cellphones underwater in plastic bags and warned each other when boats such as the Pelagus approached – then they simply ditched the abalone and escaped.

“They send spies to come and see what equipment we’ve got so they can get faster stuff,” he said. This was particularly irksome to him, who took great pride in maintaining the boat’s twin 500-hp Rolls-Royce engines.

We approached Seal Island, the snack spot for the famous great white sharks of False Bay. Many years ago, I’d heard a legend about The Submarine, a shark so huge that they had to manufacture a massive hook especially for it. The hook was baited with ‘half a horse’ and lowered into the sea. After much tugging on the thick line, it came up – horseless and straight as a pin. Reflecting on that tale now, I realise I must have gleaned it from someone who was very drunk at the time.

However, the real angle to the great whites of False Bay is their ‘Air Jaws’ display as they leap through the air to catch seals, their favourite prey. And after hearing how seals ritually ‘de-gloved’ dear little jackass (aka African) penguins, unzipping their pelts from their quivering bodies, I was fully in the great white camp.

Stomachs heaving, Jules and I crawled up to the top deck and met Jerome Fouten, the Second Engineer. Jerome, who had also faced death in the course of his job, didn’t put such a brave face on the matter. We soon found out why.

“A while ago I was hijacked by three guys who blindfolded me, put me in the back of a car and drove me around for about 40 minutes,” he said. “By the time they stopped the vehicle, I was just able to see under the bottom of the blindfold. We were in an isolated, bushy area. One man had a gun. I knew what they were going to do. I elbowed him out of my way, his gun fell to the ground and I ran for my life.”

Jerome – younger than the rest of the crew – skippered the on-board hunter vessel, an inflatable dinghy. When they chased a suspect boat, it was invariably Jerome and the DEAT inspector at the sharp end of the quest.

“I’m not armed and I don’t get to wear a bullet-proof jacket,” he said. “I tell the poachers I’m just the taxi driver, they mustn’t shoot at me. Obviously, they don’t listen.”

We bumbled around the Pelagus feeling green, interviewing the working crew, who had all been victimised on land by the poacher communities. A large skiff loaded with happy smiles and a good catch came by. They saw my cameras and began to pose with their fish. Then the seas got serious. I managed to retch and take photographs at the same time. Jerome rescued Jules and pointed her to a cabin where she could lie down. I joined her a minute later. Most of the crew made concerned appearances at our door. Billy came and offered us a shot of Worcestershire sauce, “to settle the stomach”, and it seemed to work.

Then there was action of another kind. Two small boats had been spotted, one of them “suspicious” because it immediately made a run for it. The dinghy was winched down in a flash. Jerome and Osborne hopped in. Jerome pulled a blue balaclava over his head, immediately transforming himself into a rather ominous anonymous person, and they sped off in pursuit of the running boat.

We hauled ourselves up off our pallets and visited the captain.

“It’s not all cowboys and crooks out here,” he said. “Two weeks ago, we took a few divers out to release a whale that’d got tangled in lobster-fishing ropes. You see a thing like that, you really understand that whales are mammals – they’re not just big fish.

“After we freed it, the whale went down and came up again and slapped the sea with its tail before swimming off. I swear, it was saying ‘thank you’.”

A garlicky-chilli kind of aroma had risen from the inner depths of the Pelagus. We went down to the galley, where Robert Prinsloo stood in tears. Slicing onions can be a very sad business. What did the boys like to eat?

“Meat stews,” he said. “Seafood pizzas and steak. Sometimes I bake them a cake.” We left him to his weeping and went to see how the hunter boat was doing. Jerome and Osborne were back. The suspects had escaped.

We approached Simon’s Town. On the flanks of the mountain you could see some really wealthy homes.

“These people,” sighed Billy, his voice laced with more than a tinge of disgust. “Some nights, we moor here. And then they complain when we switch on anything more than navigation lights. It seems the rich find our little cabin lights very disturbing. They think they own everything.”

This left me with subversive thoughts. Billy and his mates get shot at for protecting our natural resources. They often have to arrest members of their own community for poaching – people who don’t really see an alternative way to earn money. And then the rich folks on the hillside – who should be grateful beyond measure – want them to dim their cabin lights. Preferably disappear after sundown. Hmm.

Another crisis had, in the meantime, snuck up on me. While I was trying to photograph the shoreline, something in my long Howitzer-type lens collapsed and was near death. I had to get to Cape Town fast. We thanked the chaps, paid the Fish Fleckers of Kalk Bay handsomely and sped off to the Mother City.

At a stop street in Bishopscourt, a black guy wearing a blonde wig, pink lipstick and a summer dress tried to flog us a joke book, speaking in a quavering, sex-kitty voice:

“Hi, my name is Portia.” Jules could not help mimicking his transvestite tones.

“Actually, I’m Sipho,” he answered in a deep voice and smiled. “I’m just trying to sell these funny things in a funny way.”

We bought one and darted through the traffic to the top of our beloved Long Street, where we handed the long lens in to Uncle Camera Doctor, who promised us he’d operate immediately. We thought we’d have lunch and wait for the patient to come out of theatre.

After our morning at sea, Cape Town lunchtime society found me stinky and unpresentable. A young waitress mouthed the word “scum” to her mate and gingerly handed me a menu. I grinned and ordered something in an avocado.

The next morning we heard some intriguing news. A scuba diver had gone missing off Miller’s Point near Simon’s Town the day before. He had apparently run out of oxygen while diving five metres down. Had he been left behind by a fleeing poacher boat? No one could say. But the three bags of perlemoen found near the dive site seemed to tell their own story …

Chapter 11: False Bay

Penguin Town

Abdullah Moses is a strapping 16-year-old in the year 1900, and it’s the time of the Anglo-Boer War. It is also a time of whaling, and where he lives in Simon’s Town, there is always great excitement when a fluke is spotted in False Bay.

The youngsters of his community are used as look-outs. They light a fire the minute they see any sign of whales. The whaling boat goes out to meet the giant. As soon as it is within striking distance, the boys on the cliffs put out their fires and wait.

One lovely day, the boys spy a whale out near Roman Rock. The whaler Monarch, skippered by a Mr Marnewal, is dispatched from Jaffer’s Bay. His harpoonist is the trusty Abdol Clark. The whale is harpooned and begins to tow the boat out towards the open sea. This is normal procedure.

Today, however, there is another, perplexing, obstacle. The wounded whale has a fiercely protective calf swimming alongside her. Every time the boat gets within striking distance of the mother whale, her calf intercedes. Finally Mr Marnewal himself, losing patience, spears the calf with his lance.

The next scene should have been filmed and shown to wannabe whalers all over the world for the next 100 years.

The dying calf begins to sink to the bottom of False Bay. The mother tries desperately to lift it back to the surface. As she realises the calf is dead, the records state (Abdullah Moses’s own words in Whaling in False Bay) that she “came up and gave a scream”.

The enraged whale rises out of the waters and charges the boat in grief-stricken fury. Mr Marnewal and his crew realise they’re at the doorstep of Hell, about to be shoved in by a vengeful whale. They try desperately to back the boat away. The whale bites the boat in half. The very lucky crew hang on to bits of the Monarch until a rescue boat arrives. The whale, meanwhile, has left False Bay …

I was reading this story to Jules on the porch of one of Cotton’s Cottages, a delightful self-catering establishment (fittingly named after a famous local harpooner) overlooking Simon’s Town on the kind of evening you want to preserve in aspic. Yachts in the bay, someone doing parking manoeuvres with the country’s brand-new Navy frigates, washing machine humming happily inside with three weeks’ grimy clobber, freshly picked lavender in the bedroom. Yet in this crepuscular moment just before nightfall, we both fell silent and sad as we pictured the whale hunt.

“Moving right along,” I said, not wanting to lapse into a sunset funk. “Did you know that Cotton’s Cottages lie on Paradise Road, which was where all the hookers used to live and work?”

We sipped at our gins and thought about that for a while. Conjured up the talk on the street, the old cars struggling up the hill, the frilly dresses, the snap-brimmed hats, the flash of thighs and the jazz music. Paradise Road. We cheered right up.

Simon’s Town, I found, had a two-tone history. Cobbled streets, charmingly preserved buildings, harbours, jetties, maritime business, bookshops, restaurants and a naval base all spoke of a former age of purposeful elegance. We walked the ‘Historic Mile’ of Simon’s Town where, in the late 1700s, young Horatio Nelson went nosing around while on shore leave from the HMS Badger.

Forget Cape Town, I say. For real action back in the 18th century, Simon’s Town seemed to be the hub of the sailing universe. All sorts of traffic flowed past here, from heavily laden spice ships to slavers to Men o’ War to privateers to grimy whalers to passenger vessels. All good business for the shopkeepers and tavern owners of Simon’s Town.

This was where, if you sat in the right corner and kept your ears open, you would hear all the news from east and west. Which countries were at war, what pirate was in town, which naval captain was out of favour with the Admiralty, who had been lost at sea in the latest shipwreck and were you attending the execution this afternoon? No? Then see you at the ball tomorrow night.

“Simon’s Town was more brilliant than the far larger Cape Town,” says Lawrence Green in Tavern of the Seas. “Huge wooden buildings were erected specially for the naval balls, and fireworks entertained those outside.”

We drove down to the Simon’s Town Historical Museum, formerly the Residency, a multistoreyed mansion containing snippets from False Bay’s past eras. One section displayed old World War II posters warning citizens to keep mum about troop and ship movements. Also:

“Save kitchen scraps for hens. Council will collect.”

“Would you like to see the dungeon?” came a disembodied voice from behind. I spun around in shock, to see a kindly lady in her middle years with a look of enquiry on her friendly face. Why not?

A young man called Alan Green took us downstairs to the Black Hole, where misbehaving prisoners used to be stripped naked and tossed in, without so much as a blanket or bucket. After up to three months in the Black Hole, they would end up “seriously touched”.

“The stench down here was horrible,” said Alan. “We used to allow tourists to go into the Black Hole, but we stopped. Too many people found it too deeply disturbing.”

Then Alan put me in the stocks, trapping my legs between two heavy pieces of wood. This was what they used to do with people who were drunk and disorderly in public around here.

“About time,” observed my wife dryly, as she saw me squirm uncomfortably in the throes of ‘participatory journalism’.

“They sat like this for eight hours,” said Alan. “No access to food, water or toilet facilities. A popular Sunday outing for a Simon’s Town family would be to come out here with all the rotten fruit and eggs [probably those damn stinky penguin eggs again] they could lay their hands on – and throw them at whoever was in the stocks.”

The litany of horrors in the dungeon continued. We saw marks on the walls that were made on the down-swing of the lead-tipped cat-o’-nine-tails when a man was whipped.

“After being recaptured, an escaped slave would be flogged and branded on the cheek. If he escaped again, his ears, the tip of his nose and his right hand would be cut off,” said Alan. “They stopped this practice because the sight of mutilated people walking down the road offended the people of Simon’s Town.

“Any child born to a slave woman belonged, of course, to the master. In one particular incident in 1831, a slave woman admitted under torture that she had murdered her baby. She had her breasts pulled off with red hot pincers and then she was ordered to be burnt to death.”

The authorities, in a rare display of ‘leniency’, changed her sentence, sewed her into a sack and dropped her into the deep blue sea. So it wasn’t all quadrilles and quaffing of fine wines around here in the heady old British Navy days. Someone who did have himself a bit of a party back in 1896 was one Edgar Wallace, author and founder-editor of my dear Rand Daily Mail. He arrived at the Simon’s Town clinic as a medical corps orderly and later wrote People; Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon:

“There was a compact little surgery, and in the hours when I was alone I experimented on myself with every drug. I took opium, morphia, cocaine (which made me laugh hysterically), chloroform, ether and Indian hemp. The morphia nearly killed me, but I suffered nothing from the others. And I had no desire to repeat the experiments.”

At the Heritage Museum near the naval dockyards we met Zainab ‘Patty’ Davidson. Her maiden name was Amlay. Patty’s husband Dick was having a snooze upstairs but she was happy to show us around her family home, which had been taken from the Amlays under apartheid legislation in 1975 and, 30 years later, was being reclaimed by the family.

“The Navy asked me to move in while the claim is being processed,” she said. “That’s to stop the vagrants from taking over.” The bottom storey of the house was a shrine to Simon’s Town’s Malay culture and history. Muslim wedding finery, items of Muslim faith and records of the arrival of the Sheik of Macassar were all on display.

“Before the forced removals, everyone had friends across the colour bar in Simon’s Town,” she said, without a hint of rancour. “We, my sister and I, even dared to sit in the Whites-only section of the local cinema. Other families found themselves in ludicrous situations, where fairer ones were classified white and the darker ones, coloured.”

How would she and Dick break their fast that evening, we asked, ever curious about culinary matters.

“We’ll have a couple of dates, some samoosas, then some soup and then I’m planning a cottage pie with vegetables, maybe some caramel-and-banana pudding afterwards,” Patty said, lingering lovingly on the description of each dish. “By the way, would you like to meet a ship builder from Norway?”

Next door was Marton Berg, who had a yacht in his front yard. He thought he might sell it. It wasn’t one of those suburban ‘scam boats’ that never hit the waters. This was a dinkum ocean-going vessel “made for two, but able to be sailed by one”. Marton had toyed with the idea of sailing it back to Norway.

“But now I’m not so sure. I’ll probably just fly over,” he said. We told him we were going to visit the penguin colony at nearby Boulders Beach.

“I think I may have helped start that colony back in the late seventies,” he said. “I took in a few penguins in False Bay that were covered in oil slick. I tried to return them to Robben Island, but they kept swimming back.”

Perhaps it was a case of cartoon overload, but as I sat on the rocks at Boulders Beach watching the clans of African penguins hopping about, they looked to me like short little waiters just before opening time at an open-air beachfront restaurant. You could fix a dishcloth onto their sloping shoulders, perhaps a sling-bag for tips and change about their necks. The Special of the Day could be displayed (in washable ink, of course) on their white chests and you could just tick off what you wanted. The lovable African penguin. Just don’t expect him to serve you the catch of the day without taking a small bite out of your dish.

Known as the ‘urban penguins’ of the Cape, this 4 000-strong colony has many natural enemies, not the least of which is man, who sometimes shows a barbaric tendency to want to barbecue a penguin on the beach. Back in the mid-1600s, however, penguins got a far rougher deal from the human race. Their eggs were part of the local diet. Penguins themselves were used as fuel to supply ship boilers. When people tried to eat a penguin, however, they invariably cursed the fishy meat as “foul fare”.

Today, those big tankers you see on the horizon are the main penguin killers. Whenever they spill oil, it spells potential death for these flightless birds.

Up at Boulders Beach Lodge – not short of penguin-themed logos – we met John ‘Chops’ Craig, a former Simon’s Town Citizen of the Year.

“Back in the eighties, someone came and asked me where the penguins were,” he said. “I said ‘What? There are no penguins in Simon’s Town.’

“A couple of days later I took my dog for a walk along the beach and thought I heard a walrus. Then I thought no, that sounds more like a donkey braying. Then I saw it was a breeding pair of penguins.” I asked him why everyone called him Chops. He said his mates had given him the nickname, but he wasn’t sure why.

“I may have been eating a chop at the time.”

For some reason, I thought this was the funniest thing I’d heard all day. When you’ve been in a world of torture, mutilation, penguin barbecues and forced removals (OK, there was also the little matter of Edgar Wallace’s drugged-up walkabout in the clinic), the story of Chops is welcome wit.

Inside the curio shop at the lodge, full of penguin tsatskes, I met Bob the Cat. Bob’s job was to comfort tourists who were missing their own cats back home. For this he received more Christmas cards than anyone else in town. But they were feeding him too much bacon under the table at breakfast, and his kidneys were giving him hell.

Still on the penguin trail, we drove out to Fish Hoek to see Hendrik ‘Van the Penguin Man’ van der Merwe. His wife had just passed away, but he was still willing to receive us in his little flat over Jimmy’s Sports Shop. When he’d retired from the Navy, Van found that he was bored.

“One day I saw some people throwing stones at a penguin on the beach. I chased them off, threw a shirt over the injured bird and took it to a vet. Its leg was broken. From that day, I was a part of the penguin world. I put on a uniform again and went to work every day, looking after the penguins.”

Van became world famous as the protector of the penguins on Boulders Beach.

“I had one penguin that always used to come along next to me, wherever I went,” he said. “One day I was talking to a little girl and I told the penguin to take her for a walk. The penguin took her hand, very gently, and off they strolled down the beach. After about 100 metres, he turned around and brought her back.”

“I even told a penguin to peck someone once,” he said, with a bashful grin. “And it did.”

He showed us his ‘penguin scars’.

“Here, look. One penguin even managed to break my wrist bone. He karate-chopped me with a flipper.” His upper torso was full of peck scars, where anxious, usually oil-polluted penguins had attacked him in pure panic while he was busy rescuing them.

Once he rescued 150 penguins after an oil spill, cleaned them up at his home and drove them off to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds in his Toyota Corolla.

“Every time I changed gears, I had to move a penguin out of the way. They were under my brake pedals, on my shoulders and staring out of all the windows. Basically giving the world a helluva show.”

National Parks took over the Boulders Beach area and Van found himself being eased out of the job he had created.

“I didn’t need a degree to tell when a penguin was sick or well. I also knew just how to pick them up. They would just relax in my arms,” he said. “I loved my years at Boulders. I still remember things like how the penguins ran up the beach one day when a killer whale came in close. I admire the fact that they mate for life – did you know that a penguin pines away if its partner dies?”

Driving back to Simon’s Town late that afternoon, we landed smack-dab in the middle of a traffic jam of enraptured motorists. They were all looking out at the bay, where a pod of whales had just arrived. And this time, there was no harpoon about to be unleashed …

Chapter 12: Cape Point

Famous Baboons

He sits on the surfboard gazing out at the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Point, the south-easter blowing his hair back into a fashionable wave that billows around a thoughtful face. What kind of a swell is happening out there today? What’s the dreaded undertow going to be like? How about the meaning of the universe? Where does that puzzling, enticing aroma of chocolate and hazelnut come from? And what is this itch between my toes?

This is Surfer Boss Baboon, one of the Cape Point Chacma gang, some of the smartest primates in existence. Right now, they have infiltrated a convoy of young human surfers and are casing the joint, so to speak. Sitting on VW Beetles, surfboard racks and rocks, strolling among the boys in baggies and their adoring girlfriends, this baboon troop resembles a squad of officious Customs men, clad in grey, eyes missing nothing, constantly assessing each detail of the line of cars and their contents. Looking for a gap.

Ah ha. One thoughtless youngster, possibly a little high on life and Indian hemp, leaves his Beetle unattended for a few seconds. That’s all Surfer Boss Baboon and his First Mate need. Quick as striking snakes (don’t say “snake” too loudly around a baboon) they dart into the little car and puff themselves up to twice their size, baring their fangs and barking loud warnings to the world at large.

With the astounded surfers at bay, standing around the vehicle saying things like “Radical” and “Shoo-wah” and “What the fuuuh” and “Aah man”, the two fearless raiders grab what they came for and make a break for it. First Mate enjoys a full loaf of sliced whole-wheat bread in a plastic bag by the seaside. Surfer Boss has a jar of tasty Nutella chocolate ’n hazelnut mix (for the munchies, of course), deftly removes the screw-top lid and slurps the lot down as he sits on the rocks above the road.

“Now if only they used more of their brain cells and got together,” said Jules as we watched this little interplay from a safe distance, “they could have made a whole bunch of sandwiches and had a proper picnic.”

In our years of travel together, Jules and I had seen many a baboon at play – it could also have been work – around the country.

One Sunday morning some years before, we were driving through the farming backwaters of the Waterberg in Limpopo Province. This was also the area where the great writer Eugene Marais came to study baboons just after World War I. A breathless silence hung in the air – the tractors and harvesters were stilled, the farmers were at worship and the sandy roads were empty.

Then, as we passed the mealie fields of a certain farm, we saw waves of movement and heard muffled barks followed by the cracking of cob from stem. The baboons of the Waterberg were busy raiding the farmer’s harvest while he and his family were singing hymns in church.

I can lay a faint claim to having been raised by a baboon during one stage of my life. Her name was Ounooi (loosely translated as ‘Old Maid’) and she lived in a huge syringa tree outside our home in Pretoria. Ounooi was connected to the base of the tree by a long length of chain, just to make sure she didn’t run off and throw her name away. The old girl loved me to bits (sometimes in an uncomfortably literal sense), and when I was four she used to cuddle me on sad days, solicitously picking nits and stuff out of my hair. However, when my Mom approached, Ounooi would fly into all manner of tantrums at the sight of her rival. I thought the cantankerous yet loving Ounooi was wonderful and a little bit scary. Inevitably, after a year or so, it became clear that the banshee baboon in the syringa would have to clear out so that my real mother could walk around the place without being snarled at.

The Cape Point baboons, every bit as fascinating and opportunistic as their northern brothers and sisters, eat a lot of seafood when there’s no Nutella to be had. With their hands and sharp teeth – incisors longer than a leopard’s – they prise limpets and mussels loose from rocks, snatch swimming crabs out of rock pools and eat pyjama-shark eggs. Some people say this brain food helps make them bold and cunning.

Primatologist Dr Dave Gaynor told us from his Karoo base in the town of Nieu-Bethesda that their high-protein diet possibly gave them an edge in the low-nutrient environment of the fynbos around Cape Point. He stopped short, however, of saying that seafood boosted their intelligence.

But studies done by Harvard University revealed that certain nutrients in seafood, specifically omega-3 fatty acids, appear to be necessary for human-brain development. The study looked at 135 human mothers and their infants, finding that the more fish the mothers had eaten during their second trimester of pregnancy, the better their infants did in tests when they were six months old. Now all the experts had to do was devise some intelligence tests for wild baboons on seafood diets. Maybe enter them in a local surfing competition.

Meanwhile, we sat out in blustery weather on the beach near Cape Point doing our own little study of Surfer Boss Baboon at sunset. Having cleaned out the Nutella container an hour before, the massive baboon seemed to be in a slump.

“Perhaps he’s just in the trough of a sugar spike,” observed Jules.

Smart baboons don’t live exclusively at Cape Point or in the Waterberg. I once saw photographs of a Chacma in a cowboy suit riding a Cape mountain zebra in a Wild West circus that was passing through the village of Cradock a long time ago. He looked happy and fully in charge of Equus zebra zebra.

Lawrence Green, equally taken with the Chacma, writes in Thunder on the Blaauwberg of baboons acting as shepherds, and doing a good job of it.

Bushmanland poet and magistrate WC Scully once came upon a baboon that carried the drinks in a country bar.

“But he did help himself to drinks occasionally,” he adds.

In Discovering Southern Africa, the travel writer TV Bulpin notes that Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape was once world-renowned for being the home of a working baboon.

“The signalman at Uitenhage railway station, James Wide, had lost both legs in an accident,” he says. “He trained a large baboon called Jack to work the points and to harness a collie dog to a trolley on the line and see that his master was conveyed to and from his cottage. The baboon’s method of working the signals was a famous spectacle. He pulled the levers, looking around to ensure that the correct signals had been moved and then watched the approaching train, catching the various offerings thrown to him by the passengers. For nine years he carried out his work without a mistake until his death in 1890.”

Someone else told us Jack earned the occasional half-bottle of Cape Smoke brandy for his troubles. There was a second famous baboon called Jack, and he became a South African Army mascot in France during World War I. Jack unfortunately lost a leg in action.

“The corporal who brought in the wounded baboon was greatly distressed,”writes Green. “He claimed that Jack had saved his life in Egypt by nursing him through an attack of dysentery. Private Jack went on saluting officers after he had been provided with a wooden leg. He took his seat with the soldiers in the mess and tapped his neighbour on the shoulder when he needed food or drink.”

Lawrence Green adds that the explorer and naturalist Sir Andrew Smith noticed that baboons “disliked ridicule”.

“An army officer was in the habit of teasing a chained baboon and laughing at it, and the baboon planned revenge,” says Green. “One morning when the officer was going on parade, wearing his smartest uniform, the baboon pelted him with mud specially prepared for the occasion. Whenever the officer passed after that incident, the baboon gave derisive barks of triumph.”

Your common or garden Muizenberg baboons were also famous scoundrels, infuriating British troops as far back as the 1790s, according to the writer Jose Burman in The False Bay Story.

“Whole regiments of baboons seemed to inhabit the hills and it was necessary to leave armed men permanently on guard in the barracks to thwart these cunning rascals,” he says. “In spite of constant vigilance, food, blankets and greatcoats were frequently stolen.”

The marauder-in-chief was one Father Murphy, nicknamed such because of his long grey hair and wise eyes. Sly as he was, Father Murphy was captured by the soldiers one day. But they had all become fans of the baboon – no one volunteered for firing squad duty. So they just gave him an all-round shave for punishment and let him run free back into the hills.

Which was quite traumatic for the old fellow. The rest of his troop took one look at their newly shorn patriarch and made to attack him. So Father Murphy threw his lot in with the soldiers of Simon’s Town and became a much-favoured regular in their barracks.

Jules and I wanted to see something of the 21st-century Simon’s Town baboons, so we – and a local couple and their children – spent time finding out about a project called Baboon Matters, formed by one Jenni Trethowan. Its work had turned the troublesome issue of fearless raiding primates into a tourism-friendly, job-creation asset.

Arriving at the monolithic Naval Flats, Jenni was told by one of her baboon monitors via cellphone that a character called Eric was “still not down”.

Although the human occupants of the flats were naval types, it was also the favoured roosting spot for the 34-strong Da Gama Park troop. I could immediately see why. The whole building was clad in breeze-blocks – perfect handholds for ninja baboons.

Jenni pointed out the burly Eric, the leader of the troop, loping around on the top rim of the building. But there was trouble in Monkeyville.

Eric had been shot in the leg a few months earlier. Normally he would have been darted and taken to the vet, but William the Usurper was angling to take over the troop and periodically indulged in infanticide. Jenni feared he would go on a killing spree if left alone in charge of the troop.

When the hidden baboon monitors gauged they would be able to move the troop, they began making their special call which, to baboons, means simply ‘move on’. Abruptly the baboons started to swarm down the building, an extraordinary sight. They came down swiftly. Like noisy ninjas.

A spat broke out among some of the males as they descended. Harry, always sidelined, clambered up a nearby building and refused to come down.

Eric the Leader scooped up as many of his own children as he could and ran off past us, bristling like an animated toilet brush. William the Usurper pursued him. Eric turned about and chased him right back, barking and shrieking insult, with loud encouragement from the females on the slopes of the hill.

People came out of the flats to see what was happening, and parents stood with protective arms furled around young children. But the baboons were completely oblivious to the bipeds.

Eventually the baboons began moving as a troop up into the fynbos hill. Behind them, moving slowly, were baboon monitors Enoch Sityi and Vuyisile Mayedwa, making a monotonous, low call.

The baboons were not scared of them, but just strolled away casually.

Not all of the troop were named, only the ‘role players’ and a few others with distinctive features, explained Jenni.

Apart from Eric and William, there was young Anakin with his intense stare, curious, non-confrontational Quizzicat, Shannon with her dog-bite scar, and Nosketi. It was Enoch and Vuyisile who gave him his name. Nosketi means ‘hen-pecked husband’ in Xhosa. Despite this baboon’s immense size and perfect physique, he was the first to duck out of any confrontation.

Two of the young girls in our party sat on the ground. Shannon the baboon peered quizzically at them under her heavy brows.

They shared a moment of mutual recognition and regard.

“If they see no threat, they relax,” said Jenni.

Jenni and nine baboon monitors were all shareholders in Baboon Matters, and they watched over three troops, including this one – a total of about 100 baboons.

If the baboons were not kept away from the suburbs by the monitors, they would spend all day trying to raid houses. One loaf of bread is equal to the calories they would gain from an entire day of foraging in the wild. Heaven knows how many roots and shrubs match up to a jar of Nutella.

So the rewards were great for a successful raid, but baboons were astute when it came to weighing up energy needs.

“If they’re far enough away from suburbs, it would waste energy to go all the way back,” said Jenni. “They would then rather concentrate on the 150 species of plants and bulbs, scorpions, grasshoppers and beetles that make up their normal diet.”

The idea was that residents would pay a small amount to have baboons taken away from the suburbs, but that plan was still being formulated.

The human-baboon dynamic was slowly changing, Jenni said.

“In 1999, 21 baboons were killed in this area and there was little or no outcry. But in 2005, five or six baboons were shot, and the public response was far more vocal.”

Most of the visitors Jenni had taken on her baboon walks through the fynbos were locals, but there were a growing number of foreign visitors.

“A British journalist who wasn’t expecting much from the experience told me this was the second-best primate experience she’d ever had,” said Jenni. “It was topped only by her encounter with mountain gorillas in Rwanda.”

We chatted to the monitors. Enoch came from Alice in the Eastern Cape, and Vuyisile from Adelaide. Both lived in nearby Masiphumelele Township.

Enoch said he started doing this job “because one day I want my sons to see baboons”.

The funniest thing, they said, was that while they spent their days slow-chasing the baboons away from civilisation, at five o’ clock every afternoon, the tables were turned. The baboons made a special ‘going-away’ sound, a soft ohohohoh, and gently ‘chased’ the monitors back down the hill back to Simon’s Town. Hey guys. It’s time to knock off now.

My all-time second-favourite baboon is the legendary Kees, constant companion of the colourful French explorer-naturalist François le Vaillant, whom you last saw up at the Heerenlogement on the way to the Richtersveld.

As much as he loved the larger-than-life Kees (an egg-eating poser without equal), he described his pet (and the rest of the species) as “intractable, lascivious, gluttonous, thievish, revengeful and passionate,” adding that “if they have not yet learnt the art of lying, it is only because they do not choose to talk”.

And my darling Ounooi?

Well, she was donated to a park next to the Bapsfontein Resort east of Pretoria, where she spent the rest of her days being admired by country-and-western-music fans and listening to Willie Nelson cover songs about lost love and the cowboy code of life …

Chapter 13: Masiphumelele to Pringle Bay

Swamp Music

Saturday is barbecue day on the teeming streets of Masiphumelele Township, just over the hill from Simon’s Town.

The avenues are fogged with braai smoke as the aromas of beef steak and lamb chops and home-made marinades fill the air. Cheerful township women are roasting their mealie cobs and meat on makeshift sidewalk grilles while kwaito music blares out from the open windows of battered cars as young men in dark shades pass slowly by. An old fellow in a red jersey three sizes too big for him comes ambling up, waving a bowl containing six hard-boiled eggs and two canisters of Aromat in our faces.

“Cheap snacks. Cheap snacks. One rand, one egg. Spice for free.”

Like a schooner in full sail through this cheerful sea of township road life is our escort, Charlotte Swartbooi. A busload of tourists comes trundling by, and for once I feel what it is like to be on the ‘zoo side’ of life. I see faces peering out from behind tinted glass, no doubt listening to the bored intonations of their tour guide as they sit in air-conditioned sterility. Too scared to venture forth and shake a township dweller’s hand. Why did they even bother coming here?

“The people don’t like it when tourists do that,” said Charlotte. “It’s better when they walk through the township and meet us.”

Charlotte, one of the community leaders in this hard-scrabble enclave of about 24 000 souls, had an open smiling face and wore a bright red turban on her head. Her husband had died in a car accident some years back, leaving her with three children and a township shack. She was making ends meet by showing visitors how this mainly Xhosa settlement survived.

“Not everyone passes through here in sealed buses,” she laughed. “A lot of people – many of them foreigners – have donated what they could to Masiphumelele.” She took us to the Bicycle Empowerment Network, operating from a set of containers off the main road.

“We get old and broken bicycles from England, Switzerland and Germany,”she said. “And they are fixed here and sold cheaply to the locals.”

As we walked, we could sense something close to an air of contentment in Success Township. Maybe it was the weekend starting to wash over us, but we also detected a mood of determination and an ethos of self-help, something we often found to be in short supply in the sprawling, dormitory ‘locations’ that accompany almost every town in South Africa.

We passed a European-funded clinic where people were tested for AIDS and, if found positive, were offered free antiretroviral treatment.

There was an orphanage for AIDS children, a vegetable-garden project for the township women and a Habitat For Humanity home-building project, sponsored in part by an American couple who had visited Masiphumelele. This was the best kind of community help – where individuals made carefully monitored direct contributions that never saw the inside of a Big Wig’s back pocket. Those Big Wigs with their bottomless back pockets were killing Africa.

A man with dreadlocks crossed the road to speak confidentially to Charlotte, smiled at us and walked off.

“He said to tell you how friendly the Xhosa people are,” she said. “How we should introduce you to more people who will demonstrate this to you.”

I walked into a shebeen where two guys were playing pool badly. I was dying to put down my cameras, order up a beer and a double Jack and teach these fellows the finer points of ‘sticks’. And they seemed up for it – until Jules and Charlotte walked in. The pool players bristled with hostility.

“No, it’s not you,” Charlotte assured me. “That’s a men-only club. No girls allowed.”

We were all, however, very welcome at our next stop, the Maranatha Kiddies Club Beauty Contest in a tiny church nearby. A woman was singing a feverish hymn, accompanied by a serious-looking man who played the Roland electric organ with the jazz-cool of a Paris club musician. The reverend’s wife was far from detached as she made the opening speech to the tiny competitors and their families crowding the room:

“The children Hallelujah! are very important Hallelujah! They may be small Hallelujah! but they are like the postage stamp Hallelujah! which makes the letter go to its destination Hallelujah! Help your mothers and fathers at home Hallelujah! and always stick to the job. Hallelujah.”

The beauty contest turned into a dance extravaganza and a stunning display of vocal talent as a group of teenage singers had a full go at the harmonies on offer in the songs. And then – before saying goodbye – Charlotte took us to The Wetland. It was more like The Swamp of Despond.

A natural drainage stream flowed out of a culvert between ramshackle dwellings looped and laced with electricity cables – deadly spaghetti. Children played in the muck, others clambered over the rusty hulk of a car wreck as if it were the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. This wetland – which was now a breeding ground for diarrhoea and typhoid – was no water meadow in anyone’s language.

Two days later, Jules and I were on the opposite side of the huge False Bay at another wetland – a more upmarket one – right in the centre of the idyllic coastal village of Pringle Bay.

A few centuries ago, this stretch of coast was occupied by the drosters, gangs of runaway slaves and general deserters from the Cape rule of law that had been set up by those fine, civilised colonial masters who chopped off noses and sliced off breasts and such as part of their penal system.

The drosters lived in caves at nearby Hangklip, surviving on shellfish, small game and stolen cattle in a hog heaven of thick melkbos populated by steenbok, wild cat, greywing partridge and the occasional leopard. The history books, at this stage, do not mention the presence of our friend, Mr Chacma. Maybe the baboons moved in later.

Back in the early 1900s, Oom Stoffel Albertyn and his wife would head out from Bot River to Hangklip for their annual holiday. The drosters had long been cleared out and were now consigned to the roles of bogey man in children’s bedtime stories. The Albertyns loaded up with “a cask of good wine, coffee, a bag of boeremeel for bread, eight airtight paraffin tins of boerebeskuit and plenty of ox-biltong,” says Lawrence Green in South African Beachcombers.

The visiting family lived well at Hangklip. Oom Stoffel sometimes shot a grysbok for meat, or his wife made stews from fresh-water terrapins (good only if you remove the stink gland first). They netted springers and mullet in the shallows, fished for red steenbras, geelbek and tuna, spearing dozens of soles around Pringle Bay. The odd sea turtle that strayed up the beach was swiftly dispatched to Mrs Albertyn’s vast cooking pot.

They plundered the washed-up cargoes of wrecked ships and hunted for treasure. “Those were the good old days,” said Oom Stoffel. “Later on, the place opened up and there were all sorts of restrictions. We really knew freedom. We took the cream off the milk.”

We met Jenny Berrisford, who ran an indigenous-plant landscape company and a B & B overlooking the mouth of the Buffels River in Pringle Bay. She was a child when she first came here with her father.

He was besotted with the place back before World War II. There was no road in those days. He loved outdoor adventures and would hike all the way there from nearby Gordon’s Bay. Others came by boat.

As her regal Persian cat Misty purred quietly next to her on the sofa, Jenny recalled the old days.

“I still remember the man who used to come around in his little truck and sell milk from the can, and best of all, the old corrugated-iron shop next to Stony Point Whaling Station at Betty’s Bay. bokkoms hung from the roof, and the locals bought salt and sugar in newspaper twists, measured out from huge sacks. I remember my dad telling me this was history, and we wouldn’t see this kind of thing again.”

Back in the 1950s there were no more than six houses in Pringle Bay, Jenny remembered.

Pringle Bay had only become accessible after a road was built by Italian prisoners of war in the 1940s. It didn’t take long for people to see the potential of the place, and it became what many believed to be South Africa’s first planned beachfront holiday development, called Hangklip Beach Estates.

“This is where the rot started,” the more jaundiced amongst us commented.

“Somewhere around here I still have a hand-drawn map from 1946,” said Jenny, scrabbling around in the lounge. “They sold property in Rooi Els, Pringle Bay and Betty’s Bay.”

The erven were large – about 1 500 square metres – and there was a building code involving natural rock, fawn tones and roofs of slate or thatch so that they would blend into the sandstone and fynbos. One or two still remained in Pringle Bay. They contained three bedrooms with a big old fireplace, somehow reminiscent of old Natal Parks Board cottages in the Drakensberg. They did not shout, “Look how bloody rich I am! Aren’t I just too bloody marvellous for words! Look at my bloody expensive new car! Now look at my wonderful golf swing!” They were modest and middle class and, observed in the 20/20 light of hindsight, just perfect.

Decades later, Hangklip Beach Estates went bankrupt. Several property developers took aerial pictures of the bays and chopped them up into little stands for resale, with no regard for natural drainage or seepage, something of an eco-disaster, since most of the area was an estuarine wetland.

And, unfortunately, the old building code was never written into the title deeds, so the architecture had become self-centred and incoherent in the persistent style of many South African coastal towns.

Jules and I drove through Pringle Bay, goggling at the beauty of the natural setting and at the wayward architecture. Nestled between the spectacular Cape folded mountains and a sculpted coastline thick with fynbos were houses in the style of Road Builder Igloo, Busking Tuscan, Brakpan Baroque and Apartheid Adobe.

Reassuringly, there were also a few Cape Cod-style houses. They looked superb in the morning light.

Jenny had told us, with a mischievous grin on her face, that a tour guide in nearby Kleinmond once offered visits to the “interesting and unusual architecture in Betty’s Bay, Pringle Bay and Kleinmond”.

Many of the houses, we were startled to find, were surrounded by wetland sedges and bulrushes. Annemarie Breytenbach of the Pringle Bay Eco-Centre told us that developers in the 1980s and 1990s would shamelessly sell ‘wet plots’ and ‘dry plots’ – the former being the cheaper option. Buyers would simply fill up the little vleis with building rubble, drain away the water, and plant kikuyu. The lowland fynbos with all its frogs and creatures was under serious attack, she said.

It was still going on, to some extent. We had a look at a property that was being readied for the construction of a small shopping centre. It was undoubtedly located in the remains of a wetland, and the water was being channelled away. “But this is a wetland,” we spluttered. “Oh, no, only a partial wetland,” offered a resident airily. “Anyway, it won’t be when the water is drained.”

Still, the place was beautiful. Populations of endangered African black oystercatchers were thriving on the beaches. Jenny said she often saw grey rhebok, porcupines, civets, mongooses, klipspringers, steenbok and otters in wet places. Between Kleinmond and Bot River, a herd of wild horses ran free.

Up in the hills were dassies and black eagles. There was great excitement recently when a resident found two leopards fighting on his lawn.

But the real animal action over here came from the hills above, in the form of the local baboon troops. They haunted Pringle Bay. A local newspaper advertised two different cleaning services that would come and mop up homes after baboon raids. One was, inevitably, called Monkey Business.

All the houses in the village had been baboon-proofed. The little general dealer down the road had a sign saying that it was open and that the door was only closed to baboons. A guy called Rob, who ran the shop, served us a couple of wondrous meat pies and said the baboons often snuck into the shop while his back was turned.

“They seem to go for the avocadoes, the potato chips and the bread,” he said. “But my new security door has them stumped.”

For how long, we wondered. These crafty baboons had already learnt how to lift sliding doors off their tracks and remove them so the glass didn’t shatter. They opened doors in packs of two: one hung from the handle while the other took a flying leap at the door frame. They could open fridges and stoves with ease. They were probably one good Food Channel programme away from baking bread.

Don’t laugh. Freya Stennett, founder and owner of the Ticklemouse biscuit factory in Pringle Bay, told us one of the best baboon stories ever:

“My husband, son-in-law and I were busy packaging rusks around the table one day. We were pretty intent on what we were doing: one was cutting, one was packing and the other one was labelling. My son-in-law Luther kept passing the packages of rusks to his left. Suddenly, something made us all look up at once.

“There, sitting next to Luther, as quiet as anything, was a huge male baboon. He had joined the production line. He would take a package, open it, remove a rusk, put it into his mouth and place the rest of the package on a growing pile nearby.”

Insert a suitably loud scene of pandemonium here, with departing baboon stopping just long enough to lay claim to his own pack of Ticklemouse rusks. And who could blame him? I certainly could not resist anything baked in that little factory in Pringle Bay.

The baboons had no respect for human females. The women of Pringle Bay said the beta males were the biggest criminals in town. They had already been kicked out of their troops and were behaving like typical street gangsters.

“I once walked in on a very skinny baboon eating bananas I had just bought for a batch of biscuits,” said Freya. “Every time I took a step towards him, he growled at me. So I had to stand there and watch him eat 7 kilograms of bananas. He was quite round when he finally strolled out.”

We joined some of the locals at Barbeyond, a watering-hole and restaurant where the conversation drifted to people for whom status symbols, designer clothes, décor and expensive cars were important.

“We used to be those people,” said Nicola Lloyd, an estate agent. “We’ve seen it, done it and it doesn’t impress us any more. How many chairs can you sit on? It’s the quality and genuineness of the people out here that really attracted me.”

Great sentiments. But it still failed to explain why she and her mates were all waltzing around in Day Glo plastic clogs that came in a selection of “slurpy colours”, from lime green to fire-engine red to Barbie pink.

“Oh,” she laughed. “These are Crocs. They’ve got good grip, never slip, massage the feet and can be rinsed off after walking in the sea. People who spend a lot of time on their feet, like chefs and waiters, swear by them. They are so comfortable, once you’ve tried them, you’ll be hooked.”

Perhaps the real reason everyone wore lurid, laid-back shoes in Pringle Bay lies with the local legend that many of the long-time residents were fond of a cocktail of gin steeped in marijuana – to be drunk behind closed doors every morning. Which was definitely one way of dealing with the baboon problem …

Chapter 14: Walker Bay

Mercury Rising

“My hand with der cold is so blue,

Der weather it ain’t so hot too,

Der wind she just blow, and der snow she just snow

Ikke hval, ikke hval, ikke hval (No whales, no whales, no whales).

Der gunners have fell in der drink,

Der guns just shoot bullshit I think,

Dey spin us a line, dis would be a gold mine,

Ikke hval, ikke hval, ikke hval.”

‘Ballad of the Frustrated Whaler’ by Gordon Keen, as quoted in To Catch a Whale by Terence Wise.

I once found the work of Terence Wise in a little bookshop somewhere in the Karoo. Although I’d never been to sea in a factory ship all a-slip with whale gore and blubber and steaming guts, Terence’s tome took me right into the belly of the beast – so to speak.

It’s one of those old-school books that glorify life at sea with good mates and a ‘manly job’, complete with anecdotes of alcohol and hookers during shore leave, not to mention the mandatory first-meal-ashore of steak, eggs and chips. In among giant pots of boiling whale oil, rotting meat and quivering blubber (with a gaunt, hard-faced Captain Ahab-type skipper looking down on it all), the crew stumbled and hacked and sliced and made its bloody way over the deck. They were generally underpaid, overworked and ‘sold a crock’ on the wonders of foreign ports and dusky maidens.

We spoke to Irene Toerien, a lecturer on whales.

“Killing whales seemed to have affected the personalities of whalers,” she said. “They were often morose and miserable people, and they only came alive once they leapt up onto a dead whale. They could hardly wait to sink in the flensing knife and the cutting spade.

“I once spoke to an old whaler who lived in Bergvliet, Cape Town. He had worked on the Willem Barendsz, quite a famous whaling ship. He said he wasn’t proud of what he had done. He told me what it was like, shooting the whale gun. They had to get a grenade into the whale so that it swivelled its three prongs and churned up the flesh. Sometimes one shot wasn’t enough.”

Irene lived in Hermanus, now marketed as the Whale Capital of the World. She saw her first whale at the age of 13 in 1953 and the sight transfixed her. She didn’t see one for another five years. Nowadays, in the season, hardly a day goes by without a whale sighting. Use some imagination as you look out to sea, and it could almost feel like 1 000 years ago.

Life was OK in the world of whales back in the days when what passes for civilisation was a pup. When Strandlopers walked our shores, they used to feed, in a totally sustainable manner, on the blubber of beached whales. Across the oceans to the north, Inuits and other Arctic tribes hunted whales from boats without ever seriously denting their numbers. Off the southern coast of Madagascar, tribes of African origin went out to sea, jumped on passing whales and “hammered a wooden plug into the blow hole”, says Wise.

This, in hunting parlance, makes the southern Madagascan possibly the bravest whaler of all time – and gives the animal a real fighting chance.

The Basques of Europe got in on the act in the 11th century and set up a full-on whaling industry. They lanced the whale’s lungs so that it drowned in its own blood. Then they taught their skills to the Dutch and the English, and suddenly you didn’t want to be a whale in northern waters.

Whale products – over the centuries – have been many and varied. The flexible baleen was used for umbrella and bicycle-wheel spokes, buggy whips, shoe horns, chair springs, corset boning, hairbrush bristles, fans … even the fine baleen hairs were used for brooms. The Russians specialised in the production of golf bags fashioned from whale penises.

Spermacetti, found in the heads of sperm whales, was used to create nitroglycerine (an essential item in certain explosives), blubber went into candles, and whale oil lubricated engines and turned up in cosmetics, margarine and soap. It was the petrochemical industry of its day and also a food additive. As a child, I once heard that there was whale in my ice cream. I went on an ‘ice cream hunger strike’ for at least three weeks before being seduced back to the Walls cart by the siren song of the dreaded Eskimo Pie.

Along the coastline of South Africa, whales were big business. In the early days of colonisation, Jan van Riebeeck came across a dead whale on the beach near Salt River mouth. He jumped on top of it, struck a heroic pose and called upon his trumpeter to play ‘Wilhelmus van Nassauwen’, no doubt a stirring martial number.

Between 1785 and 1805, more than 12 000 southern right whales died along the southern coastline of South Africa. Whalers came from all over the world to join in the slaughter. In the early 1800s, whaling was right up there with wine and agriculture as one of the three most lucrative industries around here.

By the middle of the 19th century, southern right numbers were a tiny fraction of what they had been. But the whaling continued all around the world, and the biggest victims were the enormous blue whales. Even today, after decades of moratoria and restrictions on whaling, their numbers are so depleted that some experts believe they cannot hear each other in the sea any more. As a result, they cannot mate easily.

The Japanese kicked off their whaling industry by using poison on whales. By the 1300s they switched to the spear, which involved an attack at close quarters. It turned into a stylised ritual. Wise points out something interesting: both the Shinto and Buddhist religions forbade the eating of meat. Whales were thought to be fish. Now that everyone knows whales are mammals, the irony of it all is that whale meat should be more of a taboo in Japan than almost anywhere else on earth.

According to reports in 2005, the desire in Japan for whale meat started to flag. The local industry (which still killed whales for ‘scientific purposes’) was concerned about its massive stocks of frozen whale meat lying in storage while the youth of Japan wolfed down their McMeals instead. The Washington Post reported that Japanese students were targeted in a marketing campaign to get them to eat more whale. They were fed plates of deep-fried whale chunks at school and given recipes for whale burgers.

Opinion polls, however, suggested that Japanese kids were more interested in saving whales than eating them. Tokyo restaurants had started offering ‘early bird’ specials on whale meals at a big discount. This did not sit well with the Japanese government, who said the nation needed whale meat to become more self-sufficient. They were specifically referring to Minke whales, which, they claimed, had eaten up most of their local stocks of cod and sardines.

Although Japan has been eating whale for centuries, it was their post-World War II food shortage that propelled them into destroying global stocks. They were, in fact, encouraged by the American military to go out and kill whales for dinner. The American Occupation overlord, General Douglas MacArthur, said whales were “cheap protein” and the Japanese should tuck in with gusto.

The wheel turned, and now the American anti-whaling lobby was hoping that Japan’s growing love of fast food would stave off attempts to revive serious whale cuisine.

Another alarming factor for those who liked blubber burgers and flesh of Minke was that a lot of it, by the beginning of the 21st century, was contaminated with mercury. Chemical analysis of 60 samples of meat and blubber bought over the counter from Japanese supermarkets revealed dangerous levels of mercury. “Whales, dolphins and porpoises (cetaceans) are susceptible to accumulating toxins like mercury, as they are long-lived and feed at high trophic levels,” stated a report handed in at the 55th AGM of the International Whaling Commission. “Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, and scientists have found that even low concentrations can cause damage to nervous systems. Developing foetuses and children are especially at risk.”

The science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once predicted that the world would ‘farm’ cetaceans in ocean corrals, in much the same way that we farm beef. Imagine feed lots for dolphins, I thought. But then, good fortune, good sense and inventiveness all converged to give the whales of the world a break. It was called whale tourism – the greatest threat to whaling ever.

As far back as 1997 Jules and I had been out to sea with a posse of teenage Japanese tourists to look for whales off the coast of Plettenberg Bay. We saw their faces as plumes of whale breath were spotted just after the morning sun rose over the Indian Ocean. Their joy as we found ourselves in the midst of more than 4 000 cavorting common dolphins and then later a brace of southern right whales was, to quote a classic poet, “unconfined”. Not one of the Japanese kids said they felt peckish.

For some reason, whales and humans have an emotional link. We have it with elephants as well. In times gone by, humans misread that link and presumed it meant we had to hunt them down, butcher them and then think of them with great nostalgia in the evenings as we looked upon their carved bones.

“I could just love you to death.” And we actually meant it.

Nowadays, it is one of life’s finer pleasures to sit on the rocks in Walker Bay, with the tourist buzz of Hermanus behind us, and quietly observe the great pods of southern right whales coming in to show off new babies and generally rest up from their hectic Antarctic krill-feasts. As the people – many of them Japanese visitors – watched the whales in the late-afternoon light, a festival of quiet, exultant joy spread over all of us like magical fairy dust. I’m a hoary old hack who’s seen it all. Give me a good dose of satire over a sunset any day. And yet, whenever Jules and I find ourselves on the ‘whale rocks’ of Hermanus, we buy into the rapture of seeing a southern right.

Just below us was Bientang’s Cave, a restaurant named after the last-known Strandloper in the area. She lived in a nearby cave in the late 1700s and, by all accounts, made a very comfortable nest for herself. She drank water from a mountain stream, gathered seafood (like someone you’re going to meet later in this chronicle – South Africa’s only real Robinson Crusoe, still going strong in 2005) and cultivated a little vegetable garden for herself.

Bientang was said to communicate with all manner of animals, including the southern right whales. And the legend goes that year after year the whales would return to this spot in Walker Bay to speak with her. Perhaps to give her an update on matters down south, where the emperor penguins hung out. It was a good legend that fitted in perfectly with the business of watching whales – the southern rights in particular.

This species of whale was enjoying an amazing comeback from the brink of extinction. As we embarked on our Shorelines venture, there were more southern right whales off our Cape coast than in the previous 150 years. By 2005, about 2 000 were visiting our shores each year, and their numbers were doubling every decade. The whales – originally called ‘right’ whales because they were the ‘right’ whales to hunt – were down to a tiny group of 40 adult females by 1940, when it was finally decided that they were to be protected. There used to be nearly 300 000 of them before intensive whaling began in the 18th century – and they were now up to total of about 12 000, thinly spread across the southern hemisphere’s oceans.

As I write this in the South African autumn of 2006, the whale-watching industry is growing by 40% a year and is a worldwide business worth US$1 billion. No small potatoes, even for the lobbyists in the ‘If It Pays, It Stays’ camp of conservation. It’s like the whales said:

“Don’t shoot us. We’ll come and visit you. Make you happy. Make you rich.”

Land-based whale watching is becoming so popular in South Africa that it is bringing more tourists here than the legendary Kruger National Park, which offers the Big Five of the animal kingdom. And where the whales go, the merchandising is not far behind. Hermanus is awash with whale themes, whale ‘stuff’ and very good whale art. A whale festival, a nearby estate that offers a superb Southern Right brand of wines and a string of guesthouses and restaurants flying whale logos – the sleepy little town of Hermanus has woken up and become Whale Central to the world.

Early one morning we left our digs – the home of Jules’s mother Trudy Dickens and her husband Derrick in Sandbaai, near Hermanus – and drove off to Kleinbaai to join Dyer Island Cruises for a boat-based whale encounter.

I was looking to shoot the perfect ‘sailing’ photograph of any whale we encountered. ‘Sailing’ is what happens when the whale stands perpendicular to the surface of the sea and all that one views of him is his lovely tail. I wanted that tail, feverishly. Having been out to sea for ‘whale tail’ more than a dozen unsuccessful times, I was finding it somewhat of a mission. But my palms were, as yet, unbloodied.

Attired in bright orange mackintoshes and lifebelts, we walked in a saffron cloud of eager tourists down the main road of Kleinbaai to the little harbour and onto Wilfred Chivell’s boat, Whale Whisperer. Once out at sea, we passed the good boat Shark Fever, which had just hit the jackpot. A great white was showing off his ‘Air Jaws’ manoeuvres to the stunned group of adventurers on board. But for me today was ‘Whale Day’ – the shark thing would wait for another time.

We came across a gathering of brindled southern right whales engaged in recreational sex. Pale Male, as we called him, was schmoozing a far larger female, turning and exposing his snowy belly to her. They began embracing one another with their flippers. Everyone on board laughed quietly, totally seduced by the scene. The whales peered at us briefly before rolling back onto one another with an air of measured exuberance. But not one of them showed the faintest urge to ‘sail’ for my sweaty cameras.

Then the girl whale rested her head on Pale Male, forming an affectionate T-shape, and I forgot my particular mission for the moment. Just like the whaler Terry Wise, I was transfixed by these great animals.

“Men no longer go whaling from London and Belfast, Liverpool and Newcastle,” he concludes. “Gone forever are the whalers of Scotland, the Shetland Islands, South Africa and Holland …. In a score of small hamlets men now spend the long Norwegian nights gazing at their souvenirs and scars and remembering the savage beauty of the untamed, ice-bound Southern Ocean. I suspect it will not be long before the men from Russia and Japan also cease to make that long, lonely voyage.”

In the year 2006, with a health scare, a much-reduced taste for whale meat and absolutely no need for a whalebone corset, the world is still waiting for its remaining whalers to come to their senses …

Chapter 15: Kleinbaai

Jaws For Life

On a stormy midsummer morning in Mozambique, I am all of six years old and deep in the drink, encircled by questing sharks. I have been nagging my stepdad to let me join his band of merry fishermen for days now. I want to catch a barracuda, all teeth and attitude and quite pleasant to eat with a touch of piri piri sauce. Grudgingly, with a list of fierce warnings from my anxious mother, they allow me on board. My virgin deep-sea fishing adventure.

So maybe I am the young Jonah of the crew, because things go horribly wrong on the little Four Escudos fishing boat out there, between wind and wave. We capsize and go “up so floating” in the words of the poet (ee cummings). I am dragged onto the hull by a relative as the tide takes the belly-up Four Escudos out past Inhaca Island and towards the open waters of the Indian Ocean.

As the others wave shirts and things at passing cargo ships, I am trying to dislodge a large fish hook from the fleshy part of my inner thigh. There is some of my blood in the water. But hell, it’s a big ocean, who’s gonna notice?

Ha. Within the first hour you can cue in the da-dum da-dum music as ominous black fins begin appearing around the boat. Numb from shock, I can only stare with fascination as the sharks make their enquiries. Some approach so close, we can all see into their beady black eyes. Are you possibly food? Won’t you just lean a little closer into the water?

After 12 hours at sea, we’re saved by a Norwegian fishing trawler. Mother is at quayside, gently steaming. Her little boy grows up with a big fish in his memory bank.

More than 35 years later, I am sitting in a garret in Vrededorp, Jo’burg, writing The Never-ending Novel. One of the subplots concerns The Submarine, a 9-metre great white shark that comes from False Bay and eats a six-pack of Chinese long-distance swimmers (by accident) as they come flapping around Cape Point, earning everlasting hatred from their boss, a Hong Kong gangster.

The book contains huge helpings of sex slaves, heroes on Harleys, an evil professor in a Tiger Moth bi-plane, mystical Bushmen and a crazy pub crow in a Namaqualand village called Wolf Harbour – it’s really Port Nolloth, but don’t tell a soul.

Throughout all the action (entitled Little Fish Tremble – Unpublished) the villainous Johnny Lo Fat pursues The Submarine up the coast with a passion equalled only by Captain Ahab in his chase after the white whale in Moby Dick.

You’ll probably never get to read Little Fish Tremble in its current format. So let me say right here: the shark wins.

Far from instilling deep fear in me for old Carcharodon carcharias (the great white), that little childhood spill in Mozambique was the beginning of an enduring love affair with this fish, so elegantly designed and intensely focused.

Another five years later, I am finally back with the real thing on a boat called Predator with a local legend called Brian McFarlane. We’re at Kleinbaai in the southern Cape, and with us is a young adventure-nut called Roger Underdown, a night-shift maintenance fitter from Kent. Roger, who says “sumfink” instead of “something”, thinks I have the funniest accent he’s heard all week.

The cheerful traveller is going to meet a great white today from the confines of a cage lowered into the sea near Dyer Island, which is where the sharks normally gather for their Supersized McSeals. Roger has seen the eclipse in Romania, has climbed Kilimanjaro and, as soon as he’s ticked off his shark experience, is driving down the Garden Route to throw himself off the tallest bungee spot in the world. Then he’s off to Madagascar to look for a really big butterfly.

Back home, Roger sits there on the night shift surrounded by pulsating machinery and travel brochures, making up his mind where his mighty English pound will take him next.

As he emerges from the cage four hours later, Roger has clearly had an epiphany. His hands shake, his eyes shine and the words come tumbling from his mouth.

From the viewing deck on Predator, I am equally gobsmacked. A 4-metre great white shark has come boiling out of the water in pursuit of Brian’s foul-smelling chum and for a while it’s all about many white teeth and grey speed and those eyes, those implacable, black-hole eyes I remember from my childhood brush with death.

You see movies on TV about sharks and suddenly your sitting room becomes a fish tank and you’re on the great white lunch menu. As the killing machine lunges out of the wide screen, you take cover behind the coffee table. But once you’re out here and the wind is blowing over the sea and the boat is bobbing and the shark is rising from the water, it’s not about fear. You stand in awe of this living cruise missile that has been here, in this perfect form, master and commander of the southern seas, for many millions of years. And it’s nothing like seeing the old Jaws shark at Universal Studios in California, either.

The boat-based experience is so mystical and life-changing that your next urge will be to hunt down every shark-fin diner on Earth, tie a sardine to his forehead, stretch him out on a sea-going rack and let the gannets have their way with him.

When you first meet Brian McFarlane you notice he has hands like plates. Almost everything about the man is larger than life. His roots run deep in the local seafaring community, going back to his great-grandfather, who opened up the first hotel in Gans Bay. His dad, Brian Snr, came back from a World War II prisoner-of-war camp and began the first perlemoen-canning business at nearby Onrus.

Brian Jnr spent his childhood days diving for perlemoen.

“I was paid sixpence a perly,” he said. “I probably earned more than my schoolteachers. At 16, I had a Jeep and a boat. I could not see the benefits of going to school any longer, so I left for a life at sea.”

His first professional appointment was on a fishing boat, but his diving skills soon led him to look for sunken treasure. McFarlane’s life story is one of those Boys’ Own adventures, with not a Game Boy or computer screen or Internet chat room in sight. He and his mates found the fabled 24 guns of the Sacramento, which were sold to collectors and museums around the world. Then Brian went diamond diving on the West Coast, and they still talk about him to this day up there in the mists of Port Nolloth.

“I seemed to have a nose for those diamond pockets,” he said. “My boss used to introduce me to people as ‘my champion’.”

Sometimes, Brian’s boat would arrive back on shore well after the bank’s closing time, so he was unable to store the day’s ‘catch’ in its vaults.

“More than once I would be walking around with a thousand carats in my pocket and sleeping with a bagful of diamonds under my pillow.”

In 1993 Brian decided to come home to Hermanus and settle down. He bought the old clubhouse on the local golf course and set up a guesthouse. But he kept breaking plates and missing the sea, so he left the running of the guesthouse to his wife, Sandy.

Brian bought a small boat for fishing and tourist excursions. Some 12 years on, that ‘little business’ had morphed into Predator II, a large boat that could take 20 passengers. In three years of shark-cage trips, his clients had missed shark sightings on only nine occasions. And if they missed a shark, their next trip on Predator would be free.

The effect of the shark cage-diving business on the little town of Gans Bay was astounding.

“Just take my business alone. I employ 11 locals,” he told us. “I buy my petrol and bait there. Then there’s the knock-on effect: meals, guesthouses, tours, T-shirts. The eight operators here take out 30 000 visitors a year, at an average of R1 000 a time. That’s a R30-million annual turnover. It’s an established industry.”

And because the shark cage-diving excursions had become such an entrenched, important sector of the local economy, the controversy about the effects of cage-diving on shark behaviour had been carefully watched from the sidelines.

Great white sharks were killing people along the southern coast of the Cape and beyond. Shark numbers were increasing. Had cage-diving made the sharks identify humans with food? Was it because there were more humans in the water, looking like seals in their wet suits? Everyone agreed that sharks preferred to keep to their diet of seals (readily available from places like Dyer Island), but people were still being attacked in the waters around here.

Back in Cape Town, Jules and I had spoken to Dr Len Compagno, the ‘curator of fishes’ at the South African Museum. The US-born conservationist said there were more coconut-related deaths in this world than shark attacks.

“I lived in the Philippines once and I can tell you, those coconuts can be deadly,” he said with the type of deadpan delivery I last saw at a comedy club in Los Angeles. “What about drowning? Do you know how many people drown? Why don’t they do something about that? The whole thing is just hyperventilation, it’s the sky falling on Chicken Little’s head.”

Dr Compagno said the world should worry about real issues, such as man-on-shark violence.

“The harvesting of shark fins is dreadfully destructive,” he said. “Fishermen just hoist the shark up, hack its dorsal fin off and throw it back to die a slow, painful death. The market for fins outstrips the shark populations. The Chinese use it as a feel-good meal for weddings. And the irony of it is: if it weren’t for the added stock, shark-fin soup would be tasteless.”

Sharks are not serial man-eaters, according to Dr Compagno. Much of the problem is that sharks, lacking hands, use their mouths to explore live objects in the water. And an exploratory nip from that array of razor-teeth often proves fatal to humans.

“There’s no proof of a connection between the cage-diving industry and shark attacks on swimmers,” says Compagno.

We asked Brian McFarlane why cage-diving with sharks had become so popular. It was by far the most sought-after adventure activity among foreign tourists visiting the province.

“I put it down to Jaws,” he said. “The book and the movie scared people out of the water – and into a boat. Jaws made sharks into monsters, but it also gave them a mystique. People want that thrill of being safe in the presence of the monster.

“I love my sharks. A day without sharks is a day without sunshine.”

And what sunshine these sharks brought to operators and their tourists. It immediately became obvious that each shark had its own character and preferences. Some seemed playful and curious. Some were shy, contenting themselves with circling the boat. Others were aggressive and surged after the tuna bait like starved prisoners. There was one well-known fish that liked to be tickled just in front of its gills. In fact, it would keep returning to the boat concerned, just to be tickled there once again.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking the sharks loiter about tourist boats, habituated to a daily snort of chum. Most are only passing through, many on epic cross-oceanic voyages, such as one great white female, satellite-tagged and nicknamed Nicole. In 99 days she migrated briskly from Gans Bay to Australia and back again, the fastest trip by a marine animal ever recorded.

And now we were going to try out Predator II on a bright October day in 2005 as part of the Shorelines journey. Brian would not be with us, but skipper for the day would be Rozier (Rozy) Steensma, the spitting image of the rock musician Huey Lewis.

We had a full complement of tourists, including Anna and Stu Durand from Brighton, England.

“I was enthralled by Jaws,” said Stu. “It’s been a lifelong dream to see a great white shark up close.” Not only had they managed to photograph the perfect ‘whale tail’ a few days before but they’d just come from the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park where, in addition to seeing the rare Kalahari lions, they’d captured a desert leopard on their little digital cameras. I was hoping to get all that within the next decade or so.

At first, the sharks were slow to arrive. Then, as they scented the chum in the water, they began cruising around the boat. People fell over themselves to get the perfect picture, and I prayed no one would fall in right then. It would be very bad timing, and a potential blow to the industry in general. No tourist likes a real-life death. It’s like a Ferris wheel breaking off and rolling out of the fairground.

Stu and Anna threw on wet suits and joined three others in the large cage attached to the side of the boat. The sharks followed a lump of tuna right up to the caged tourists and, when it was whipped away, began attacking one of the inflatable pillows holding the cage buoyant.

Anna eventually came out, in a very excited state. She grabbed her cellphone and contacted her six-year-old son back in England.

“He’s huge, darling, I can see him now. He’s at least 4 metres long. He’s coming up to the boat now, right as I’m speaking to you.” Which put us in mind of a game drive in the bushveld some time ago, when we had to sit and listen to an excited someone in the vehicle describing a lion to her boyfriend back at home – also by cellphone.

Stu, in the meantime, was staying below and drinking in every bit of adrenaline on offer.

I liked the close-up shark experience, but Jules and I both thought the operators could have been a little gentler with their sharks. Many of the fish carried scars from encounters with boat engines, possibly cages as well.

The star of the show definitely deserved better treatment – without them, the folks on board Predator II would have to spend hours watching seals barking at each other. Which, compared with encounters with great whites, was a bit like watching sleepy old men play chess in the park.

The shark cage-diving business brought people closer to the great white populations than ever before. They went out for the thrill of fear, they returned with deep respect for the fish in question. People like Brian McFarlane didn’t have to break dishes in guesthouses, tourists visiting these shores had another all-day adventure option and the sharks got to strut their fearsome stuff in the water.

“It’s all about showmanship,” said André Hartman when we collared him back on land. “You have to tell the people the right stories and entertain them.” André, who no longer had an operator’s licence, was thinking of packing up his ‘shark show’ and heading for the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.

“The Baja Peninsula is great for sharks,” he said. “Plus, the visibility is much better and there’s yellowfin tuna fishing out there …”

Chapter 16: Gans Bay

Perlemoen Party

As the black storm clouds approach from the ocean, the atmosphere around Danger Point lighthouse is electric. Rich afternoon sunlight is offset by nervous streaks of lightning on the horizon. The lichen-splattered boulders leading down to the coastline are split and scored by millions of years of battering by waves. The ocean booms and thuds on the edge of the jagged land, as though demanding entry.

If you stand at the marker below the lighthouse and follow its directions out to sea, you’ll find yourself staring at the exact spot where the troopship HMS Birkenhead went down on 25 February 1852. She was carrying British soldiers, reinforcements for the Border wars with the Xhosa. She was doing about eight knots when she hit a rock just more than 2 km south-west of Danger Point.

The bottom of the ship was torn out. Only three of the eight lifeboats could be released into the sea. All the women and children were ordered into the boats and the men were told to hold back. As the Birkenhead sank, the soldiers and sailors on board tried to swim to shore, and the sharks cruising in the area feasted. Out of the 630 on board, 454 died.

These days, the likes of the Birkenhead would be guided to safety along the southern Cape coastline by the beam of the Danger Point lighthouse, which flashes in short bursts of three. In his eyrie above the shoreline, the lighthouse keeper sees all. Out to sea there are the passing ships and there is the coming storm. Below him, along the paths leading to the water, men come streaming towards their vehicles parked along the main road. They are the perlemoen poachers, and no one gets in their way. They carry their bags of booty – the real sunken treasure around here – with a pirate’s swagger and head off home.

“I see the poachers,” Colin Olivier, the lighthouse keeper tells us. “But it’s not our business to catch them so we stay out of it.”

Abalone. Perlemoen. What’s the fuss? As a Jo’burg-based landlubber I used to see these perlemoen busts on the evening-news broadcasts. There, in the featureless face-brick courtyard of someone’s home somewhere in an industrial suburb, uniformed cops would be dragging out bags of what looked like ashtrays. The TV reporter would tell me that they had a value of millions – there were gangs involved and possibly drugs too – and that the perlemoen were smuggled off to China, where they were viewed as a delicacy. What? I could not see it. To me, a perlemoen was not a living entity. It had no value. Like most South Africans, I had never tasted one.

I remember thinking: Why the hell didn’t we just let the Chinese strip our shores of this stuff and be done with it? Then, with the perlemoen gone, the gangsters would all have to get day jobs and the smugglers would go away. Then I found out a little more about this ‘piece of snot in a crash helmet’ and this is how I think it all goes …

We have massive spreads of kelp forests off our southern shores. Inside these waving, drifting masses of kelp live the Cape sea urchins – Parechinus angulosus – under the prickly spines of which shelter juvenile perlemoen. Many sea beings like to snack on a perlemoen, especially the rock lobster – kreef.

The lobsters are also eating the sea urchins and so are stripping away the perlemoen nursery facilities. To make things worse, lobster numbers east of False Bay are increasing, migrating around the corner of the Cape in vast numbers for reasons no one can quite explain. At any rate, they are playing havoc in the perlemoen beds.

Now, to make matters worse, there are many millions of people in China who love to serve perlemoen on special occasions such as weddings. They want our perlemoen so badly, they are willing to buy it for huge sums on the black market. The attack on the hapless perlemoen is two-pronged.

So the smuggling gangs come from China and approach the local coastal communities, most of whom are living on the under side of the breadline. For them, the perlemoen has been the ‘food of last resort’ for centuries. The beds are plentiful and if there’s nothing else to eat, the boys just hop into the ocean with a chisel and pry them loose from the rocks. Each perlemoen is a meal on its own – and you can even use the shell for a rather pretty ashtray or candle-holder.

Initially, it’s a cash business. The Chinese are paying with fresh bank notes out of the boots of their cars. You suddenly see wealth all over the village, in the form of new Mercedes-Benz models and extensions to the home and pretty things for the women to wear and, perhaps, a better brand of whisky for the man of the house.

In the decades before the 1994 democratic elections in South Africa, only certain lucky individuals were granted permits to take out the perlemoen. But in the New South Africa the ‘formerly disadvantaged’ populations living along the coast firmly believe it’s their right to benefit from the sea and extract as much perlemoen as they want. For most of them, it’s also their only means of survival.

Moving right along from the concept of a perlemoen-for-dollars business, the smugglers now begin to offer the local poachers drugs and guns for the perlemoen instead. This has a certain appeal, because both drugs and guns can be sold for exorbitant profits in the local community. And then a vicious cycle begins. You’ve now got gun-toting drug addicts patrolling the shores around the southern Cape, grabbing anything on the sea bed that resembles a perlemoen, drying the stuff at home in unsanitary conditions and getting a quarter of the price they normally would for a properly dried perlemoen. So more perlemoen are prised off the rocks to make up the shortfall. Cops are outgunned or bribed to join ‘the other side’, tourists are beaten out of the way on the beaches and objecting locals get death threats and gang graffiti on their high walls. And ordinary people living along the coast simply don’t have a chance to eat perlies any more.

We drove through the town of Hawston, near Hermanus. It had, at that stage, not yet been ‘blessed’ by the attentions of property developers, who had created something of an overpriced look-alike condo strip mall along the road into Walker Bay. Another day in Paved Paradise. Not yet here in Hawston, because this was the place, they said, from where the fearless perlemoen gangs operated.

Hawston had snow-white beaches, a lovely bay and wild horses in the water meadows. We had lunch at a new restaurant called Huraeb Gaes: smoorsnoek, vetkoek, oxtail, mussels in white wine and so on. We asked the manager, Judith van der Merwe, if she would prepare some perlemoen for us.

“It’s not the legal season for perlemoen,” the genial woman replied. “I know lots of poachers who are taking them out all the time, and I’d love it if they would do their civic duty and supply me, but they just laugh. They get far better prices elsewhere.”

Just like the shark man, Brian McFarlane, in his youth, the kids around here dived for perlemoen. Some were look-outs, while others helped to carry the stuff from place to place. Very few folk in Hawston had perlemoen-free hands. I could understand it. Supply and demand. A pity about the drugs and guns, though.

The most famous name in connection with perlemoen poaching was that of Ernie ‘Lastige’ Solomons. To many in Hawston, his name was synonymous with that of Robin Hood. He seemed to be creating a new legend every day.

“Ernie has been banned from Cape Town,” someone in the restaurant told us. “But he likes the clubs over there. So he puts on a mini skirt and a wig and goes there anyway. He has also produced a ‘perlemoen rap’ CD called The Six.”

We could not find Mr Solomons that day, but we did meet a famous former poacher called John ‘Klonkies’ Moses. The burly Moses ran a timber-cutting business as well as making money from his legal perlemoen quota under the new system. Under this arrangement, in a bid to reduce poaching, the coastline is zoned and chosen individuals are each assigned an area.

“We know the perlemoen are being wiped out,” he said, “but the issues are complex. For 30 years, only 200 commercial divers were allowed to take out perlemoen and they kept the business to themselves. They were schoolmasters and lawyers and none of their money ever enriched the community.

“I went with 12 other poachers to ask the government to change the situation. We were all poor. We told them: we don’t want to poach, but we will if we have to. They would not give us licences, so then the poaching really began. It became a war.”

John Moses wasn’t talking about a price war or a couple of slaps in the face here. These guys were serious. The numbers were just too big to leave alone.

“I warned everyone – including the media – not to portray us as people with a lot of guns and big amounts of money – but they did. And then the chancers started arriving here – lots of them.”

We told him about our foray with the DEAT patrol boat from Kalk Bay. John laughed.

“Let me tell you. When a patrol boat approached, we would SMS the divers. They had their cellphones down there in waterproof plastic bags. These boats are big and clumsy, you see them coming from far away. So what happens? The poachers throw their perlemoen overboard so there’s no proof. And the perlemoen die. It’s such a waste.”

What about legal, on-shore perlemoen farms?

“Now you’re talking,” he replied, suddenly more animated than he’d been a second before. “We need perlemoen farms here in Hawston. Then we could maybe re-seed the area and make Hawston a Marine Conservation Area.”

Like the cigarette baron who makes his millions from tobacco sales and devotes the rest of his life to the wellbeing of humanity, or the hunter who becomes the conservator, this poacher wanted to become a protector.

“The authorities can’t stop us poaching,” he said darkly. “Only we can stop it …”

Wilfred Chivell’s place lay just off Poacher’s Road on the way to Danger Point lighthouse. Wilfred – one of the foremost environmental champions along the Cape south coast and owner of Dyer Island Cruises – had offered to host us for a couple of nights as we picked away at the intricate matrix of Gans Bay life.

After our visit to the lighthouse, we returned to find Wilfred’s friend Susan Visagie hard at work in the kitchen on a magic meal involving spiced chicken, cheese toppings, vegetables and something outrageous in caramel toffee. Susan, who was also helping Wilfred plan his new eco-centre in Klein Bay, began laying out a dish containing four thawing pilchards, which I thought was a bit over the top for supper.

“No, that’s for the penguins,” she laughed, and took us outside to where two rather oily and depressed-looking African penguins lurked in a little enclosure. Nearby was a clutch of baby mountain tortoises and, in an igloo-shaped building, a series of swallows’ nests. Wilfred was a sucker for all kinds of strays, even writers bouncing up and down the coast.

“One of my jobs around here is to keep a constant supply of wet clay available for the swallows,” said the inventive Susan.

That night, around the dinner table, Wilfred told us what life had been like around here two years before.

“This town was a free-for-all. The police were escorting the poachers around. Yes, the poachers actually hired police to bring their armoured trucks to load up the perlemoen and take them through the road blocks.

“A friend of mine once came around a corner and saw a few dozen men from Blompark (the local ‘coloured’ village) in wet suits, about to dive into the sea. Then a Casspir drove up and he saw the policeman talk to the divers. The Casspir was then parked out of sight, in the bushes. The divers all went into the water, like a pack of seals. They later brought out their load of perlemoen and it was all loaded into the Casspir.

“I heard afterwards they had negotiated a R30-a-kilo handling fee with the police. So, let’s say they took out a tonne of perlemoen that day – that’s a R30 000 bribe for two policemen who earn maybe a couple of grand a month.

“I don’t blame the guys from Blompark. They see the poachers from Hawston and Hermanus come here for perlemoen because there’s nothing left over there. The local community once believed the government would protect them, but it didn’t. We need a community quota. Locals should benefit from their own resources.”

Wilfred’s young son, Dicky, later told us many schoolkids in Gans Bay were part-time students and full-time perlemoen poachers earning R250 a kilo.

“My dream is to change that around here,” Wilfred said with passion. “The younger generation have grown up with no respect for the sea because of the poaching. I’m putting up a marine centre to teach the kids of the Overstrand, from Betty’s Bay to Pearly Beach, about this.

“I never used to associate Gans Bay with perlemoen poaching and drugs. I thought we were different from Hermanus. But I mean, suddenly there’s R1 million on offer. How else can you make that kind of money so fast? Then you’re breaking the law anyway and you look at other ways of making money, like drug dealing. Then you need to keep it all safe so you get guns.”

The next day Wilfred took us to the perlemoen farm near the lighthouse, where I discovered that a perlemoen actually lives and breathes, a bit like you and me. I had a tug-of-war with a young perlemoen. We fought over a small piece of kelp and he won. I have to say I was nearly asleep at the time, having downed a couple of anti-seasickness tablets that morning before our outing with Dyer Island Cruises, followed by a brace of delicious beers for lunch. Alcohol and no-heave medication bring on drowsiness far more thoroughly than two hours of chamber music.

Nick Loubser, manager of the I&J perlemoen farm, took us to see his breeding stock. I became hypnotised by the stately movements of a perlemoen and its tiny eyes.

“These guys are tame,” he said. “They get used to people. Here, try feeding one.” And so I – in that dream world between sleep and wakefulness – tussled with a rather muscular perlemoen. Lillian, Wilfred’s sister, who worked in the packing section, said she was glad the perlemoen were exported live from the farm.

“I’ve become very fond of all of them,” she said. “I would hate to actually see them killed.” That’s a lot of personality for a glorified ashtray, I thought.

Perlemoen farming is pretty clean. They don’t produce protein-enriched waste, like fish do. They eat kelp, carefully harvested by local concessionaires so as not to destroy the beds. Hundreds of tonnes of these perlemoen are legally shipped off to the Far East in a kind of semi-hibernation state, which lasts for 42 hours.

This appeared to be the optimal future for the perlemoen industry of the southern Cape coast.

We liked John Moses’s ideas of local communities benefiting from perlemoen farms and trying to re-seed their coastal beds. Then the perlemoen business would have completely ‘clean hands’ and China could buy its wedding delicacies over the counter and the poachers and smugglers could all get legitimate jobs. And the drugs and the guns could all go away. And the lighthouse man would feel a lot better about working the night shift …

Chapter 17: Gans Bay to Arniston

Storm in an Egg Cup

If you want a little peep into the deep history of this coast, go to the museum on the beach at Franskraal, east of Gans Bay. Jan ‘Pyp’ Fourie and his wife are the owner-curators and will show you some weird stuff from the brooding days of the guano hunters and the seal clubbers of Dyer Island. There’s a mattress full of genuine penguin down, embroidered Victorian underwear with cunning ‘toilet slits’ at the back, a carved wooden doll that used to belong to the daughter of a lighthouse keeper and various remnants from the wreck of The Bulwark, which went down on the rocks here in 1963.

“Part of the cargo was barrels of sweet wine,” Jan will tell you. “The men who first found the barrels got rip-roaring drunk. Then their wives marched down to the beach to give them hell, had a taste of the wine and fell about on the sand. In fact, the whole of Gans Bay – except for the pastor – was drunk for a week.”

In his lyrical, self-published book, Dawn at Dyer, Jan remembers:

“Aunty Maria … comes shuffling along and invites the visitors into the cottage. The kitchen smells of the morning’s fermenting yeast dough, this afternoon’s burnt milk and tonight’s paraffin for the Primus stove. A seafood concoction is simmering on the Bolinder stove. Yesterday’s unidentifiable stew lies in Foxie’s aluminium bowl under the green Oregon table. Aunty Maria lights her seventh Flag cigarette with the sixth one and pours strong ground coffee from the brightly scoured UGGI (Union Government Guano Islands) kettle. Later Edwin (her husband) serves sweet wine out of a small wicker bottle and then (much later) removes the gold needles out of the pot-bellied Gallotone tin, screws one into the gramophone’s head and winds the gramophone up and puts on a Columbia record.”

We told Jan that we’d just been with Wilfred Chivell for a few days, working on the ‘creature feature’ issues along the coast, which included sharks, whales, penguins and perlemoen.

“Ah perlemoen,” he mused, while playing a wistful number on the accordion for us as we sat outside. “My Aunty Maria used to say you don’t just tenderise perlemoen slightly, you beat it within an inch of its life without damaging it. And then you fry it in a hot cast-iron pan. And then you eat it, just like that.”

His wife, ‘SD’, was equally fascinating. She took visitors on ghost tours of the district. She immediately pulled Jules aside and began talking of hitchhiker ghosts, “fish smouse from Napier” and a long-dead woman who sometimes danced in the night with her bridal veil blowing in the wind.

I, on the other hand, learnt from Jan that the seal clubbers used to dress in old, loose clothes because sometimes the seals would fight back and try to drag a careless clubber down to the water.

“And then it was useful to be wearing cheap clothes that could be easily torn off your body,” he said.

He played a few more tunes on the accordion, while I sat outside in the sun watching the sea, sipping some of Jan’s witblits. It was a good way to spend a Saturday morning and I said so.

“Dit skiet jou kop oop,” said Jan. Yup. It does seem to blast one’s head open.

By mid-morning Jules and I were filling up with diesel at the BP station in Gans Bay. I was trying to regain focus, and doing quite well, as long as I remained firmly shielded behind dark glasses. Jules had found a tick nestling in the crook between her little toe and the next one up the line. She sat back and sighed, waiting for the instant onset of tick-bite fever.

“I feel quite flushed,” she insisted.

“It’s the witblits,” I replied. But my thoughts were really on the Big Game of the day – the 2005 Currie Cup Rugby Final between the Free State Cheetahs and the Northern Transvaal Blue Bulls. The Bulls were favourites, but I fancied the fleet-footed fellows from the Free State. Were we going to get a chance to watch the game somewhere?

I heard someone singing a dreadful version of Willie Nelson’s classic, ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’, two doors down at a karaoke bar. And you know that song. Like perlemoen cooking, it’s really bad if it’s not performed properly.

“It’s gonna be ‘Blue Bulls Crying in the Rain’,” I told the petrol attendant, who couldn’t give a shit because he was more of a soccer fan.

A rather battered, sunburnt woman approached and said she was from Port Elizabeth but was living in Gans Bay because some very kind people had given her a little room to stay in with her children and she wasn’t asking for money but could we please go to the Spar supermarket with her and buy a loaf of bread and a can of pilchards so she could feed the kids?

“What?” I said, because I was in a witblits cave and had not followed a single word of that. She was just about to start the pitch again, when a local woman who could stand it no more appeared out of nowhere and shoved half a loaf of sliced brown bread and a can of (yes) pilchards in her hands.

Our beggar-lady was now in the awful position of trying to cadge cash for food while actually holding food. But we gave her some money anyway and she made for the karaoke bar.

Our mission for the morning was to purchase a scurrilous CD we’d heard about, produced in praise of perlemoen poachers by members of the locally famous Baardskeerdersbosorkes (Beard Shaving Bush Orchestra). Don’t try saying that with food in your mouth. And it’s not (as I’d originally assumed) a village bedecked with barber’s poles. It is named in honour of a large, hairy bug that reputedly likes to snip away at your whiskers while you sleep.

We traversed the dry, fawn fields of the Agulhas plain until we arrived at the settlement of Baardskeerdersbos. Two very old ladies told us where we could find Oom Manie Groenewald’s shop.

“But it’s closed,” they said in unison, looking startled when we jumped back into the bakkie. They called out:

“He lives right next door. We’ll call him for you.”

They took us to the front door and told us to knock. They bustled around the corner to the back of the house. An old fellow with white hair opened the door and peered out, like Badger disturbed in his Wild Wood lair.

“Yes?”

“Oh hi. We heard you’re selling a CD about perlemoen poachers.”

“Are you over 18?” this directed at me.

“Well, I’m not. But my wife is,” I said, still hiding behind my shades. And it wasn’t even that bright out.

“OK. Come in.” This was what I imagined a Saturday-afternoon drug deal in the platteland would feel like.

Inside, people sat around a table in the gloom of the kitchen, drinking brandy doubles with spring water and wasting no time about it. They were getting ready for The Big Game. Their hearts were also with the Cheetahs, but their money would be with the Blue Bulls.

“Have faith,” I assured them. “The Free State will triumph.” And who was this asshole from Jo’burg who comes in here and sits down with his dark glasses on and suddenly he’s a rugby expert? I could read the bubble. Let’s get him really drunk on witblits. Maybe he’ll turn out all right. They began to feed me large tots of white lightning, and out here in Baardskeerdersbos they seemed to drink only the finest of liquors. It all went down like golden tequila on an afternoon by the Sea of Cortez. With a “haai op die aas” (shark on the bait), as André Hartman would so famously say.

Oom Manie emerged from a back room with a silver briefcase, looking suitably ominous. I fingered the cash in my pocket and glanced over at the front door. Was it locked? If this deal went sour, Jules and I needed a quick exit. Where were the bloody car keys?

But Oom Manie was in a mood to parley first. Small talk to smooth the transaction.

“I produced the CD because it’s time we also made some money from the perlemoen,” he said. “We all used to eat perlemoen here. You see these two old ladies? Well, they grew up eating perlemoen. That’s why they’re still so lovely.”

We spoke about boeremusiek for a while. Our housekeeper, Dorah Sebola, was a Pedi who grew up on a farm in Limpopo Province. Somewhere along the line Dorah must have had boeremusiek hard-wired into her system, because she adored it. She was a special fan of the Baardskeerdersbosorkes, and we told Oom Manie so. He literally preened. Warming to us, he finally clicked open the briefcase. The deal was about to go down.

I bought the perlemoen CD and another one produced by the orchestra for R100. Months later, I played the perlemoen one, titled Manie en Piet Speel ’n Moerse Hou (Manie and Piet Play one Helluva Shot). It turned out to be a bit of a diamond in the rough. They sang of poachers, long weekenders in a jail cell, paying bail, staging farting competitions and running off with sackfuls of perlemoen. It was all a bit edgy and defiant and ran for just less than 22 badly produced minutes. Even Piet Smit, Manie’s partner in this particular crime, admitted the “pressing wasn’t so good”.

“But they’re flying off the shelves,” said Manie, referring to sales of the album.

“Oh,” said I. “Where are they being sold?”

“From my home,” he replied. “They’re flying off the shelves here.”

I took another sip of my witblits. The label on the bottle read:

“Suiwer Lawaaiwater. Spookpis Blitz. Een dop en die donder tref jou. Gestook, gebottel en gesmokkel deur … Ons Geheim.” All of which boiled down to “Very strong booze – we won’t tell you who made it or how.”

“The old people used it for medicinal purposes,” someone said from the darkness. “They had one first thing in the morning. Then a second and a third.”

I looked over at Jules. She took a gentle sip and was propelled backwards out of her chair, eyes bulging, choking and gasping and generally being a girl. Manie & Co were soon falling about the kitchen in high spirits, which prompted Jules to start hamming up the whole affair. I sat there like The Godfather watching a bad cartoon, drinking witblits and wondering about the bats in my head. Those black bats.

We had to get out. I wasn’t going to watch a Currie Cup Final with this band of delightful ruffians. So we drove off, with Manie’s words ringing in our ears:

“Remember,” he yelled from the front door. “There are only two things that look and taste like a perlemoen. And one of them is a perlemoen …” How rude. How lovely. Bless the Saturday brandy drinkers of Baardskeerdersbos.

We arrived at the rather plush Arniston Hotel, checked in and watched the Cheetahs have a little Blue Bull for late lunch. I wanted to phone the boys in the band and crow, but decided against it.

We took a drive around the village and found No. 2A, Arniston Sea Cottages, where we had stayed a few years before. It was a huge yet cosy building, complete with fireplace inside and a table outside where you could clean your fish before the braai. And then there were memories of the infamous egg-cup saga from the previous time.

It had to do with the Visitors’ Book at No. 2A, which contains an entry from a Philippa H, of London, dated 21/5/96:

“Your understanding of the word ‘luxury’ is different from mine. The cleanliness of the house left much to be desired and the ‘modern, fully-equipped kitchen which caters for your every need’ simply didn’t exist. The plywood fittings are of the cheapest, shabbiest kind. The two saucepans of battered tin and burnt inside were just about fit for a scout’s camping trip, not a modern kitchen.

“The hob and oven in this house are simply a disgrace. As rust is such a problem, why don’t you fit a ceramic hob or gas cylinder? The element is hanging off inside the oven, looking very dangerous. The oven is, of course, filthy. The glasses are smeared, as is the cutlery. No egg cups. How can this possibly ‘cater to our every need’? No phones, not even an internal line to call Reception to say where are the egg cups? The house is draughty, spacious but not comfortable and badly planned. Speaking as someone who helps run a self-catering business in England, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

“Re-plan and re-fit and re-equip the kitchen and clean the house properly (including the windows) and you may well pass the ‘luxury test’ with flying colours.”

We were in the middle of a coastal thunderstorm, sipping Government Port and toasting marshmallows in front of the fire. The cottage was ‘badweather romance’ epitomised. We read some more entries, in reply to the irate diatribe above:

“Egg cups and ashtrays were spotless.” – B Davies, Sydney, Australia.

“The British pioneers who helped to found this land would rightly be turning in their graves could they read the entry of 21/5/96. We are proud to be from Scotland and the north of England, where the positive pioneering spirit is still strong. This is a wonderful complex in our opinion, and in a truly wonderful situation.” – Dr CK Land, Scotland.

“One of the best moments of my seven months in this beautiful, frustrating, amazing country. The uptight, soulless cow who wrote the comments of 21/5/96 has obviously never seen the stars here on a cloudless night – egg cups are irrelevant in the face of such awesome beauty.” – C, from Streetham Hill, South London.

“Please get some real egg cups. I had a boiled ostrich egg and it just wouldn’t fit these piddly little things in the cottage. Had to use a bucket.”– The Easter Bunny.

And then they just got downright crazy:

“Tried to burn the thatch, but it’s obviously treated. Managed to carve my name under this table, though.” – Eric E (no origin).

“It’s bizarre how things turn out after a long, extremely stressful, difficult year in Johannesburg and my marriage on the rocks. K and I came here with the hope of getting away from it all and trying to get back some of that head space we once shared. We arrived, took loads of drugs and fucked all day and all night! Try it, sports fans, you won’t believe what it does for the soul.” – GB (no origin).

We drove on to the true end of Africa, Cape Agulhas. A witblits headache was beginning to storm inside me. We found The Southernmost Café In Africa, bought a couple of KitKats and walked past a lonely fairground pony nearby.

“The more you think about life, the more you feel it is thinking about you and reaching out to you as you reach out to it,” a disembodied voice to my left suddenly intoned. I was amazed to see it was Jules. And in a serious mood.

“You realise you can touch holiness at any time. It is always there. Eventually everything is holy, and your will to see it is granted. The more you give up, the more you gain. Your vulnerability and openness make you stronger than steel.”

I could not think of a single wise word in reply. Instead, I came out with:

“Do you think we’re currently staring at the Southernmost Fairground Pony in Africa?” And left it at that …

Chapter 18: Arniston and Elim

Shipwreck Coast

It’s 30 May 1815, and a thick fog has set in on the coast around Waenhuiskrans in the Overberg about 40 km north-east of Cape Agulhas.

The British East Indiaman called the Arniston is approaching the coastline in convoy. Most of the passengers on board are wounded British soldiers from six regiments stationed in the East. A squall brews off the Agulhas Bank and the resultant hurricane drives the Arniston towards the land. By dawn, it is clear that the ship lies in the eye of a storm, surrounded by breakers.

Taking the advice of his staff and a Royal Navy agent on board, Captain George Simpson heads the vessel towards land, hoping to beach her. The Arniston, according to reports, hits a reef more than 1 km out at sea and begins to break up.

It later emerged that Captain Simpson had mistakenly taken this part of the coast for Table Bay, but once the currents began dragging her towards the beach it was too late. Among those who drowned were 14 women, 25 children and Lord and Lady Molesworth.

We found a plaque near the beachfront that read:

“Erected by their disconsolate parents to the memory of Thomas, aged 13 years, William Noble, aged 10, Andrew, aged 8, and Alexander McGregor Murray, aged 7 (the four eldest sons of Lt Col Andrew Giels of HM 73rd Regiment) who, with Lord and Lady Molesworth, unfortunately perished in the Arniston transport, wrecked on this shore the 30th day of May, 1815.”

The “Sale Notice Of Goods Salvaged From The Transport Ship Arniston” read:

“[A] quantity of Goods, saved from the Wreck … consisting of:

“122 Casks, containing Wine, Arrack etc;

“580 empty ditto, of different sorts;

“1 Bellows;

“2 Casks Pitch and various pieces of Cordage and Rattans.

“The Sale will commence at 10 o’clock in the morning of each day, and be held on the Beach near the Eilands Valley Caledon, 23rd of July, 1815.”

This part of the coast was home to Strandloper communities as long as 120 000 years ago. Shell middens have revealed bone fish-hooks, stone sinkers, sheep bones and clay pots, evidence that Khoi herders lived here as well. These days, the village of Arniston (which was formerly called Waenhuiskrans) boasts houses that are being sold in the R5-million bracket. Cape Town uses Arniston as a weekend getaway, and we soon found out why.

After four weeks on the coastal road, Jules and I collapsed gratefully into the world of the Arniston Hotel, a welcoming universe of excellent showers, a great double bed, satellite television, room service offering fresh kob, vegetables, baby potatoes and ice-cold lager. That night, after delighting in the total nonsense of a Hollywood teen-thriller movie, we literally passed out. Jules dreamt that a Lambert’s Bay gannet had become our travelling companion and, when there was no fresh fish, it was happy to be fed bread soaked in milk. I always marvel at the exquisite detail of my wife’s dreamtime.

In the morning we breakfasted on homemade bread, smoked salmon, cream cheese, a fruit fantasia and pots of strong coffee. And then we walked up to Kassiesbaai, the fishing village on the hill that gave Arniston all its seafaring appeal. In a bid to keep developers at bay, so to speak, Kassiesbaai had been declared a national monument.

We heard that there’d be a service at 10 o’clock at the little Anglican Church in Kassiesbaai. For some strange reason (we are not regular churchgoers) Jules and I both wanted to attend, so we rushed back down the hill to get properly dressed.

We sat at the back of the simple building, which was soon quite full. A few women, their heads covered, came in, genuflected and crossed themselves.

Outside, five girls in red-and-white smocks waited for the service to begin. One of them twirled an incense burner over her head, as if it were one of those fire-dancing tools you see at trance dances.

At ten exactly, with an air of great ceremony, three priests walked in, led by the altar girls bearing crosses, candles, the holy communion wafers and a small bell.

It was Holy Eucharist, and Father Eli Murtz led the service. His message revolved around the story of the Good Samaritan.

“Take a good look around,” he said. “See who your real neighbour is.”

Perhaps he had noticed the two pale faces at the back of the church, because he continued:

“We have to help people of all races and backgrounds, and see everyone as our neighbour.”

We prayed for the community, and the priests asked the parishoners to remember Americans suffering in hurricanes (Katrina having recently had her way with my New Orleans) in their prayers.

They also offered a special prayer for anyone who wanted to come forward for a particular reason. A man asked to have his young son specially blessed because it was his birthday. The priest prayed with his hands on their heads.

There was a slow build-up to the drama of the Holy Communion. First there were readings. The priest was surrounded by the altar girls, who held up the Bible, illuminated it with candles and held a cross high.

The incense was lit, and the burner swung back and forth. The priests gathered round the small altar. A woman holding up the book from which Father Eli read rested her hand over her heart.

The spiritual tension kept building. The community had now completely forgotten about us, and was entirely focused on the tableau before them. There was a hushed reverence. The church had become wreathed in incense and was lit with candles and fervent, almost-tangible prayer.

The people gave the moment their full attention, and breathed its holiness. Everyone was uplifted at the moment Father Eli held up the Host, and one of the altar girls rang a bell.

The singing after that was joyous. It was not just another ‘Kumbaya moment’. In layman’s terms, it rocked.

Everyone around us reached out to shake our hands, and we smiled shyly at one another. Peace. Peace. Peace.

Afterwards, we spoke briefly to Father Eli at the doorway of the church.

“The community is not doing too badly,” he said. “The fishing is weak, but the hotel and the missile-testing site at De Hoop employ some of our people.”

“Do tourists come up here?” we wanted to know.

“Yes, but they don’t seem to want to speak or engage with anyone,” Father Eli said ruefully. “They just look at the buildings as though the people aren’t there.”

We walked back to the hotel and went onto the delightful patio for beer shandies and bacon-and-Brie ciabattas with pesto and balsamic vinegar. We kept stealing glances up the hill at Kassiesbaai and that other life. And remembered the incense, the altar girls, the open-hearted singing and one transcendent moment in time when everything seemed holy, even to professional cynics like us.

Just after lunch, in the lounge we met Derek Drew, the hotel manager, beneath a strange trophy of a fish with horns. This was the famed ‘bokvis’ we’d heard about.

“It’s a trap,” I warned Jules. “Set for travel journalists and naïve tourists. Like the miniature kangaroo of the Kalahari, which is actually a spring hare. And the jackalope (or is that antellabit?) of Arizona, USA, that rabbit with the antlers on its head.”

“Who just arrived by helicopter on the front lawn?” was our first question.

“Oh, someone rich,” shrugged Derek.

In the mid-afternoon, we drove into the hinterland towards the mission village of Elim.

The first time we passed through the tiny Moravian settlement was back in the false summer of 2001, and we hardly noticed the place. Granted, the weather had turned foul and a bitter coastal wind was whipping us off to Arniston, where smoked snoek, Government port, roaring fires and deliciously trashy paperback novels beckoned. And marshmallows too.

Elim was a washed-out grey ghost out there beyond the windscreen wipers, its cottages bleak and shut tight against the elements. Yet something told us to track down the local tourism offices and take some numbers for a return trip. Even in this disgusting pea-soup weather beloved so much by coastal-Cape types, the village had a seductive, Thomas Hardy feel to it. And so, the next year, we returned in sunshine …

Beaulah Pontac of the Elim Tourism Bureau personally escorted us to Die Gastehuis, a beautiful old building with grey walls, white trim, thatched roof and green fences. Julienne and I wandered around the place, which could easily sleep a dozen, and finally chose a room for ourselves. Our lodge hostess, Bridget Jonathan, popped in and apologised for the fact that, due to the metre-thick walls, we could only catch the SABC 1 and 2 television channels. We assured her all was well: we weren’t even going to switch the thing on.

As the sun dropped over the Bokkeveld mountains and Bridget bustled about inside preparing a delicious meal of mutton chops with rice and vegetables, we sat on the steps outside, eavesdropping on the village of Elim. A few metres away stood the magnificent church, the proud centrepiece of the settlement around which everything revolved. From inside we heard the strains of a brass band. Down the road a motorcycle that had long lost its silencer came roaring up in the twilight, its teenage rider yelling with glee. Then the sound abruptly disappeared, and the brass band in the church struck up again. Kerkstraat, the main drag, stood lined with gingerbread cottages, mostly thatched, that seemed to stretch way beyond sight. The weather was balmy, and the stable doors of the cottages were half-opened, revealing Elimmers involved in the time-honoured custom of stoep-talk.

Elim was a very special place. You could not just buy a plot, build a face-brick nightmare, pull in and party with your millionaire buddies. Besides having to be a member of the Moravian Church, you also had to negotiate many other stages of approval before you would be accepted in the community. And, unlike most places in South Africa, the community always had the last say in matters here.

In 1824, the farm Vogelstruyskraal was bought by Hans Peter Hallbeck of the Germany-based Moravian Church. It was settled by former farm labourers from the area, who proceeded to build a church-protected community that was blessed with the sweet waters of the Nuwejaars River and the 70-odd magical, medicinal varieties of fynbos that abounded between Wolwengat and the Kouberg to the east.

Eight years later, a British barque sailing from Liverpool to Bombay was wrecked on a reef near Dyer Island. Two years later, hull planks from the wrecked ship were used in the building of the main church in the former farmstead of Vogelstruyskraal, now Elim.

The church clock dated back to 1764, when it had been installed in a small town in south-east Germany. After nearly 140 years of service in Europe, the clock was brought to Africa and, in 1911, was donated to the Elim church.

We heard it was the oldest working clock in South Africa. Then there was the church bell, which was probably the reason the village had never burnt down, even though most of its roofs consisted of highly flammable thatch.

“If there’s an emergency, someone just rings the church bell and everyone comes running”, said lifelong resident Christina Afrika, who ran a coffee shop at the old Water Mill. “And if someone dies, all the people of Elim gather around to comfort and to help with tea, sugar, cake. The support is always there, and people are upset if they aren’t informed of a situation they could have helped with.”

“Hell, in Jo’burg I could disappear for months and my neighbours wouldn’t notice,” I joked to some of the women of Elim as we drank coffee at Christina’s. I could see they thought I was a bit of a sad bugger.

The next morning I was up before the dawn. I set up a wide-angle shot of a sleeping Elim – not a soul was astir – timed for the precise moment when the sun hit the two rows of gingerbread cottages. Good cloud in background, Bokkeveld looking handsome in the distance.

First light duly arrived, accompanied by a glorious blast of rainbow from the heavens, starting somewhere at Cape Agulhas and dropping smack dab into the end of Kerkstraat.

After breakfast, Beaulah told us about the thatchers of Elim, world-famous men who travelled the globe practising their craft. “They’ve gone to places like Spain and Dubai on thatching projects,” she said. “They teach their sons how to lay thatch and so the custom goes on. In the week, however, you just see women, old folks and children in Elim. The men are out working as thatchers or on the farms. They come home at the weekend.”

I asked about perlemoen poaching. The newspapers had been bristling with tales of coastal poaching, Chinese Triad connections and the fact that if you spoke about it you could end up sleeping with the kelp.

They told me how a gang had infiltrated the sleepy little village in the late 1990s, seducing the local girls with cellphones and money and moving into some of the cottages. One Sunday the whole community of Elim gathered and marched to the houses involved, and warned the owners of the houses that they would have to evict the gang members or face leaving the village themselves. One of their pastors, Dominee Freddie Hans, spoke to the gang leaders and after that, they all moved out and into another, more welcoming, community …

I wanted to meet this amazing Freddie Hans, but the dominee was getting ready for the Sunday activities, where the newly confirmed members of the church shared a very special and private service. “It’s as if you’re really sitting at The Lord’s Table,” Beaulah beamed. “The men and women sit apart, dressed in either white or black. The women cover their heads with white cloth. The doors are closed and the curtains are drawn.” And anyhow, the gang affair was over and done with. More important than that was Eternity Sunday, being celebrated this weekend. As in small towns all over Europe, festivals like these keep the community bonded.

While Beaulah was escorting us around the village, showing us, amongst other things, the only monument to the abolition of slavery in the country, the village was heading to the cemetery to spruce up the family graves. Every year at this time, the plots were lovingly cleaned and decorated with flowers of the region, many of which are found nowhere else.

We joined the Elim community in their first service of the Sunday, just before the service. Inside the church, all was white, symbolising simplicity and purity. The organ, brought up from Three Anchor Bay in 1964, was a magnificent machine. And when the power failed, the brass band took over. I asked Beaulah why there were no crucifixes in the church.

“The members of the congregation carry their crosses in their hearts,” she replied …

Chapter 19: De Hoop to Witsand

When Oysters Attack

The floods of 1906 – well, who can forget them? Across the 36 000 sprawling hectares where the De Hoop Nature Reserve stands today, the low-lying fynbos is completely submerged. On Sundays, the extremely sociable farmers of the area visit each other by lifeboat, skiff or, in some cases, crudely built rafts.

This is where the farm Melkkamer once flourished, under the talented and eccentric hand of one John Henry (Biddy) Anderson.

So back to the floods. After seven days of constant rain, with water levels ever rising, the Wilsons of nearby Skipskop Farm decide to visit Biddy Anderson to see if he wants a bite and some help bringing his livestock to higher ground. Their arrival has to be unannounced, because all ‘coms’ are down. So the Wilsons pack a picnic lunch, jump in their lifeboat and row over to Melkkamer.

Biddy and his building partner, a man called Dickson, have been hard at work, putting up a loft in the stables. But the rain has temporarily halted all construction and the flood level is cause for concern. Biddy, for some reason, has a piano in the stable. He and Dickson manoeuvre it upstairs to the newly built loft. Biddy looks out the window at the world of water and decides what the heck. So they head back downstairs and bring up a case of whisky.

And this is how the Wilsons find Biddy Anderson and Dickson: in fine whisky-high spirits up in the loft, tinkling the ivories without a care in the world.

Jules and I had arrived at De Hoop to stay the night and, possibly, head up to Koppie Alleen and watch 60-tonne whales breaching exultantly out of the sea below us. De Hoop was one of South Africa’s most important whale sanctuaries, especially for southern right cows and their calves. It was also a great place for mucking about with a macro lens in the aforementioned fynbos.

The only slight problem was the missile-testing range right next to De Hoop. And when we arrived at our little self-catering cottages, there was a note to say that the Overberg Testing Range would be firing missiles the next morning. Please don’t go up to Koppie Alleen. You might encounter a problem. Or something to that effect.

So it all looked like a bit of a bust, really. The weather was turning into a dog, all grey cloud and thunder-boomy in the distance. Pretty soon it was bucketing down and we found ourselves in the tiny De Hoop museum with nothing to do but wander disconsolately around the modest displays and sulk.

Then Jules found the Books. Oh yes, the Books. They were two tatty old scrapbooks full of memories and we fell on them like meerkats at a grub-feast. In one of them was The People of De Hoop Nature Reserve: A Cultural-Historical Heritage, compiled by Ann and Mike Scott of the Overberg Conservation Services. A demure title, considering the sexy old stories it contained.

This was where we read about Biddy Anderson, but before him came a slave called Februarie, originally from Hangklip near Pringle Bay. Februarie was a droster, a runaway slave, who chose to live as an outlaw instead of at the foot of a colonial master. He wandered up the coast (they weren’t firing missiles over your head in those days) some time in 1850 and set himself up in a cave on the north-west corner of what later became the Melkkamer property.

Initially, Februarie was well liked. He lived by hunting and taking out honey where he could find it, exchanging the sweet dripping combs for food with workers on surrounding farms. But then he got sly, and then the trouble began.

He started taking the workers’ wives as hostage, extorting clothes, tobacco, candles and other supplies from them. Every now and again he would steal a sheep from one of the surrounding farms. His cave had a narrow entrance, which he could easily defend. Besides, when life became too harrowing for him there, Februarie would decamp to another cave at Kathoek in a kloof to the south-east. The farmers were upset about their stolen sheep and decided to do something about it.

Jules was reading this out aloud to me while the rain pounded on the roof. I was soon caught up in the story.

“So what did the farmers do?”

“They caught him one night while he was climbing over the wall of a kraal,” said Jules. “They beat him up and dragged his body off to the nearest aardvark hole and stuffed him into it.”

Rough justice. So back to Biddy Anderson, my hero of the moment. The ebullient Biddy was a double Springbok, starring in both rugby and cricket in the late 1890s. I found a newspaper clipping, a sports report written by one Paul Dobson detailing a game played on 5 September 1896:

“Tommy Crean won the ball for the British Isles at a lineout and fed Louis Magee, the brilliant Irish half-back. Magee passed to Sydney Bell of Cambridge, who was in their fly-half position. Bell passed to Fred Byrne of Moseley, who was playing centre.

“Then it happened. Ferdie Ashton of South Africa sailed into Byrne who crashed to the ground. Biddy Anderson darted in, snatched the ball from Byrne’s grasp and set off for the British goal line. Only one opponent blocked his way: Newry Meares, an Irish forward who was chosen at full-back that day. But Alf Lerard, the South African half-back, was up with play. Anderson drew Meares, and Lerard took the pass to score under the posts. Tommy Hepburn converted after the tourists had protested against the try and South Africa went into a 5-0 lead. It was also the final score.”

“Yawn,” said the cruel Jules. “So what?”

“So what? So what?” I had to tickle her and chase her around the little museum. “That was the first time South Africa ever won a rugby Test match – that’s what!”

“Sport. Schmort.” But I would not be daunted by girlish ignorance, and read to her from Biddy’s obituary, written by Percy Twentyman Jones (who the hell calls anybody Twentyman Jones these days? That’s so Twickenham) in the Cape Times of 11 March 1926:

“So long as Rugby football is discussed in South Africa the name Biddy Anderson as the prince of South African three-quarters will keep cropping up. The players and spectators of the present day have no conception of the remarkable genius lurking behind his every movement on the field of play .… [W]hen he closed one eye and drew up one side of his mouth as he glanced in his partner’s direction, his pleasantly plain features – for he was not exactly handsome – scintillated with mischief for his opponents.”

I rooted around the scrapbook and found a cutting that recorded a cricket match between Cape Town and some place called Alma, in which Biddy Anderson scored an unbeaten century with the bat and claimed six wickets with the ball. But by then I had lost my wife, who had found the Death by Oysters story.

It was the tale of the “hapless Mrs Cloete”, who was given a huge oyster by her husband at their wedding feast. She choked to death on the oyster in front of all the guests and her horrified husband, who blew his brains out with a shotgun shortly afterwards. The oyster shell was mounted above the front door of the old house on the homestead.

The records hint that the ghost of the “hapless Mrs Cloete” used to dance in the attic, while the ladies of the Anderson family danced below in their bare feet to the stirring concertina tunes played by one Oom Frikkie. These festivities were, apparently, made even more memorable by the cask of sweet wine that a certain Oom Serfaas would bring over from Wellington from time to time.

Jules continued to read, and the sport cuttings fell from my fingers as storm darkness fell outside and we mind-tripped back in time.

“The young daughter of one of the past owners of De Hoop was in love with the son of the owner of an adjoining farm, but he was not thought to be good enough by her parents. The two young lovers consequently disappeared together.

“Ten years later, an axe and some blonde hair were found in a hollow by labourers cutting milkwoods for fuel, suggesting a suicide pact. The ghosts of these two ill-fated young people are said to haunt the homestead.”

I found another Boys’ Own story.

“Listen to this one. It’s about all the German U-Boats that used to sail around Cape Infanta during World War II. Disguised as fishermen, the crews would come up the Breede River in rubber dinghies and shop at Port Beaufort.”

The German seamen would stock up on food and diesel for their U-Boats, which were doing damage to Allied shipping around the Cape at the time. They lay in the waters of both the Indian and Atlantic oceans like waiting wolves. But after a while the fuel gauge started dropping, the breakfast milk turned sour and the Chief Engineer had scoffed all the sausage in the galley. When the going got tough on the U-Boat, the U-Boat guys went shopping.

South Africa was in two minds about World War II. While some citizens were ‘fighting the Hun’ in North Africa, others were ‘all for the Führer’ and the complete Hitlerisation of the continent, complete with jackboots, swastikas and rather large rallies.

The most famous South African Hitlerite was one Robey Leibbrandt, a champion boxer, who met the Führer at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. He became an instant Nazi and underwent extensive training in Germany to help overthrow the Smuts government of South Africa and install a Hitler-friendly regime.

Leibbrandt returned to South Africa by U-Boat in 1941, came ashore on the West Coast in the Kleinsee area and made his way through the diamond fields and finally down to Cape Town. He formed a gang called The Stormtroopers and they began a sabotage campaign that eventually led him to within an inch of the gallows. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in December 1943. Five years later, when the Nationalists came to power, Leibbrandt was released. They say he was one helluva boxer.

That was the mood in South Africa back then. So when someone from a U-Boat came strolling up the high street dressed either as a tourist or a fisherman, the shopkeeper didn’t always report the sighting to the cops. In fact, when the shopkeepers saw just how much the German seamen were willing to pay for goods, they shut the hell up and took the money.

But the police and, subsequently, Jan Smuts’s government came to hear of these unscheduled tours of the Agulhas plain. So they sent in government agents “also dressed as holiday-makers” to snoop around. Can you imagine all these lumpy-eared types trying to act all nonchalant around tiny Port Beaufort?

I read:

“Pypie, a local shepherd, witnessed men coming ashore from a German U-Boat and was sworn to silence. Terrified that his family would be killed, he kept the secret for at least 30 years.”

Then there was the story about a German officer whose body was found washed up on the shore. In the inner pocket of his uniform were two used tickets for a performance at Cape Town’s Alhambra Theatre.

We sat up till late that night, reading about De Hoop. Then we opted to share one of the single beds and lay down together under our open sleeping bags. There was an interesting squeal of protest from beneath us, as though we had trapped an unfortunate African penguin that was now braying in full voice. We bounced a bit in enquiry and suddenly the whole bed gave way under us.

“That’s it,” I said, disgustedly. “We’re officially on diet.”

The next morning, I slunk off to Reception to ’fess up about the bed. The conservation officers nodded gravely, said don’t worry and managed to keep straight faces. As I walked away, I heard them explode with laughter. Like I said, we were now on diet.

On the way out of De Hoop, I fell into a fynbos funk. I was now an official lover of fynbos, because once you’ve seen it up close you know why it’s called a Floral Kingdom. You also realise just how much of it all along the Garden Route has been destroyed in the interests of ‘development’. But more about that later. Just so you know: I think insensitive developers should be lined up against a wall and throttled to death with their Sunday newspaper ads selling you bullshit off-plan. Which, around here, normally means taking out the fynbos and throwing up something silly (they like the words ‘low maintenance’) in face brick.

We stopped – as is our wont – at an ostrich farm, because the females were batting their large eyelids at us and sashaying up and down and rearranging their wings like self-conscious cabaret queens. A 10-seater van stopped next to us.

“Hi there. We’re looking for a place called De Hoop [pronounced ‘dee hoo-ep’],” came an American accent from the passenger in front. He hauled out a really crappy road map that must have been last used by a distracted U-Boat shopper.

“That’s not a map,” I said, sounding like Crocodile Dundee as I hauled out my personal road atlas and gave it to him. “This is a map.”

“Thanks man. Now where’s Dee Hoo-ep?”

“It’s here,” I said, pointing at a spot on my map. Eight sets of eyes peered keenly at it. “But you shouldn’t go there today. They’re firing off missiles.”

Eight sets of eyes grew round like small saucers. Missiles. I could see these Americans, a senior bunch, were in no mood for missiles.

Then the entire van erupted in uproarious laughter. They got it. I was joking. Nice joke. Now where’s Dee Hoo-ep?

“I’m serious,” I said. “Listen, why don’t you guys all come to Malgas?”

“What’s there?” These curious Americans.

“The only working river pont in South Africa.”

They were up for it, and we next saw them at the section of the Breede River where the Malgas Pont is located. Originally from Oregon and Washington, the four couples were doing a slow road trip from Cape Town to Zululand.

“You know how we can afford to travel? We’re still married to our first wives!” said one guy. And they all broke up laughing again. The Comedy Store on Wheels. Like Saturday Night Live – for pensioners.

We eased our vehicles onto the pont, manned by ferryman Anthony Mgongo and his assistant, who each wore a harness and held a length of chain he would expertly twirl around the pont cable. Then they would both walk the length of the pont, untwirl their chains and come back. The grand old codgers on tour thought this was marvellous and asked to join in. A few grunts and groans later they gave up and declared they were starving.

We parted company and headed to Witsand beach, where we found an old man feeding his young puppy milky tea from a saucer. We stopped to admire the eager animal, a Labrador-Alsatian cross totally absorbed in his treat.

“I had to think long and hard about taking on this puppy,” said the old man in a grave tone. “I didn’t want the pain that comes over you when they die. But I have high hopes that this one will outlive me …”

Chapter 20: Mossel Bay to Knysna

“Rasta Don’t Play Golf”

We’re tooling down the N2 highway in the heart of the Garden Route past Mossel Bay towards the great Tsitsikamma Forest and there’s not much of a fynbos fiesta going on. Recent developments, including the great fires of 2005, have begun to threaten the region. fynbos loves a bit of flame, however – that’s how it regenerates every decade or so. But it cannot withstand the peri-urban creep of the ‘little white ball’ – the mushrooming walled-off golf estates where rich folk of all colours and nationalities have come to make their last stand.

Before the golfing community takes up its designer pitchforks and lava lamps and comes hunting me down, please understand that I just don’t get it. Except for nine half-drunken holes at the Grahamstown Golf Club in my student days, I’ve never raised a putter in anger. I don’t empathise with golfers. Where they see a fairway to heaven, I see a boring expanse of over-irrigated grass.

You know when you’re trying to explain the glorious concept of five-day cricket to an American and his eyes glaze over? Well, that’s what happens to me whenever someone goes chittering on about golf. I am a Golfing Gobi Desert. But I do want to enquire of the Tiger Woods Wannabe Society:

“Dudes, who stole my Garden Route?”

I also want to put that question to whoever is behind the boom in squatter camps down here. And those developers who build their ticky-tacky look-alike holiday homes and flog them to upcountry suckers who use the place once a year for barbecues and pissups by the beach. They could have stayed home, switched on the sprinkler and had an even better time for much less than the fortune they just forked out for a flawed dream. It’s just not good enough for my Garden Route.

We weren’t all supposed to move down and live on the Garden Route, for heaven’s sake. We were supposed to preserve its pristine state for generations to come, visit it occasionally in a managed way and then head home again.

So, as an outsider driving slowly along the so-called Garden Route, what I saw looked less and less garden-like and increasingly tacky. There were about 18 golf courses and the developers wanted to build more. And every year the grubby, sprawling squatter camps and the crime rate grew larger. There were golf balls rattling into tin cups to your right. And beggars rattling tin cups to your left. And here we were, as middle class as you could get, not really welcome on either side. Just keep on trucking up that N2, folks. There’s nothing for you here.

Jules and I seethed and decided to visit some officials in the know, to find out just how bad things were on the so-called Garden Route. We arrived in George, found the town’s tallest building and Jules went up to see them while I car-guarded the Isuzu and its contents. What they had to tell her was no food for comfort, either.

“Where’s the Garden?” she wanted to know from Dr Steve du Toit and Niel Lambrechts, who worked for the Western Cape Provincial Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning.

“It’s slipping away from us, thanks to these developments,” said Steve. “The problem is that up until now there has been no overall plan or policy protecting the Garden Route from development, nothing that actually safeguards what tourists have come to see. The developers arrive with a vision, but the authorities haven’t had a coherent counter-vision.”

There were 12 big developments pending, each one with a capital cost of at least R500 million. The average project involved more than 500 houses, one or two golf courses, a shopping complex “and an optional runway for private planes”.

“And you know what gets me more than anything else?” demanded Steve. “These guys come from the city to the coast, and all they do is carry on watching satellite TV. They don’t even look at what is around them. How do you explain that?”

In December 2005, the Western Cape government finally came out with development guidelines to control urban creep and the development of golf and polo estates along the Garden Route. But they may as well have been throwing a mouse to the vipers. A true range war was on the boil. Developers and rich residents were squaring up to an alliance of nature lovers and landless people.

And to make matters worse, most of the developments seemed to have a tame politician in their pockets – or the relative of one.

The biggest issue concerned water. Each golf course used about two million litres of water a day – enough for 80 000 people at the daily minimum of 25 litres. All the major rivers in the region were stressed, according to a national river-health assessment report. All surface water was overcommitted, with barely enough to enable Nature to function properly.

In a state of shock, we went off to stay with an old mate, Rod Hossack, in his Victoria Bay guesthouse called Land’s End. We always loved waking up in this Cape Cod-style house, where the former owner’s wife was now a ghost who had her own breakfast table laid for her every morning. Rod also consulted the ghost-lady on major issues in his life. The sight of those Vic Bay waves breaking on the rocks in the moonlight had always been one of the enduring joys of a visit to the Garden Route.

“You Jo’burgers,” Rod said, semi-serious. “What have you guys done to control development up in your neck of the woods? Me, I’d rather see a golf course than a smokestack – any day.”

He was right. But did it always have to come down to that: smokestacks or golf courses?

“Yep, Jo’burg – now there’s a place for you,” he continued, ironic twinkle in his eye. “I went there recently for some medical treatment (after taking a tumble while surfing in Bali) and boy, the billboards! They’re the best scenery you’ve got. I can understand why you lot want a piece of this world.”

But when we started talking about the poverty-wealth gap along the coast, Rod grew serious.

“It’s a volatile situation,” he said. “Imagine you’re a poor person, suffering from cold night after night under a leaking roof. But over the hill are empty holiday houses, used for maybe a month or two every year, containing every comfort you can possibly imagine.” It didn’t take rocket science to figure out the rest.

The water shortage in the area? Was that not a natural deterrent to over-development?

“These guys are so rich they would not be able to comprehend that a simple lack of water stands between them and their golf course,” said Rod. “They’d just say: find the water, ship it in somehow, bugger the cost. The stakes are high, my friend. Money’s on the move and the rates are low. Everyone wants to play golf. Why, they tell me there’s a town in Spain surrounded by 64 golf courses.”

Yes, but did that Spanish town have a Floral Kingdom? Or such a first-rate forest system as ours? Did it have a chronic water shortage? And if they had 64 golf courses already, then why didn’t everyone go chase their little white balls up in Spain, already? Sorry. No empathy.

The next day, we entered Knysna, where my jaunty hero François le Vaillant came a-wandering back in the late 1700s in search of a decent elephant-foot breakfast and a specimen of Knysna turaco. He was shocked to see how the colonists lived in their buffalo-skin-roofed huts when they could have built timber palaces. But when he arrived at a place called Pampoenskraal, Le Vaillant fell in love with the forest and built an open-air dwelling for himself.

He declared that his spot at Pampoenskraal was far superior to the “sumptuous grottoes of our wealthy financiers, the magnificent villas of the English citizens, nabobs and plunderers”. Those “grottoes and villas” took a couple of centuries to arrive. So did the “English citizens, nabobs and plunderers”.

Knysna, as we drove in, was very busy, even in the doldrums of the pre-Christmas season. “Money on the move.” A far cry from the scenes recorded in the journals of Hjalmar Thesen, great-grandson of the timber entrepreneur whose family line ran deep in the area.

When the Duke of Edinburgh visited Knysna in 1867 to bag a couple of the local elephants for his trophy wall back home, the village consisted of 25 “European homes” and a wharf. The real cowboys of the Knysna forests were, of course, the woodcutters. They lived off honey, sweet potatoes, wild boar, fish, pumpkins, bushbuck, bread and coffee – and the kind of food you’d only find in a very special deli today.

Another legendary Knysna character was George Rex, who may or may not have been the illegitimate son of England’s George III. Anyway, it didn’t hurt to have that kind of rep in those days. Rex did what most men in the district would do: he kept ostriches, hunted elephant and cut timber. He also persuaded the authorities in Cape Town to turn Knysna into a proper port. Interestingly enough, records showed that one of his descendants was the circus clown called Stompie, who partnered the equally famous midget called Tickey. Not to be confused with the hero of Marianis Mini Sirkus, which once played to limited crowds at Alexander Bay.

We shopped for victuals and went off to our digs, the Endlovana Coastal Hideaway near Belvidere. It was a tented camp in a world of fynbos and milkwood, a short walk from the beach. Working on this family property and learning a few environmental lessons along the way had turned its owner, Susan Campbell, from “arrogant and ignorant” lawyer into someone dedicated to low-impact living. She was certainly not on the side of the rampant developers of the area.

After the first night in Endlovana, Jules wrote in her journal:

“It makes you wish your childhood-holiday memories had been of this. Being in a tent exposes you. You feel the coastal winds, and the light veil of mist on your face. It changes your hair and the texture of your skin. You feel sleepy more often. You eat well. Last night we used the open-air shower on the top deck, bathing in warm water in cold night air, watching the stars. This is a generous place.”

The next afternoon found us up at the Pezula Estate, which Steve du Toit had recommended as one of the more “positive developments” along the Garden Route. Pezula’s owner-developer, Keith Stewart, looked a bit like the late movie director John Huston. There was also an air of the hungry wolf about him. But The Big Pezula wasn’t out to eat us that day.

Keith Stewart didn’t open up shop here because he needed the money. He’d made his fortune from inventing photocopier add-on equipment during the 30 years he’d spent in the USA. He bought the 630-hectare hilltop land overlooking Knysna and cleared the plantations, reintroduced fynbos to the property and sold large plots where houses could be some distance from one other.

“I had the luxury of time, so I cut no corners,” he said. “Now we have some of the most valuable real estate in the country.” (Hence the price tag for one plot of about R14 million. That’s land only. Mansion extra.)

But the laws of living in Pezula seemed to ensure that, for once, a coastal development would be a thing of value rather than an environmental eyesore. The homes of Pezula would have fynbos occupying their garden space. If you were in love with an exotic plant or flower, then you had to keep it in a courtyard under strict quarantine conditions.

It was most definitely a millionaires’ playground in the offing, but Pezula employed local people (and not just as waiters), was restoring some of the indigenous environment and was sorting out its water-usage issues.

You could always find someone willing to sell you dark secrets about Pezula in a dimly lit bar somewhere – but that, we were discovering fast, was standard issue for all developments along the so-called Garden Route. We were planning to gently sidestep this particular den of slithers but had to ask Stewart how he felt about the proliferation of poverty co-existing with all this wealth.

“There is no excuse for the shanty towns you’re talking about,” he said. “Government is just not doing enough. There is a skills fund worth billions of rands – and it’s not being used. In this area, there are 40 000 people living in poverty. I say to the local municipality, let’s take a chunk of the land you own. I’ll build 500 houses on a piece of it for free. Let’s get the other developers to build the rest.”

As we were preparing to wind up our time with him, Stewart said:

“Just remember, I’m here for the long haul. And, unlike most developers, I live on the property. You know where to find me.”

From riches to Rasta. The next day we drove through Knysna for our appointment with Maxie Melville in the township of Khayalethu, more precisely, the precinct of Judah Square.

Seen from a distance, Khayalethu had a stylish woodcutter thing going for it. Every building was handmade with planks, there were vegetable gardens and shops painted garishly. It looked like a large, rather funky, forest village where real people hung out. Poor, granted. But guaranteed to be interesting.

It was Saturday. Kids were playing cricket in the streets, using tomato boxes for wickets and crude bats. Near Judah Square we saw the ‘Rastamuffins’, preteens in their dreadlocks, goofing around near a wall of Rasta quotations.

Maxie’s home was not a dagga den. It was a small, clean house with timber add-ons. Someone had been baking. You could smell that ‘Granny’s just been and she left something for pudding’ aroma about it. There was nary a trace of a spliff, joint, bong or Rizla rolling paper.

Maxie, 40-something, lanky, dreadlocked and square of jaw, bade us sit.

“At one time the Rastas of Knysna lived apart, dotted about Khayalethu,” he said. “It was awkward. We’re vegetarians and don’t drink alcohol. People had meat braais around us, there were shebeens, drunks on the street. Then we got up a petition with 2 000 Rasta signatures, asking the authorities for our own space. Welcome to Judah Square.”

We had to ask about the dagga, which was part of the Rasta culture.

“All our households have a plant,” he said. “In summer they’re visible, because they grow above the fence line. But we have no crime. There is no rape, no robbery and no assault in Judah Square. We never pick up a gun. We never take hard drugs. To us, ganja is like food. It is our inspiration. It is the herb of herbs.”

As members of the general Knysna population, how did Maxie and his group feel about developments along the Garden Route?

“It’s a bit much. We’re worried about the nature. Development takes away our space, our beauty and our privacy. They say they’re bringing jobs but they only last a short while. The developments only benefit the rich. Our natural areas are getting smaller and smaller, and they’re pushing us out. They say it’s job creation and betterment, but is it really?

“We need more balance. Here, there is great wealth and great poverty close to each other. But there is no love.

“Besides, Rasta don’t play golf …”

Chapter 21: Plettenberg Bay to Keurbooms Strand

In Charm’s Way

A seasonal blend of suntan lotion, high hopes and lust. This was Plettenberg Bay in the summer of 1972, the year they opened the Beacon Island Hotel out on the rocks where once stood a whaling station, complete with boilers, bone crushers and blubber processors.

Not the world’s most romantic place in the early days.

But back in 1972 it was spring break for soldiers, and we lay on Lookout Beach like shorn goats released into the general population.

It was the time of Frank Zappa’s ‘Overnight Sensation’, Elton John’s ‘Crocodile Rock’ and Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’. We memorised Frank’s soft-porn ‘Camarillo Brillo’ and ‘Dynamo Hum’ and tried our best to surf the easy waves of Lookout. All but one of us ended up posing sadly on our beach towels, surfboards lying nearby in a discarded heap.

The real surfer dudes were locals such as Rod Hossack from Vic Bay, who protected the Petals of Plett with their lives. The inbound Jo’burg parents guarded their girls like family treasures.

But we – a small brave band of five – had one another, our minivan and six weeks to blow on sunburn and optimism. And so we chomped little hamburgers from the Formosa Café in the delightful one-horse town of Plett and got drunk on two beers each and kept trying our luck with the petals.

It was hard going, at first. And then an unusual recruitment took place. Julia Rattray, one of our ‘home girls’ from Jo’burg, joined us. A girl? For sure. But not your run-of-the-mill girl. She could hold up her end of a wine bottle all right. Julia began to introduce us to the darlings of Plettenberg Bay and, after a few embarrassing false starts, we all found some form of summer romance.

The years went by, Julia became a newspaper photographer and we all hung out together in a large group at weekends in an edgy old villa of reduced circumstances in Bez Valley, Jo’burg. She took up with Kevin Carter, who was to win a Pulitzer for his photograph of a young southern Sudanese girl in drought conditions (with a vulture waiting patiently in the background for her to keel over) and they had a daughter called Megan. Kevin took his life and became a tragic cult figure around the world. Julia became a writer and went to live on the family estate near Plett with her daughters Sian and Megan. We have been friends for more than 35 years.

After weeks of drifting along the coastline, Jules and I decided that – even though we classed ourselves as liberal and democratic and all that – to allow your average South African freedom of housing design was to give him a loaded gun. There was just too much individual bad taste about. Many of our seaside villages looked like either tatty nightmares or identical seal colonies.

South Africa needed some architectural consistency, just like there once was in the old Karoo. And in some parts of the Western Cape.

So we needed to have speaks with Julia’s younger brother Martin, who over the years had designed classy coastal homes, hotels and polo complexes collectively worth more than R1 billion. Martin, the distinctly mad genius of the Rattray family, would know.

“The only problem with all this,” I said to Jules and Julia, our new travelling companion sitting in the back of the Isuzu, “is Horst.”

“Oh, Horst is a darling. He’s an absolutely adorable sausage,” said the languid Julia, sneaking a cigarette on the back seat and blowing the smoke out of a crack in the window when she thought I wasn’t looking.

Horst, for the record, was Martin Rattray’s Rottweiler. I had never seen a bigger dog in all my days. Horst could crush your back with one of his front paws. And I wasn’t keen to enter Martin’s place up on Fairview Farm at The Crags unless Horst had been placed safely behind a fence somewhere.

The other dogs in his life were spaniels. Many of them. Martin even had a cherished motor-bonnet ornament in the form of a spaniel in the On Show position. He’d had many a car crash in the district and, no matter how pulverised his old Mercedes would be, the silver spaniel rampant ornament always survived.

The signs in his coach house-cum-office read:

“Let us build such as our children will thank us for”; “A single ugly villa can dethrone a dynasty of hills”; “Beauty is necessary”; “Man becomes what he sees”; “The quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten”; “Piss off, I’m busy.”

Large chalices of wine were poured. Martin was immediately on the case:

“De gustibus non disputandum, old boy. About taste there can be no discussion.”

Did the country need a coastal-aesthetics committee, we asked.

“No teeth, no teeth at all. If you want to make sure there is visual, stylish harmony on the coast, it must be written into the building codes,” he said. “In any village, it’s good to have a signature characteristic, a flagship design.”

Why had South Africa been floundering away in a stew of styles, all mixed up and eclectic without being cute?

“Now write this down,” he ordered Jules with a mock-imperious air. “South Africa, by now, should have a style whose mother is Cape Dutch House and whose father is Ndebele Cottage. Look at those Australians and what they’ve done with the typical outback farmhouse.

“And if Plett were in Scotland, you would find an established village built in the time-honoured fisherman style by people using local material – people with a strong sense of community. They would have lived off the sea and there would, of course, be a fishing harbour with a market. It would look marvellous.”

What about ‘low maintenance’?

Martin cringed at the term. Then the light of battle went on in his eyes and he raised his wine glass like a saluting gladiator.

“Mining-camp mentality. Everything is created in a rush, with regard only for usefulness. And then there is the nouveau riche crowd, the ‘look at all my money’ gang. It will still take a few generations of wealth before people have the confidence to relax and not feel the need to show off. I have a client, for instance, who has opted to disguise her spa, gym and steam room in what looks like an old farmhouse. That’s style.

“If you love a plasma TV screen, you can have one. But why not put that TV set into a home built in the style of a fisherman’s cottage? It doesn’t have to be [insert dramatic shudder here] face brick all the way. My friend Gordon Forbes [the former tennis star and author] once gave me the most beautiful brief. He said make me look as if I’ve got a lot of style but no money.

“Charm is marketable. Charm is valuable. I will send Horst the Rottweiler after any person who regards charm as secondary to low maintenance.” As if on cue, the monstrous Horst came into the coach house and showered me with spittle from his spade-like tongue. When he saw Julia his eyes rolled with pleasure and he rumbled over to where she sat.

As usual in this part of the world, the conversation drifted to the weather. I remembered Plett from years gone by, when the rainy season would seriously set in and we’d spend many consecutive days indoors, wandering why the hell we came down here hoping for quality beach time anyhow. Now, it seemed, there was more sunshine than anyone needed. The district was drying up.

“I live on rainwater that falls on my roof,” said Martin bitterly. “I sometimes have just enough to wash with a bucket and a face cloth. And that brings me to my next question: why on earth don’t all South African homes have underground water tanks by now? We still haven’t realised we’re living in a dry country. We pray for rain in the dry season, and then when it comes we just let it run off our roofs without storing it.”

As the afternoon at The Crags wore on and the wine flowed, the conversation went walkabout a little. We were now in Scotland, with Martin inhabiting a castle he had inherited. A castle that burnt down in mysterious circumstances. Martin wasn’t saying a thing about that. But he did tell us about the delicate ‘Code of Butlers’.

“While I was living in Scotland, I visited a friend living in another ‘rotting stately’ up the glen,” he said. “When I asked the butler how my friend was, he told me that ‘milk had been needed upstairs’. That’s butler-speak for ‘Her Ladyship has a dreadful hangover’.”

Inspired by Scottish memories, he rushed off and fetched a bottle of Bell’s. Pouring generously, he added:

“I learnt to drink whisky in Scotland. They say they use enough water when they make it, so you shouldn’t add more. And ice? Oh, ice bruises the whisky.”

Then we were in London with Martin, where he’d had a brush with the law.

“I’ll never forget the headline: ‘Boozy Toff Attempts to Enter Ritz Without Exiting Car’. I complained bitterly to the judge about the lack of parking space in Piccadilly.”

After two more Bell’s monsters, the Rottweiler had truly set in on the afternoon, so we fled down the hill with a promise to meet Martin early the next morning.

We were a few minutes late in arriving at the entrance to Fairview and there was Martin, tapping his foot on the asphalt of the N2 racetrack. He was looking forward to the outing.

Our first stop was up the road, at the Kurland Estate. Martin had designed much of this grand homage to polo. The budding greenie in me bristled at the arrogance of the ponies, all the Plett bling and the Countess of This and the Prince of That and the Eurocopters that “thickened the skies” here over Christmas. And at all those millions of litres of much-needed water going to waste in the “hissing of summer lawns” (to quote Joni Mitchell) and the White Russian blood lines and curlicues and such.

But the old-time libertine in me was totally fascinated by the Jilly Cooperishness of it all, the who’s-bonking-whose-wife-ness of it all, the airs and graces and rush of the chase on the polo field and the gasps of the sexy young things in the summertime. That’s always been Plett, really.

We had come to Kurland to admire Martin’s new pavilion, an exquisite series of three white buildings, spacious and airy, with the delicate Victorian lines of spun sugar.

“Oh yes, the hissing of those summer lawns again,” I cursed, as a spray of water hit my camera. To make matters worse, you could see the not-so-distant smoky haze of the firestorm that was beginning to suck up an awful lot of the forests and plantations and villages around here. But the morning was hot, and both Jules and Julia stood barefoot on the green polo field allowing the spray to irrigate them from top to bottom. Jules tucked in her shirt and did a surprise cartwheel, and we all applauded. Meanwhile, the water flowed at Kurland, at a rate of 1.5 million litres a week. I remembered Rod Hossack’s words:

“These guys are so rich they just say … find the water, ship it in somehow, bugger the cost. The stakes are high, my friend. Money’s on the move.”

We drove back past Plett to the former home of one Andries Stockenstrom le Fleur, who led a group of Griqua settlers to Plett in the late 1920s. Martin Rattray had been commissioned by the local authorities to restore the old farmhouse into a museum and to create a hamlet within the nearby Griqua Kranshoek community.

We were in a quiet valley full of Jersey cows and old stone pines. It was time for lunch, and we had packed a picnic of exotic breads, tomato, cold meat and cheese. Not a drop of booze in sight. Looking for a likely spot, we came upon the Roodefontein Dam, which was allegedly the water supply of Plett. It was drying up fast, and within a few months it would be at a meagre 5% of capacity. Something was drinking Plett dry.

We drove into the back of yet another estate that had been in the news (and not in a nice way), but by now we had developmental scandals clogging up our ears. Greed was going to close this part of the Paradise Coast down for good.

We drove past a rehabilitation centre where Martin may or may not have spent some time.

“Oh yes. The Pletty Ford Clinic,” he quipped. “They used to have horses there too. One day, however, some of the inmates rode them over to a shebeen in Kranshoek, exchanged the horses for drugs and went on the tear. Dreadful business.”

We had now decided to drive into the Harkerville Forest for our overdue picnic. As we bounced down the gravel road between tall indigenous trees, Julia casually mentioned that she’d come here to do dolphin therapy at some stage.

“For a story, of course,” she added.

“When I woke up, I found I was levitating, rigid as a board, two feet above the sofa. The woman told me not to worry, and I gradually floated down again.”

Lunch was delightful, but the lack of liquor was weighing heavily on our spirits. So off we went, like slavering gypsies, to Enrico’s at Keurbooms Strand. The late-afternoon setting on the beach was superb. We quaffed wine and ale and met some of the locals, who delighted in passing on scurrilous stories about Plettenberg Bay.

We heard about fugitive millionaires fleeing from foreign debts, of pharmacists wanted by Interpol, of boats offloading contraband in the night, of old-time pizzerias where you could order the drug of your choice and it came delivered in the same box as your Four Seasons.

During the high season in December, the N2 was called the “black crocodile” because it ate so many people. The local airport became Heathrow over Christmas and farmers rented out fields to aircraft owners for parking. Society hostesses were at full gallop with their rounds of parties … and then suddenly, in the midst of a flow of unprintable gossip, Martin appeared from nowhere and called out:

“Enrico, that fantastic French-café music, please.”

And suddenly Paolo Conte was amongst us on that deck with his bistro sounds and everyone, including the waiters, was jiving away joyously. Down at the shoreline, children danced with the waves and the light of the setting sun shot through the tankards of ale and suddenly we were all talking about onions.

“Did you know,” said the owl-eyed Julia, “it’s still legal in certain states in the USA for housewives to throw onions at persistent salesmen? Apropos of nothing, of course.”

I remembered Enrico Iacopini, who used to own the wildly successful Roma Pizzeria in my stamping ground of Melville, Jo’burg. He left Melville in 1998 after being shot in the stomach by a robber.

“But it’s not safe here in Plett either,” he said with a wide grin. “Just last week, Martin threw a pumpkin at me.”

Then photographs were taken, drunken-marriage certificates were produced, a wealthy woman’s pearl was temporarily purloined, and Martin embarked on a long tale about one Lady Sophia Gray.

“Who rode around on churchback, designing horses.” Yes, the Rottweiler had set in once again – on a perfect day in Plett …

Chapter 22: Storms River

Cadillac Jack

Lightning strikes deep into the dry fynbos behind the Tsitsikamma mountain ranges, and a fire begins to brood and smoulder in privacy. There is no question of rain, so the flicker becomes a blaze, spreading over the ridges and down into the valleys towards the sea. The rest of the country looks on with mild interest via millions of television screens and the protective distance of headlines.

But for the thousands of farmers, timber workers, homesteaders, shepherds, villagers and N2 commuters in the eastern and southern Cape, it’s all too real. The wall of fire grows two storeys high and is fast and deadly as it marches in a wide, united front along the Garden Route, seeking out resin-rich pine plantations and wattles and stately blue gums that become huge tree-bombs as they explode.

Jules and I leave Plettenberg Bay knowing little of this. We’ve seen the smoke smudges in the distance, but hell, there’s always a little blaze or two around here. They’ll put it out in a day or so and all will be well.

On our way to Storms River, deep in the Tsitsikamma Forest, we pass the emerald polo fields and arrive at the toll plaza. Something is amiss. The haze has settled on the highway, and visibility is down to 100 metres.

“Are you safe?” we ask the woman behind the glass in the toll booth. She makes a little face and shrugs. They’ve seen fires out here before.

Now the murk is positively apocalyptic and the sky has turned a completely unnatural, sinister shade of beige. Trees loom out of the haze like wintry skeletons. Two hadedahs circle overhead, confused by the mid-morning twilight. As are we …

Storms River Village is a tiny settlement tucked into a world of wood. There is a soft fall of ash flakes as we pull up at the Woodcutter’s Cottage on the main road. This is to be our new self-catering home for the next couple of days.

We unpacked all our worldly possessions into the cottage and went off to find Anneline Wyatt, who worked for Storms River Adventures. Anneline was distracted at first. We found out that her husband Martin was out fighting fires in the area.

“We’re all a bit worried about the direction of the wind and the flames,” she said. Which, in retrospect, was a very understated, Battle-of-Britain way of putting things. In fact, the village stood on the brink of annihilation. What usually saved it from going up in smoke was the fact that it was hard to burn the natural forest surrounding Storms River. The indigenous forest was moist, and so thick and dense that it lacked the quantities of oxygen needed to feed the fire. If Storms River Village had been located in the middle of a pine plantation, like some of the other villages in the area, it would stand no chance of survival. But this was a particularly dry season. Everything looked ready to burn.

The light was flat as we climbed into a large tractor-trailer with a busload of Dutch tourists for the Woodcutter’s Journey into the Plaatbos Nature Reserve.

We were lucky enough to have the current Miss Tsitsikamma, the lovely Jossy Abrahams, as our guide.

“Oh, our Jossy’s a real favourite with the tourists,” Anneline had said.

We drove into a forest where more than 500 plant species were to be found. Ferns were big business around here, with 16 tonnes of greenery sent overseas every week to garnish floral bouquets of European romantics. The harvesting was carefully monitored, to keep the business sustainable. Jossy gave us an insight into the forest.

“The blackwitch hazel is a natural air humidifier,” she said. “The hairy undersides of the leaves hold moisture and gradually release it during the heat of the day, keeping the forests moist.

“And here’s the malleblaar – the crazy leaf. Some of its leaves are sweet, while others are bitter. That’s to confuse the animals. The kammanassie tree gives off a milky latex if you cut it. It fools the stomach into feeling satisfied quickly, so that the animal moves away.”

The forest road we were slowly puttering down was once the national route through the district, built by the celebrated Thomas Bain and his army of convicts in 1885. Some say that this was the road-making genius’ greatest work, winding through the most spectacular part of the Garden Route and crossing the Groot, Bloukrans and Storms rivers.

“Interestingly enough,” said Jossy, “Thomas Bain used the old elephant paths to guide his way.”

At the low-water bridge, the Storms River flowed like Coca-Cola over the pale rocks, through reeds and shrubbery that could have come straight from the landscaped garden of someone important.

After a picnic lunch of chicken enjoyed in a woody setting, Jossy and her crew took us back to the village. The Dutch climbed in their air-conditioned tour bus and left the area. We prepared for our canopy adventure, which I had mistaken for a gentle stroll on some kind of platform up in the trees above us.

Then our guides started hauling out the harnesses and I thought Uh Oh, here we go again. Flinging ourselves about a dangerous place in the service of a good story. We looked up at the walls of the adventure company’s office and saw photographs of happy people speeding through the forest treetops, attached to wires.

With us this time was a six-pack of British tourists: three men and their wives, who were all hairdressers living in and around London. They travelled overseas once a year in a pack, and were as jovial as a jazz band.

So there I was, like a big, fat flying squirrel on five cups of coffee, whizzing towards the trunk of a fast-approaching tree. Not the usual picture of grace. More like a wombat on a wobbly. One of the British women braked to a complete stop on the first run and was left dangling in mid-air, wide-eyed and tearful. I hugged my tree trunk. It was time to go again, a 100-m green rush of forest flight.

My wife had a grin from ear to proverbial ear. She loved this stuff. Julie ‘Gonzo’ du Toit, who should have been a trapeze artist. Eventually we were all in the full swing of the adventure, and the adrenaline was flowing like hot wine in a ski lodge as we babbled away like howler monkeys in the penthouse of this magnificent forest. We stayed silent for just long enough to catch the flight of a red-winged Knysna turaco (loerie) and hear the insistent call of a forest buzzard as it flew nestwards.

The Hightop Speed Queen and I slept like exhausted lumberjacks that night. The next morning, the normally dramatic outline of the nearby Tsitsikamma mountains was obscured by smoke from the advancing fires. We went for a short walk in the forest, taking photographs in the artificially muted light as flakes of ash rained down gently.

Ashley Wentworth ran Storms River Adventures. On his office wall was an array of framed photographs of Ashley in dark suits, with smiling businessmen at glitzy awards functions.

“I keep them up there just to remind myself of what I escaped from,” he said. “Thank God I’m out of all that.”

“All that” was a long time spent working for multinational pharmaceutical companies.

At 46, Ashley sought to change his life completely. So he and his partner Fiona (I didn’t catch her surname at that moment) came here and turned Storms River Adventures into an ethical, eco-friendly, job-creating operation. They won award after award in the world of fair trade.

A shadow of pain crossed Ashley’s face as he continued:

“Then in 2000 we had that catastrophe, when 13 people died while blackwater-tubing on the Storms River. We had taken over the tubing operation from the former owner and had tested it completely for safety. We’d even flood-tested it to make sure we could get people out of the gorge if the water ever came down.”

But when a flash flood poured storm water into the Witteklip tributary of the Storms River, the situation went out of control in two-and-a-half minutes. The affected group was close to the take-out point and the enormous surge of water washed them past it, turning a nearby Grade 1 rapid (which even a child could safely navigate) into a Grade 5 (un-runnable, similar to a waterfall).

In the enquiry that followed, Storms River Adventures was exonerated of all blame.

“There was nothing anyone could have done to foresee or mitigate the extent of this flood,” said Ashley. “No one actually drowned. All deaths were from neck and head injuries as the force of the water knocked people against rocks.”

Storms River Adventures was at the epicentre of empowerment in the village, which included a catering company (serving a very good tramezzini), and a craft shop, where we met a guy who once had a tree fall on him and survived, albeit with a metal plate in his head.

Ashley’s company had trained more than 360 guides, who were now working all over southern Africa and beyond. We asked about the fires.

“You live with that danger all the time,” he said. “The last big one we had was in 1998, just after we arrived. The police came around one morning and ordered the village to evacuate. We took all the staff down to the rugby field, which is surrounded by indigenous forest. The fire bypassed us, leaving most of the village unscathed. We fear smoke inhalation more than the fire itself.”

Anneline came in with an update from Martin in the field (so to speak):

“It’s crossed over to Coldstream and is heading towards Soetkraal. There are three fires in the range at the moment, and one’s coming to us. A lot depends on wind and rain. It’s now at the Bobbejaan’s River. I don’t think the highway is closed yet.”

We walked outside. People were quietly preparing for the worst, filling water tanks. One of them looked as though it had just snuck out of a museum for an adventure.

“This is ridiculous. That fire tank is useless at the moment, because the pump is in for repair,” said Ashley, with a rueful smile.

More people arrived, wide-eyed, with the latest news. Between the Bobbejaan’s and Groot River, the fire was right up against the road. The driver of a tour bus reported seeing two leopards and an aardvark crossing the road in a panic to get away from the fire. It was pandemonium all along the upper reaches of the Garden Route.

I, meanwhile, had been wandering through the village and found an intriguing collection of Cadillacs in an Art Deco showroom right next door to a Victorian hotel complex. Hmm.

The owner’s son, a young guy called Jean du Rand, at first thought I was trying to flog magazine advertising, which upset me too. Although he was giving me the ‘tradesman’s entrance’ runaround, I insisted on seeing the legendary Jan du Rand, owner of all those magnificent machines at the front.

He was also the laird of the Tsitsikamma Village Inn, which looked very Rattray in mien and design. This was the original site of the Tsitsikamma Forest Inn, complete with original yellowwood floors in the old bar.

Jan du Rand arrived, a little grumpily at first, but he soon warmed to us upon realising we were not out to sell him space of any kind. We spoke about the fire.

“When you evacuate,” said the big man, “you must stay in the middle of the road. And don’t stop, because that’s when the fire will take you. Just keep going.” Little did we know – that bit of advice was to be our mantra the next day.

Jan confirmed that Mad Martin had, in fact, designed his new hotel. How did such a plummy Scot like Martin Rattray ever end up around the same fire as this hale, hearty old Afrikaner?

“I used to play bowls and tennis with his parents, Gillian and Peter,” said Jan. Now you see. Never judge a book, I say.

And the Cadillac Junction outside?

“I grew up in Hanover in the Karoo. Back in 1958, when I was a teenager, one Bok Theron bought himself a Cadillac and used it only on Sundays. I admired that car so much.

“In 1990 or so, I went to visit a car collector in Cradock and found myself staring at the very Cadillac once owned by Bok Theron. It cost me a fortune, but I just had to have it.”

Warming to his subject, Jan took us off to his Cadillac Shack, a showroom done up in deep-rose pink. His pack of well-groomed, big-fin Cadillacs stood waiting, amid displays of old Underwood typewriters and vintage vinyl from the sixties. In the corner was a gleaming red 1973 Ford Mustang.

“That’s my muscle car,” said Jan. Outside, people were rushing about in a tizz over the looming clouds of fire smoke. Inside, we were talking Newton Metres, V-8s and 4 km a litre. Jan was keen to take us for a ride on the N2 to his petro-port at the Storms River Bridge.

“They’ve just found a suicide at the bridge,” he said. “Wanna go for a spin?”

Initially, the little private-school boy in me recoiled. Go for a ride on a fire-straddled highway in someone’s outrageously indulgent ‘muscle car’ while aardvarks are fleeing for their lives? To see a dead body? Are you mad?

The travel writer in me said Bloody right, old son. Get into that Mustang before the guy changes his mind. So Jules and I shared a look and a smile and then hopped in. Besides, I liked Cadillac Jack du Rand. He reminded me of my brother, who also had those larger-than-life eccentricities.

As we pulled out into the road, everyone stared. Jan hardly noticed. Out of the speakers a 1950s singer warbled moodily.

The Mustang kept growling and leaping forward like a beast desperate to run. Jan was weighing up the odds between impressing us and being caught. As he eased his foot off the accelerator, he realised how lucky he had been. One of the Knights of the Order of the Shady Trees was lurking in the undergrowth with his radar camera and his reflective shades.

We arrived at the petro-port just as the mortuary van was leaving with the body.

While the fires had been keeping the Garden Route in a fever over the past few days, a young Capetonian with his own problems had bought a one-way ticket on a luxury bus to the Storms River Bridge. Once there, he went to sit under one of the mainstays of the bridge, opened his briefcase, took out a blank piece of paper and began to write.

Days later, someone would spot dozens of pieces of paper littered on the ground, look up and see a body swaying from a belt tied to one of the bridge beams. The man had apparently struggled to compose his suicide note.

Once we’d passed the rather smoky traffic cop on the way back, Jan let the Mustang out of its cage and quantities of proverbial rubber were burnt.

“Dinner’s at seven,” Jan announced. We couldn’t possibly. We were busy. Stuff to do. Serious stuff. And then the devil-writer with the pointed little horns blurted:

“OK then. What should we bring?”

Chapter 23: Storms River to Jeffreys Bay

Up in Smoke

The Storms River Wedding of the Year kicks off with a growl as the priest pitches up on a Harley Davidson at the broekielace pastel palace called The Tsitsikamma Inn. The whole village is agog. This is Cadillac Jack’s big day, and his young wife, Anne, waits at the makeshift altar, dressed like a 1950s American soda-fountain babe.

Soon, that well-known 1973 Mustang comes rumbling down the main road and out springs Elvis Presley. Or the closest thing to Elvis Presley you’ll find anywhere along the Garden Route today. Oh yes. Cadillac Jack du Rand (some simply call him “Jan”, but for the purposes of this fantasy his name is Cadillac Jack) has arrived in style. His own style, mixed up with a little bit of Las Vegas in the Time of the King. A white suit with bell-bottoms, sequins and a pointy collar. Sneakers to die for and one helluva rug swivelling jauntily on his balding noggin.

The wedding speech is a hoot. Almost every phrase is accompanied by a significant Elvis song. When Cadillac Jack turns to address his in-laws, the chosen number is ‘It’s Alright Mama’.

“Come in, come in,” Jan du Rand boomed as we entered his mansion through the big red doorway at the back. The first thing we saw was an enormous plasma screen TV – about the size of a six-seater table – attached to the wall. The King, surrounded by flunkies as he arrived somewhere in Hawaii for a performance, leered down from the screen with his Tupelo Mississippi Cajun sneer.

“I like Elvis a lot,” said Cadillac Jack in passing.

A number of other couples were outside at the braai, where a large selection of meats were sizzling. Jan took us around to the front garden, where he planned to keep 34 pairs of exotic water birds. Jules was about to give him some good advice in case a feathered foreigner flew in and got funky with some of his garden varieties, leaving behind a little ‘present’ of Type H5N1, a virulent strain of avian flu. I stopped her just in time. We were here for a party, and it was clear that nothing would dissuade Jan from buying his fancy front-lawn ducks.

Inside, Elvis was getting it on. Someone turned the volume right up. They were probably jiving self-consciously to the faint strains of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ over in Kurland by now.

“Here’s my gym,” said Jan, showing us a vast exercise room with Jacuzzi, sauna, weights, running machines and an inspirational set of Cadillac prints on the walls.

We sat down to an excellent repast of shoulder of lamb, rump kebabs and pork chops with salads and rosemary potatoes. Anne – who had once managed a guesthouse in England – was an excellent chef and a charming hostess. But she really wanted to murder us with her pudding.

“It’s healthy,” she laughed. “It’s only fruit.” Yeah right: brandied bananas, berries, ice cream and a generous drizzling of Belgian chocolate. After more than six, occasionally dodgy (in culinary terms) weeks on the road, we leapt on the feast. A chubby Elvis – never one to turn down something sweet – smirked at us approvingly from up there on the big screen.

We rolled back to the Woodcutter’s Cottage after dinner, full as two ticks on a hound dog’s bum.

“It’s over the top, but I like it,” I said to Jules and burped loudly into the Tsitsikamma night. “You know me and eccentrics. And then there’s Elvis. Any friend of Elvis is a friend of mine.” She had to agree with my sentiments, although she had arrived a little late in this world to appreciate the Presley era fully.

The next morning we met Emma Fisher, the main liaison person between the local township residents and Storms River Adventures. Emma was also the home-based care expert who worked on the frontline of health in the community. Emma’s ‘back story’ was a hard one. Her forest-ranger husband Petrus Ngcobo had burnt to death in an accident involving petrol many years before. She worked as a labourer for the national park, cleaning toilets for R18 a month. With Petrus’s regular compensation payout of R30, Emma had had less than R50 to support herself and six children each month.

“Then I was promoted to cleaning chalets,” she said, “and life got a little better. There were lots of leftovers from the visitors and this helped me to feed the kids.”

Both Emma and her next husband, Johannes Fisher, got diabetes. Johannes died at 51, leaving her a widow for the second time. But by now she had grown used to the presence of ill health and bad fortune. So she started looking after the people in the Storms River Township.

“I knew suffering. I could help other people now.”

As we drove into the township, Emma told us about the medicines they used to take in her younger days.

“We used the perdepisboom [horse-piss tree] for women’s problems, hotnotskooi [Hottentot’s bed] for colds and marijuana for asthma – taken as a tea, of course.”

But now the township was drinking itself to death, she said sorrowfully.

“Young girls are having babies just to get social grants. Others are getting drunk and having sex without condoms, exposing themselves and others to the HIV/AIDS virus. We call them ‘beautiful bombs’.”

Emma, Jules and I went off to hunt for one Paw Paw Scott, the man behind the famous Otter Trail, but Paw Paw was out fighting fires. So we went back to Storms River, where I had a long-overdue reunion hug with Fiona Green, Ashley Wentworth’s partner. Fiona, a slim, attractive woman with an unforgettably cute lisp (that’s how I remembered her from our woolly days at Rhodes University) was every bit as caring as Ashley in her attitudes to the poor living in their midst. And now that the village was threatened by fire once again, her first concern lay with the township people and their pets.

My concern lay with the Bloukrans Bungee Jump that awaited us the next morning. More than 200 metres of free fall at the end of a rubber line down into an infinite gorge? In my delicious decrepitude? Was I bloody crazy? Look, I’d done this kind of thing once before (Victoria Falls, circa 1996) and ended up singing rather high-pitched snatches of a Neil Young ditty all the way down to a point just above the Zambezi River. But I’d been desperate for another story angle on Victoria Falls, and the guys in the Explorer Bar the night before had laid all manner of bets, forcing my hand.

But this was another kind of animal. Twice as high, twice as scary. And, to crown it all, I was doing it completely sober this time.

So the dawn arrived and we wondered where the fires had gone. The first gusts of wind had rattled through town like an express train just before six o’clock, clearing the skies of smoke. The mountains were visible for the first time that week.

As we stood in the road outside the cottage, we felt another windy draft. This time it was hot, like a distant dragon’s breath. The much-feared berg winds had arrived. They would be fanning the embers like a giant set of bellows.

Before we left for our date with a bungee rope, we popped in to visit Ashley and Fiona at their offices. Anneline told us her husband Martin and his fire-fighting team had been out since long before sunrise. Cars were arriving and departing from the village at speed, leaving strands of rumour and garbled bits of information in their wake. The fire had jumped the highway at a number of places. The local clinic was open and ready to receive burn victims. Would the Plaatbos Forest, with its indigenous growth, be a good sanctuary?

Then the smoke descended on Storms River and the sky turned a dreadful apricot-sepia colour. Ashley had been planning to go into the plantations to cut down a pine for the staff Christmas tree.

“I suppose I’d better hurry and get one before they all burn down.”

A light drift of smoke ash began falling on the village. We called the bungee people and they said come on over, we’re ready for you. Jules, who had made sure to wear a special sports bra for the jump, was now worried about the flammable nylon content of her tracksuit pants.

“I’m sure they won’t let us dive into fire,” I said without any real conviction. Shit. Not only was I going to attempt the world’s highest bungee jump in my middle years, but there was now the added thrilling possibility of going down in flames as well.

We hit the N2 back towards Plett and the Bloukrans Bridge. Smoke rose ominously from both sides of the highway.

We reached the jump area and I nearly had a party all by myself, right there. The bungee staff came hurrying past, carrying equipment.

“No jumping today. So sorry. We’ve just received orders to evacuate.” They ran off in the direction of a clump of wooden huts right next to a pine forest. A Kiwi jump master called Devon came over and gave us (ironically) a ‘rain check’ on the jump.

“Now you’d better get going,” he said anxiously. “The fire is very close to the road.”

“Dodged that bullet,” I said to Jules as we turned back onto the N2 and headed for Storms River Village. Along the way, we saw road workers working the verges with their hedge-trimmers, completely oblivious to the approaching blaze because they wore earmuffs. We caught their attention and pointed at the smoky distance, but they just smiled, nodded and continued their trimming.

At the Boskor sawmill, a group of seven women flagged us down. They had been told to evacuate the sawmill premises, and were frantic about their children and homes on the other side of the Storms River Bridge.

“Hop on,” we said – and they needed no second invitation.

A hundred metres on, we were flagged down by fire officials and the women climbed out, chattering nervously. A luxury bus ahead of us did a U-turn. Other vehicles passed us. We glimpsed flames above the trees to our left, and then they vanished in a billow of thick smoke.

The firestorm arrived, flanking both sides of the highway, which had suddenly become our safety zone. We were parked behind a bakkie loaded with what looked like gas canisters. Behind us was a truck loaded with freshly-cut timber. We were not in great company right then. We felt an overwhelming urge to escape, by any means possible.

We decided to drive on into the smoke. The women jumped back onto the vehicle, with two on the back seat behind us.

“Get some pictures of the fire,” I urged Jules as we passed the crackling, angry wall of fire that seemed very keen to turn us into toast. The day turned into dark grey night. Like a desperate moth, I just followed the two orange hazard lights of the vehicle in front of us.

“Chris, I think we should turn back,” said Jules. But that option was no longer available and besides, I remembered the words of Cadillac Jack:

“Just keep moving. Just go forward.” Thanks Jack. You darling Elvis impersonator-type fellow, you.

The women on the back of our bakkie were whimpering and breathing heavily through their scarves. I was too busy concentrating on those flashing taillights ahead of me to be scared. That would come later, I knew.

Finally the smoke lightened from dark brown to tobacco to tan to grey and we pulled over at the turnoff to Storms River Village. The women coughed and climbed down. They thanked us and disappeared down the road to where their friends were waiting. As complete strangers, we had nearly shared a death that day.

The man driving the timber truck behind us also stopped. He came up and shook my hand.

“Wow. That was a serious risk we took,” he said, with a rasp in his voice. “I had to wet some toilet paper and hold it over my mouth to breathe. I just thanked God for your taillights all the way through.”

Storms River Village was in uproar. The road was alive with people, carrying their prized possessions to safety. Two Israeli backpackers begged us for a lift. Sure, we said. So we fetched their kit from their guesthouse and deposited them at the entrance of the Storms River Adventures office. Ashley would know what to do with them.

Anneline Wyatt drove up in her sedan, which was filled with two dogs, a hamster, an African Grey parrot called Gorgeous and a ring-necked parakeet called Sexy. Her pets were distinctly pissed off at having to share such a small space.

Fiona was whirling in and out of the township ferrying people and animals. She was covered in scratches from trying to free panicky township dogs from their chain posts. She said the township people were sprinkling their lawns and roofs with water, and burying their gas bottles in the ground. The supermarket did a roaring trade in comfort food. Then they told us that the park was now on fire. We heard that the village of Coldstream was burning, that children had gone missing. The nightmares were becoming real.

The hot berg wind suddenly swung around and turned icy. The prayed-for cold front had arrived. We scrabbled for jackets. Anneline’s cellphone rang. It was Martin. Could she prepare supper for 22 starving fire-fighters? No problem.

We decided to leave town for our next stop, Jeffreys Bay. But the N2 was closed, so we bet on the R102 via Humansdorp. Neither of us wanted to leave our new friends, but they were distracted and it looked as though there was nothing more here for us to do.

“Promise that if the R102 looks even vaguely dangerous, you’ll come right back here and stay with us,” warned Fiona. “We have a flat waiting for you.”

We had a small section of the N2 completely to ourselves. I was pleased to see that the Knight of the Order of the Shady Trees had taken his speed trap and buggered off to safer spots. I wished him well.

At the Tsitsikamma Lodge turnoff, we saw an ironic flood-warning sign, and then we were on the R102 in an area called Kwaaibrand (Angry Burn), which was a little more in keeping with the theme of the day, we thought.

Radio Algoa had fire updates every few minutes, begging people like us to stay off the roads. The air was still brown. We drove past farms where dairy cows stared dumbly at their burning piles of lucerne. We saw farm workers in the distance, vainly battling looming fires with wet sacks and more courage than I would ever muster. Large gum trees next to the road had caught fire at their base and would soon fall across the R102. The whole area was devastated.

Finally, we arrived at Jeffreys Bay where, out on the legendary Supertubes, the surfers played in the late-afternoon light like sea sprites. We sent SMSs to our friends to tell them we were safe, and fellow travel hack Geoff Dalglish replied:

“It’s amazing what some people will do to get out of a bungee jump …”

Chapter 24: Jeffreys Bay

Sushi Surfer

Where’s the perfect life? Who’s living it? Waddabout my slice?

This is for fellows in the 50-plus age group. What say we quit the city and take up the surfing life at Jeffreys Bay? Swap our PCs and spreadsheets for Apple Macs, a photo-software package and a music-edit suite? Trade the Merc and the endless repayments for a little bubble car that runs on the smell of an oil rag? Pawn the golf clubs and the rest of the urban stuff and buy an electric guitar, a microphone and a brace of surfboards?

What’s that you say? Pie-in-the-sky idea? I should grow up? Read on, O faithless one …

Jules and I drove in through the fire season of the Eastern Cape and Carpark Vanessa could smell the smoke on us when we arrived. The Isuzu’s upholstery reeked like a burning tobacconist’s and I was desperately in need of good Scotch therapy. Like most people, I tend to keep my head in the midst of a real crisis. Afterwards, however, I get the shakes.

“There’s a bus full of school children trapped at the Van Staden’s River Gorge,” said the attractive, Kiwi-born Carpark Vanessa, as she handed us the keys to our luxury suite at African Perfection, a holiday apartment complex overlooking the shoreline at Supertubes. Not really wanting to think about those fires any more, we explored our new digs instead.

You could see this was a place for surfers. There were surf racks in the room and requests on signs for wetsuits to be placed over balconies, not in bathrooms. For a split second I felt like a wave rider. But the reality is that wave rider and golf have only one thing in common: both activities are alien to me. I do, however, really like to watch people surfing. Golf? Not so much.

A week before, Jules and I had dropped in on Rod Hossack, the veteran surfer from Vic Bay, for a Surfing 101 session.

“The Aussies were the first to colonise the world in terms of surfing,” he said as we sat on the porch of his marvellous guesthouse overlooking the bay.

“In the ’60s, they were heading off to the furthest islands, living like feral cats wherever they went. But even then, there was an overwhelming spirit of ‘localism’. Transport was not always available, so surfers used to specialise in their own bays and were often downright hostile to strangers.”

Rod, in his mid-50s, was also living a really good life. For two months of the year he ‘and a few good mates’ went surfing in Bali. The rest of the year was spent in the idyllic Victoria Bay with his wife, Shanel, and their daughter, Amber, with occasional jaunts up to Jeffreys for something different to ride.

Back when the world was younger and Jimi Hendrix was still a proudly Seattle muzo, surfers looked like suntanned hippies with their long locks and their Kombi camper vans and their stashes of marijuana. Nowadays, there was big money involved. The sponsors had stepped in and the sport had spruced itself up. Short back and sides.

We stood on the porch of our apartment and watched rhythmic lines of green-grey swells unfolding in our direction, neat pleats, raised rows like corduroy, rising swiftly and gracefully to become glassy and translucent. Then they began breaking from our right to our left, lifting, curling sweetly and falling on their foam, peeling across the bay, a movement that seemed to last forever. The surfers leapt on their boards at the last possible moment and danced on the green-cream speckled face of the waves.

This was what had driven surfers of all ages to this place for more than four decades: the delight of Supertubes peeling down from Boneyards to The Point, steady as rice-paper ripping.

There was one more thing that hadn’t changed about surfing: the girls. Count on the babes to be there through all stages of Aqua Man: from feckless hippie to sponsored yuppie to old fart squeezed into a wetsuit, accompanied by his forlorn dogs at the waves’ edge. The girls were always present on the beach, often pretending not to notice their men out on the waves. But you knew. A girl loves a singer. A girl loves a surfer. A girl loves a man who can cook. Which brings us to Steve Walsh of 20 Pepper Street.

I hadn’t seen Steve’s craggy face since the dark and desperate days of the 1980s in Jo’burg, when he played music in clubs all over the city. I remembered his voice, a throaty mix of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen with wistful shades of Neil Young.

Twenty years later, I found Steve Walsh again. He had a funky little bistro right in the basement of African Perfection. That night, he introduced Jules and me to the world of sushi and sashimi – clean, raw food, straight from the sea. Someone had brought him a fresh yellowtail that morning. Steve prepared the meal in front of us: slices of yellowtail sashimi and hand-formed nigiri sushi, showing us how to hold and dip the little portions, what the pickled ginger was for and how dangerously delicious the wasabi mustard could be.

“It’s considered good luck and good manners to rest the chopsticks with the sharp points facing left,” he said sagely. Was this really the Steve Walsh of Jack Daniels Rockey 24 Prohibition Club and late-night Fontana Hillbrow fried-chicken fame?

“These days, I’m hooked on sushi,” he said, sneaking a little rice roll off my plate and quickly swallowing it. “That, and surfing.”

Steve also had his music corner in the restaurant, a tiny stage setup that sported a Fender Telecaster, an amp and a microphone.

“No gigs, mate. I sing when the mood takes me,” he smiled, with no apparent regret. I pulled him into the past with a couple of questions.

“I got out of the music business 10 years ago. I could see I wasn’t going to become a rock star,” he said.

Steve’s one and only CD so far, a very good collection of his own songs called Mister Dog, said it all on the inside sleeve:

“These songs were written between 1975 and 1995 when I decided to reinvent my life as a cook and open a restaurant rather than end up singing requests for a bunch of ‘play it again Steve’ drunkards in some poxy bar while drowning my dreams in brandy and Coke.”

The ‘Conversion of Steve Walsh’ didn’t begin here at Jeffreys. It started out at St Helena Bay on the West Coast, where he ran a restaurant and cooked over an open flame.

“At first, it was terrifying,” he said. “Would people like my food? I’d see a car’s lights come bouncing down the long track to my farmhouse restaurant and I’d think, ‘Go back. Oh please, go back.’ Then we started getting repeat business – people took to the food.”

We thought we knew the West Coast after our long ride from Alexander Bay to Cape Town. We thought we knew all the legends. Steve Walsh knew more. And he had the inside track on the issues, as well. He broke out a bottle of Jamesons and we rambled on about perlemoen and lobster to sharks and then West Coast dynasties we’d never heard of.

It took Steve nearly a year to learn the discipline of making sushi.

“And the respect one needs to give it.”

We asked about life on the water.

“The locals are traditionally very defensive of their turf,” he said. “Three years ago there was a vicious battle for command of the waves. It was sparked off by foreigners muscling in, which incensed the people who live here. The locals started wearing white vests over their wet suits and called themselves the J-Bay Underground, showing a bit of muscle themselves. It wasn’t all heaven out there. Surfers would slash one another’s tyres in the battle for a place on the waves. This happens all over the world.”

The next day, we would find the following graffiti on a face-brick wall near the shore:

“Don’t live here – don’t surf here.”

Steve said things had eased up in Jeffreys Bay, however.

“Turf has been established. The locals are more relaxed. In fact, a lot of foreign surfers are now remarking on how friendly the J-Bay crowd is.”

He spoke of the lure of surfing, the ultimate sensation of ‘the green room’, the cylindrical wave that put you in another place. The Mystic.

“And then there’s the power pocket, the critical breaking section of wave that speeds the surfer along at nearly 80 km an hour,” he said. “You use every muscle in your body, and are constantly competing with yourself.

“Supertubes is not the place to learn surfing. You’ll kill yourself. Have a look at those rocks at low tide. At high tide they’re only a metre below the surface. You come here when you’re good.

“After a while you become a water-man, you learn to deal with the ocean conditions, how to judge the waves. Every good surfer is a good water-man.”

In the old days, he said, surfers made up a small group of people with a bad reputation for grabbing people’s daughters in the back of their vans, taking drugs, throwing wild parties and dressing strangely.

“Shaun Thompson changed the image of surfing all around the world,” said Steve. “In 1977, he became the world champion. He was presentable and interesting and sponsors loved him.” Steve put himself into the ‘soul surfer’ category.

He talked about the famous surfing destinations around the world, such as Teahupoo in Tahiti, “the scariest, most radical wave on the planet. I’m so happy I’m old so I don’t have to go and surf it. That’s the ultimate punishment.”

Did they respect him out there?

“Surfing is a sport where age makes no difference,” he said. “You’ll get 14-year-olds yelling: ‘Get off my wave, you old bastard.’ Around here, kids grow up quickly, because they hang out with adults so much.”

We visited Steve in his tiny bedsit to see the DVD Teahupoo – The Two Days That Blow Minds. There was a bed for himself, one for his dog Duke, a desk and a new Apple Mac he was slowly coming to terms with. Steve’s life was completely pared down. His current reading material was a book on Japanese cooking and a surfing magazine. Girls, Steve, what about the girls?

“There’s someone in Cape Town. I see her four times a year,” he said, and left it at that.

Back in our room, I paged through a copy of Zig Zag, the local surfing magazine everyone read in Jeffreys Bay. There was the thing on the Aussie mice I’d heard about. A guy called Shane Willmott was training three mice called Harry, Chopsticks and Bunsen to surf “small waves on tiny mouse-size surfboards”.

Willmott dyed his surfing mice different colours so they would “stand out in the white wash” of the waves.

I liked this story, but at breakfast down in 20 Pepper Street the next morning, I really liked the music of Jack Johnson, the Hawaiian surfer-singer whose sound was playing almost all the time in Steve’s place. When we checked the www.jackjohnsonmusic.com website later, the musician was quoted as saying:

“Future projects? I wanna collaborate with the waves for the next couple of years. I want to take a little break and surf a lot.” But not before playing a concert at the Waikiki Shell in Honolulu with my personal hero, Willie Nelson, in April 2006.

We had an appointment with our landlady, Cheron Kraak, who owned and ran the South African Billabong franchise and a company called Country Feeling. En route to her offices we drove through Jeffreys, which had to rate as one of the ugliest architectural collections along the SA coastline. Charm-free face brick was everywhere. ‘Low maintenance’ in full supply. One of the property ads at a supermarket read:

“Lock-up-and-go units, compromising [sic] two beds, one bath, open-plan kitchen area, parking baby [sic], walk to beach, limited sea view.” Not today, thanks.

We mentioned this to Cheron Kraak in her office. She pulled a face and agreed:

“Ugliness devalues everything.”

Cheron remembered this place when it was still a piece of hippie heaven on earth.

“I came here in the 1970s and fell in love with the surfing. I ran away from the whole tennis club thing in Jo’burg. An Aussie girl showed me how to make reversible hand-embroidered bikinis and board shorts. I started this business with one portable sewing machine.”

Cheron transformed a matchbox-sized garage into Jeffreys Bay’s first surf shop. She’d found a niche.

“I’d let the surfers choose the material and the buttons, and I’d cut the shorts out on the lounge table, sew madly and deliver them myself,” she said. “I even offered a repair service when they got torn.” And then the Weekend Post told her story in January 1981 below the catchy headline:

“She sews sea shorts on the seashore.”

Life was only partly idyllic in the beginning. Jeffreys Bay had been a tiny fishing village, a beloved holiday-fishing spot for the local farmers, who didn’t immediately take to the surf crews.

“We were not accepted,” Cheron said. “You’d see curtains twitch as we walked past. Only a few people would let us stay in their outside rooms or sell us food. So we bought our own property.”

Cheron’s surf shop grew throughout the 1980s.

“A lot of locals still thought it was a front for something illegal,” she said. “But it was just the fear of the unknown. They were scared of change.”

Cheron Kraak now ran an operation that employed more than 200 people and brought an international surfing event to Jeffreys Bay in winter each year: the Billabong World Championship Pro Tour.

“Jeffreys Bay becomes the centre of the surfing universe for more than two weeks,” she said. “Every event is streamed live on the Billabong website, and there is massive media coverage, publicity you could never buy.”

Another feature of Cheron’s company was that she preferred to employ surfers.

“Everyone buys into the lifestyle,” she said. “Surfers run the business the way we want it. Outsiders just don’t get it – there’s a distinctive look.

“And in terms of our employment agreement, there’s ‘permission to surf when there’s surf’. After all, why are the kids here in Jeffreys in the first place? It’s the best right-handed break in the world.”

Carpark Vanessa emerged from her Wendy-house office as we returned. OK, I give up. Why Carpark Vanessa?

“Because I’ve been here working in the carpark for longer than anyone can remember,” she said. “We’ve got a few soul surfers in at 20 Pepper Street – Steve said to call you.”

The old guys (what am I saying? They were younger than me) were all successful businessmen and were tucking into a late English breakfast after a morning on the waves. We asked a large fellow what it was like being ‘in the green room’.

“Hmm. It’s a very rare feeling,” he said. “Like getting laid these days.” His feisty little wife raised her eyebrow as if to say that’s it, buster. No afternoon delights for you.

That night, Steve Walsh played for us. He sang the Waits classic ‘Heart of Saturday Night’ and I was back in old Jo’burg, drinking tequila sunrises on Rockey Street with my mates after a day of teargas in the townships. And then he put down his Fender, picked up his sushi knife, and proceeded to feed us …

Chapter 25: Port Elizabeth to East London

“Chickens, Plucked or Live”

After writing my final exams at Grahamstown’s Rhodes University, I shoulder my rucksack and stick a thumb out on the road to Jo’burg, via King William’s Town. Three black guys in a skoroskoro stop for me and I jump on the back, taking shelter from the pounding Border storm under a torn piece of old tarpaulin. This is 1975 and I’m not sure I’ve done the right thing here.

Especially when they stop off at a busy shebeen in King William’s Town and load up with sweet wine and Carling Black Label beer.

“Celebration drinks for after they’ve sorted me out,” I worry to myself.

They potter on into the countryside of thickets and low hills, and come to a stop in the middle of nowhere. Uh oh. This is it.

The driver’s mate hops out and hands me my very own bottle of sweet wine.

“It will keep you dry,” he laughs. Yeah, right. You just want to get me drunk and then it’s all over. But this line of thought is starting to tire me. They drive on, while I get a bit pissed at the back, singing Neil Young softly to myself in the rain. Let me exit this world with a suitable rendition of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’. Kind regards, Mugged & Maudlin, Eastern Cape.

Just south of Cathcart, my benefactors stop again and go searching for wood to burn. Is this my final resting place? No. A piece of boerewors sausage the length of a champion python is flung onto burning bush. The lightly toasted meat is divided into quarters and I am handed my share.

There is a minimum of conversation. No life stories are exchanged. All I know is that they’re three Pondos going to look for work on a farm up in the Stormberg, somewhere near Molteno.

The men leave me on the N6 to Aliwal North, half-cut, well fed and bemused. Fear had driven me just this side of mad. The uncomplicated kindness of a lift, a bottle of sweet wine and a piece of sausage brings me back.

“OK Jules, let’s go out and commit some serious responsible tourism,” I joked to my wife 28 years later as I packed camera gear for a spin around Port Elizabeth’s townships with Calabash Tours. Finally, we were back in the Eastern Cape.

Responsible tourism. What a fuddy-duddy name for a great thing. A fun thing. Rather ‘dance-in-the-street tourism’. Rather ‘win-win tourism’.

“Maybe they should call it ‘discovery tourism’,” mused Jules as we left our boutique hotel in the Summerstrand with one Nelson Sebezela from Calabash. On the way, we picked up an aspiring wine maker from Australia, a hulking youngster called Michael. He was already looking green about the gills, muttering something about a late-night curry that was shouting the odds back at him.

“And you haven’t even seen your first Smiley yet,” said Nelson.

“What’s a Smiley?” asked Michael with an uncertain look.

“Wait. That’s for later.”

I wanted a photograph of Queen Victoria, who stood stern and forbidding outside the Port Elizabeth Library. She was a silent reprimand to overdue-book borrowers everywhere.

As I was framing her glaring visage in my lens, two local lasses called out:

“Leave that old lady. Take our picture instead.” I made them pose with The Librarian Queen as a compromise.

From the minute we climbed into the Calabash-mobile, it was clear who our guide’s hero was.

“Nelson! Rolihlahla! Mandela!” he cheered, fist clenched and waving out of the minibus window. Nelson Sebezela then launched into Xhosa for Dummies & Daytrippers with an exhibition of confounding vocal clicks.

Driving into the middle-class township of KwaGxaki, Nelson spoke of goats and street committees:

“Around here, when you move into a new area, it’s traditional to have a big party, invite all your neighbours and slaughter a goat. They’ll quiz you about where you’ve come from, what you do, who your family is and what made you give up your last place.

“I recently left my parents in KwaZakhele,” he said. “I found my own spot, in the same township, and my new neighbours were so curious they sent a delegation to the family home to find out more about me.

“Even in the richer townships, there are street committees. That’s us Africans – we’re always in each other’s business. Sometimes, however, those street committees play a vital role, like breaking up family feuds.”

Three ghosts, magnificently covered in white clay, strode across a gully in the distance. I wanted to photograph them but because they were abaKwetha (initiates) no verbal contact was allowed. So, after a hundred hand gestures, they finally agreed to pose in silence.

We passed through the morning markets of KwaZakhele, where women vendors were cooking up a roadside storm. Among the “Chickens, Plucked or Live” signs was far stranger fare.

“Welcome to Smiley Street,” said Nelson. There came an audible groan from the sick Aussie at the back as we encountered scores of blackened sheep’s heads – the local breakfast of champions.

“The sheep’s head is put into the fire,” Nelson informed us, thoroughly enjoying this part of the tour. “When the lips have been stretched into a smile, you know it’s done. The women then take it out of the fire, clean it up and remove the brains, which we rarely eat. The real treats are the cheeks and the gums.”

Just then, somewhere in the vicinity of historic Red Location, Michael had to exit the minibus and chunter loudly in the mud.

“Sies, man!” a couple of passing township women remarked, and turned their heads away in disgust.

Three years later, on the great Shorelines tour, we were back in the townships of Port Elizabeth with Nelson. This time, his boss, Paul Mediema of Calabash, was with us. We were drinking beer down at Kwekwe’s in KwaZakhele Township.

Was our kombi safe around the corner, I asked. “If the kombi is stolen, we just report the matter to the amaDhlozi,” said Paul, rolling himself a cigarette rather expertly. “It’s a system that evolved out of the anti-apartheid movement. Self-defence units became street committees. If you lose something, you just go to them, pay a finder’s fee and that’s that.”

In the kitchen at Kwekwe’s, Patricia January and her assistant Beauty Dywili were adding final touches to the tourists’ feast of chicken stew, boerewors, coleslaw, mealie pap, mash and fresh bread. They were expecting a large busload of Hollanders.

“We can’t give them too much traditional food,” Patricia said. “It would stress them.” There would be no grinning sheep on offer tonight.

The regulars, mostly older men, were having their Friday-night drink and catching up with mates.

The huge luxury bus arrived and out streamed about 40 bewildered souls. The township choir, a ragtag band of singing angels, began a litany of praise and welcome. The Hollanders walked the gauntlet of warmth and song into the shebeen, studiously avoiding eye contact. Soon, a few cold beers, some excellent singing and Patricia’s hot meal relaxed the group and grins began to emerge like shy little face-ferrets. Some very responsible tourism was on the go …

The next day we drove north towards Port Alfred. It was raining and the land about us looked Irish. The firestorms of the past week were nearly forgotten, as though they had happened in another country 10 years before. Still, we phoned Ashley back at Storms River to find out if all was well.

“The rain arrived,” he said, and you could hear the party in his voice. “The fires died just in time and missed the village.” We said goodbye as we entered what looked like the set of The Truman Show.

The morning sun lit up the Port Alfred marina in a dozen pastel hues. Fluffy clouds drifted overhead. Canvas-covered boats bobbed gently on blue water and the air was still.

We were in Port Alfred’s pre-Christmas lull, guests of the founder and developer of the Royal Alfred Marina, Justin de Wet Steyn. Within weeks, most of the 200 mansions that made up this slice of seaside heaven would come alive with upcountry families. Endless rows of Christmas lights would shine into the skies of settler country and Santa would ride the canals in a ski boat laden with presents. Canoes would forage up the Kowie River; deep-sea fishing boats would head out into the Indian Ocean for bigger stuff. And no Smileys would be served here, either.

“This is the lifestyle people dream about,” said the developer, who had made his earlier fortune from fried-chicken franchises all over southern Africa.

“Me, not so much,” I confided to my wife as we detoured inland. “I’d prefer something in a shabby little Mozambican beach bar one day.”

The bar we were headed to was the Pig ’n Whistle in Bathurst, a settler village with a history of frontier wars and house-to-house battles with the “rampant Xhosa”. On our travels I had found a very strange book called Camp Life & Sport in South Africa by one TJ Lucas, who had been a Grahamstownbased hussar in the early 1850s.

Lieutenant Lucas had a rough time of it at first. Pranksters sold him a vicious horse that ran him straight into a stone wall at high speed, causing half his flowering moustache to shear clean off. Then a new commanding officer, named, for reasons of propriety, “Colonel S”, arrived. The little colonel particularly hated wearing his hussar’s shako, a kettle-shaped helmet fancied at the time. After various parades, he could be spotted kicking the poor shako about his office floor with gusto.

Colonel S once took them out on patrol, and they were beset by a huge swarm of locusts. One of the locusts flew directly into the colonel’s eye, distressing him greatly.

“I’ll serve you out for that, you little beast,” the colonel shouted, snatching the locust up in his fingers and turning around to his troops. “Now who has a pin for me?”

Someone produced a pin and the colonel shortly had the offending locust skewered.

“You’ll hit me in the eye, will you, will you?” he yelled at the writhing locust while giving the pin “a vicious twirl”. Both locust and pin were then placed in one of his saddlebags and they rode on, into the scrub. But whenever his eye pained him, the colonel would have the little locust withdrawn and “subject to fresh torments at the hands of its remorseless captor”.

Like the frontier wars that took place between Xhosa and colonial, the book has its deadly-serious side. We were to find out more about that later, but our next item of business lay in the Buffalo City itself: East London.

We stayed overnight with Lew Elias, a senior journalist from the Daily Dispatch newspaper. Joining us was a mutual friend, the photographer Les Bush, who had grown up in East London with Lewis. With Lew and Les as our guides, we travelled around the city where the late Janis Joplin would have felt at home. Everyone, it seemed, owned a brand-new Mercedes-Benz.

Daimler-Chrysler practically owned the town. Staff had great incentives to buy themselves C-Class Mercedes coupés.

“So you’d get spray painters and the like driving to work in these very expensive cars,” said Lew. “Any stranger to East London would think there was some serious money here somewhere.”

We went for breakfast to a great spot on Latimer’s Landing. Opposite us stood rows and rows of different models of Mercedes.

“There’s more than R46 million in cars watching us have breakfast,” said Lew, who, one suspects, was a bit of a petrol head.

While we waited for our food, I read from an advertising leaflet fixed to the middle of the table:

“Private Investigations. Confidentiality Guaranteed. Spymaster

specialising in hidden cameras, bugging and de-bugging”

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently”

– Henry Ford

“Don’t upset me. I’ve run out of places to hide the bodies.” – Anon.

Latimer’s Landing had been named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who first discovered a dead coelacanth (aka Old Four Legs), a fossil fish that once left the sea to stump around on land and decided hell no, this isn’t for me, returning swiftly to the waters. But it still had those stubby little legs.

Marjorie was called down to the East London docks one day in 1938 to check out a load of sharks that had just come in on the boat Nerine. She noticed a strange-looking blue fin sticking out from the pile of otherwise pure shark.

“I picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” she told author Samantha Weinberg in A Fish Caught in Time. “It had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy-dog tail.”

The part I liked in Weinberg’s book was the struggle Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had in handling the rather bulky coelacanth. Firstly, the taxi driver wouldn’t have “that stinking fish” in his cab. He finally allowed her to put it into the boot.

The only place to store such a large fish was the mortuary, she reckoned. But the mortuary officer thought she was mad. The people at the local cold-storage depot also refused the coelacanth entry. So she and a local taxidermist decided to preserve it in formalin, keeping it wrapped in copies of the Daily Dispatch and her mother’s double-bed sheet until it could go off to Professor JLB Smith from Rhodes University.

Lew, knowing we’d be looking for something more than regular tourist snapshots of East London, took us to a place in the local harbour where more than a kilometre of hardwood – worth about $25 million – stood piled. These trees had been cut from the first-growth forests of equatorial Africa and loaded onto a boat called the Kiperousa, destined for south-east Asia and life as millions of strips of veneer.

But the Kiperousa had sunk just south of East London, and these huge logs had drifted off into the sea lanes. Some had beached themselves, others were still out there, waiting to smash into a passing yacht.

But a bigger problem lay before us. There had been a wave of criminal attacks on tourists along the Wild Coast in 2005. Jules and I were driving into another kind of fire. Snatches of the Daily Dispatch headlines were beginning to worry me:

•  May: Three men shoot dead a security guard at Mbotyi River Lodge and wound the manager, Charles Lamb; Eight elderly tourists attacked – two are killed – by hijackers outside Port St Johns;

•  July: A group of tourists attacked at knife point by youths while on a hike outside Port St Johns;

•  October: Four foreign tourists escape with their lives when armed gunmen open fire on two vehicles near Coffee Bay.

Jo’burgers live and sleep in a hotbed of crime. There’s always someone getting shot, hijacked, robbed or raped back home. And yet, when we go on holiday to the country’s poorest province, we expect safe passage, warm welcomes and good fishing. And the weather had better play its part, too.

I was 21 years old again, sitting in the rain on the back of a bakkie on the way to the Stormberg, with my old Neil Young song and my fear. I desperately needed a bottle of sweet wine, a length of boerewors and some reassuring words. Failing that, an armed escort up into the Wild Coast …

Chapter 26: Morgan’s Bay to Trennery’s

A Walk on the Wild Coast

When I think about the Morgan Bay Hotel, a cockatoo called Baldy and a woman called Dodo spring to mind.

We’re trying to have a beer in the courtyard of this old hotel, shortly after checking in. A sulphur-crested cockatoo is doing his nut in the corner, screaming like a midnight drunk. He whistles and yells and spins and performs daring somersaults around the rope inside his cage.

Baldy’s been there for 17 years now, shouting the odds at no one in particular. They sometimes let him roam through the hotel like a maddened banshee. And if one neglects to compliment him on his magnificent singing voice or hairstyle, Baldy does odd things like ripping the rubber trim off the windows.

He is often to be found in the bar after supper, scrounging peanuts from the guests. Give him an opened tin of tomato cocktail and he’ll grip it firmly in his beak and down the lot. And then you must applaud his drinking expertise.

This hotel was all about serious repeat business. The icon of the ‘come-again’ crowd at the Morgan Bay Hotel was one Mrs Dodo Wilmot. The Wilmots had been vacationing here for six decades. Every year, they booked Room No. 2. Mrs Dodo Wilmot, now a widow, arrived here and met up with her son, who flew in from his home in the USA for a two-week family holiday.

“Mrs Wilmot is the first in for breakfast and supper,” the owner-manager Richard Warren-Smith told us over tea one afternoon in the expansive old sitting room with the sea view, where, on a good day, you could see hundreds of dolphins leaping up through the breakers. “She’ll stand there tapping her foot if we’re one minute late.”

After World War II, Richard’s grandfather Ivan returned from hostilities and wanted nothing more than to run a beach hotel on his beloved Eastern Cape coast.

He chose Morgan’s Bay, which had been a holiday village since the early 1900s, when settler families trekked here in their ox wagons, bringing ‘food on the hoof’ in the form of cows and sheep. In 1920 a retired hospital matron opened a boarding house in Morgan’s Bay. She tried selling it, but there was no shortage of shysters in the area, so she had to take the house back a number of times. And then came Ivan Warren-Smith. He caught a bus up from East London, walked to the top of the hill overlooking the bay and fell in love with it all. Maybe the dolphins were showing off that day.

Ivan paid the matron £4 000 for her boarding house, parked his Oldsmobile and caravan on the premises and began turning it all into his dream hotel. It morphed into the Warren-Smith family business over the generations. As a young man, Richard went to London to work in the hotel trade as preparation for eventually taking over the Morgan Bay Hotel. It was just too damned cold over there for the boy from Kei Mouth.

“When I came back in 1990, my father Jeffrey just passed me the braai tongs at a hotel lunch and said carry on,” laughed Richard. Thus he joined the hotel’s management team.

The Morgan Bay Hotel was “like coming home” – true to its motto. South Africa lost something from the ’60s onwards, when many of its family hotels gave way under the onslaught of franchise operations. Jules and I were delighted to run across establishments where the dining rooms were still vast, the menus short and the manager not too snooty to sit down and have a drink with the guests. Where you stepped over sleeping old dogs at the entrance, the hotel cockatoo ruled the roost and the information booklet requested “the more jubilant guests” to be quiet at the poolside in the early afternoon.

The next morning we left on our Wild Coast ‘amble’ across Kei Mouth and up to our next stop, Trennery’s. A cheerful young man called Bongani Colonial Mlilwane, who had 15 siblings and lived nearby, was our guide for the first half of our 14-km walk.

Colonial said he was in heaven every day.

“I used to work as a school security guard on the Cape Flats,” he said. “I lived in a shack. I saw gunfights and shack fires until I thought no, it’s time to go home. Now I walk up and down the beach, talking to my guests. What could be more pleasant?”

Prompted by various sightings of abaKwetha along the way, we asked Colonial about his personal initiation to manhood, which involved a painful bush circumcision.

“I was with a group of friends all doing this thing together. Our wounds were bound by absorbent leaves, which were changed every 15 minutes. We were each given a new white blanket with red stripes. We were warned: the headman does not want policemen or ambulances coming here.

“You are not a man if you have to go to a hospital, they said. By the fourth day, you feel so much pain and you have no strength and you do not care if you die.”

In the first week, the initiates covered themselves with white clay and slept in designated huts. Sisters could bring them food or firewood but on no account were they to see their mothers. After four weeks – God willing – they were healed.

“A goat is slaughtered and prepared for you,” said Colonial. “You drink beer and you are allowed to cross the river and hunt. It is a big thing to become a man. No woman would think of marrying you if you were uncircumcised. And if you are not, you remain a boy, no matter how old you are.”

We were suddenly at the swine-fever control point on the Kei River Mouth. I’d been living in Colonial’s head for more than an hour, viewing out-takes from his world. We came across a jovial, middle-aged squad of South African and Brit hikers, heading south on the ‘amble’. They were doing the long trek from Kob Inn to Morgan’s Bay. Colonial took over their group from Eric Nkonki, who became our guide.

We crossed the Kei River by ferry, a large-bottomed boat expertly manhandled by a team who twirled giant wheels attached to rudders and outboard engines.

Then we were in the old Transkei. And the weather was also from another country. It turned grey and foul and windy in no time at all. The morning’s jaunt had turned into The Lost Patrol. We trudged, looking down and saying nothing in case of sand-in-mouth, against a vicious headwind. We were joined by Eric’s friend, a guy called Amos, who wore very fancy leather shoes. So fancy that, when we crossed little rivers and streams, he prevailed upon Eric to piggyback him across.

“Here is the Gxara River,” announced Eric. “Do you know this place? Up the river is the pool where the Nongqawuse went, where she was given the vision.”

We’d been reading Noel Mostert’s epic Frontiers, detailing the demise of the Xhosa nation in British colonial times, and The Dead Will Arise by Jeff Peires, which told the story of the infamous cattle killing of 1857.

Reel back to just before 1820, as more than 300 000 unemployed soldiers who’ve fought Napoleon’s armies sit idle in grubby, disconsolate, post-war Britain. An advertising campaign is launched to encourage at least 5 000 Britons to come and live in South Africa, “the most precious and magnificent object of our colonial policy”, according to The Times of London.

They’re supposed to be agriculturalists, destined for the border lands of the Eastern Cape. But many tradesmen, artisans and mechanics pretend to be farmer types and make it onto the transfer list. A fair number of them fail as farmers, but end up building magnificent settlements such as Grahamstown instead. These families, faux farmers and genuine, are the buffer zone between the Cape Colony and “the warlike Xhosas”, as some like to call them.

Now fast-forward 34 years through a number of bloody frontier wars to 1853 and to the landing of a smallish herd of Friesian bulls from Europe at Mossel Bay. They’ve all got the dreaded lung-sickness and are rotten from the inside out. Within two years, this disease has spread all over the colony and up through Xhosa country.

Three years later we’re in April 1856, at a pool on the Gxara River in the company of two young girls, Nongqawuse and Nombanda. Something happens at that pool on that day, something that is still the subject of heated debate today, nearly 150 years on.

Nongqawuse’s uncle, Mhalakaza, has been working for the Archdeacon of Grahamstown, Nathaniel Merriman, on the cleric’s travels in the hinterland as his travelling advisor and translator. Mhalakaza has cherry-picked more than his share of biblical Christian knowledge, imagery and philosophy from his boss. He blends this with his inherent set of Xhosa principles and becomes something of a grand speechmaker himself. Merriman’s wife insults Mhalakaza one day and the Xhosa leaves their employ and goes back to his homestead on the Gxara River.

We’re with the girls at the pool, and Mhalakaza is lurking somewhere in the dramatic background. Two men claiming to be long-dead Xhosas materialise from the bushes. They tell the girls to pass on the message: there is going to be a ‘rising up’ and a rebirth of the Xhosa nation. All cattle are to be killed. The cultivated fields are to be burnt. Corn storage bins are to be trashed. Fresh kraals are to be built. ‘New people’ will rise from the sea with healthy herds of cattle for everyone. Whites and Fingoes (who side with the British) will be swept off to sea and disappear forever.

The Xhosa nation is divided into believers and non-believers. The believers destroy their food stores and their cattle herds. You can smell rotting meat all over the frontier. Fires rage all over the Eastern Cape. A nation waits. The non-believers say, What? You want me to do what? Kill my precious cattle? Burn my food? Believe a couple of teenage girls and their angry uncle?

Various appointed days “of the two suns rising red” come and go. Mixed in with all this prophecy and madness is the news that the Russians have smacked the Brits in the Crimea and that those same Russians are on their way to help clear out the governor, Sir George Grey, his cronies and his ‘buffer zoners’.

Nothing happens. Mhalakaza manipulates the situation. He says the ‘new people’ aren’t quite ready. Vision begets vision. The tips of thousands of cattle horns are spotted just under the reeded wetlands, supposedly waiting to emerge in their boisterous, bellowing masses. King Sarhili is sucked into all of this. He, like his people, is so desperate to see the backs of the white settlers and their soldiers that he’ll believe anything.

By January 1857, doubt sets in. This is partially dispelled by a new edict from Sarhili announcing that unless all the cattle in the Xhosa kingdom are slaughtered, the prophecy will not come about. More killings. But who’s actually in charge around here? Sarhili or Mhalakaza, who is starting to sound a little like a crazed egomaniac?

Sarhili tries to commit suicide but is stopped in time by his councillors. And on January 17 he speaks up at a beer-drinking session:

“I have undertaken a thing of which I now entertain certain doubts, but I am determined to carry it through.”

A month later, when the starving begins in earnest, King Sarhili says:

“I have been a great fool in listening to lies. I am no longer a chief.”

The Xhosa nation begins to starve in their many thousands. Their kraals stand empty and they begin to filter into settlements such as Grahamstown and King William’s Town. People die in the streets where they fall.

We finished our rest on the Gxara River and prepared to continue the windy trek up the beach. I suddenly remembered Sir George Grey and his wife, Lucy.

According to history, Grey might not have had a direct hand in the cattle killing, but the results played very much into his ‘social engineering’ hands. He now had the tottering Xhosa nation where he wanted it: squarely behind the begging bowl. He could dispense food relief to whomever he wanted. He could send Xhosas all over the country, where their labour was gratefully and cheaply used on farms, in factories and in homes.

But Sir George Grey’s comeuppance is his wife, Lady Lucy Grey, and her dalliances. He is recalled to London and, upon his arrival, the new Home Secretary sends the Grey family right back to Cape Town. Sir George gets another turn at the wheel of governance.

I have Jeff Peires to thank for the basic detail of what follows.

They’re in the ship headed south again. Lady Lucy, the naughty girl, sends a note of assignation to one Admiral Henry Keppel, a fellow passenger she rather fancies.

“Unlock the door between our two cabins and I will come to you in the night,” she urges the admiral.

Unfortunately, Sir George intercepts the note. He loses it entirely with Lucy, forces the ship to dock at Rio and has her kicked off at the docks. It is not generally known if Lady Lucy falls in with the party set down at the Copacabana. But she doesn’t see George for 36 years.

On the verge of insanity, he returns to the Cape. Instead of another bout of social manipulation (perhaps turn the Boers into vegan-liberals or something) he is so caught up with the Lady Lucy affair that he can do nothing but drink, curse her name and look for ‘victim sympathy’ in Cape Town society. The irony is delicious. Try as one might, it’s hard to picture what is left of the Xhosa nation shedding a single tear of pity for the plight of Sir George.

By the end of 1858, the Xhosa population of British Kaffraria (the Eastern Cape border lands) had dwindled from 105 000 to fewer than 26 000. Huge swathes of former Xhosa territory, including their spiritual stronghold, the Amatola Mountains, were given over to the white settler communities. In fact, many Xhosa ended up working for these settlers on land their clans had once owned.

But I wasn’t there at the time, and I still had so much to read and learn about the whole Eastern Cape frontier. It was no use pointing fingers in hindsight at anyone. Except, maybe, at the players in the Lucy Grey scandal.

On we walked, The Lost Patrol, until we came to a spot where some cows lay on the beach, looking utterly stoned. I photographed them and the pictures came out all Kubrick and soft-focus, because I’d forgotten to clean the coastal fog off my lens first. But the hotel was in sight, my legs were sore and the backpack was eating at my shoulders. I had been taking special care not to wobble onto the rocks we had trudged over.

There was only one mud puddle in the dirt road leading up to Trennery’s Hotel. Somehow, I managed to slip gracelessly into it, sinking to my knees in the black muck.

“I just love hiking,” I gasped at Jules, who stood over me with a smile on her wicked face. “But you know what I love even more? When the hiking’s over …”

Chapter 27: Trennery’s to Umngazi River

Bay of Beans

The beach below Trennery’s Hotel smells like the best bits of childhood: sea perfume tangled in the morning scents of wild plants, mingled with a hint of sunscreen. We walk, Jules and I, to stretch the muscles stiff from yesterday’s hike. Carefree children play on the sand, nannies in attendance, and Trennery’s itself resembles a slightly skew Victorian village. Staff in their starched uniforms rush about on errands to the kitchen, the laundry, the stock rooms, the bar and the dining hall.

Despite the almost tangible happiness around us, our thoughts still wander up the Gxara River to the heart of the cattle killing. We know that the Wild Coast is famous for its fishing spots. We have seen the convoys of stubbly white men in their muscle cars bristling with fishing rods, travelling invulnerable through the interior, intent on casting and reeling, casting and reeling. With perhaps a beer or two thrown in. This is the classic Wild Coast experience. Men in corporate offices tug at their collars and dream of this moment. Ties off, sandals on. Boys on the road. Fish on the line and firewood stacked at the ready. Cool box in ‘lurk’ mode. Bugger the weather.

“Now let me get this right,” I say to my wife. “Part of the prophecy was that cattle would emerge from the sea and there would be feasting.”

“Yes,” she answers. “But of course it never happened and instead everyone starved.”

And yet, with the Agulhas current zipping along in the neighbourhood, the sea was literally brimming with fish. Later, she quoted to me from Noel Mostert’s Frontiers:

“The Xhosa stood in awe of the sea, had a great dread of venturing upon it, and a horror of eating fish … For many centuries they had watched the distant sails of passing Indiamen, and often succoured the survivors from wrecks. But they never ventured upon the sea. The Xhosa may be unique among the world’s coastal-living peoples in never having cast line or net into the teeming seas that bound them in.”

And at mid-year, these waters abound with sardines (The Greatest Shoal on Earth is a particularly popular catch phrase to describe this phenomenon) heading north to Durban in their tens of millions, pursued by birds, sharks, dolphins, orcas and the odd humpback whale. They often swim very close to shore, and all one has to do to secure a season’s worth of dried fish is go out there and load up.

“Their salvation did in fact lie in the sea.” I was slowly working this one out. “Just not in the form of cattle and Russians.”

And so, with our immaculate 20/20 historical hindsight, we continued down the beach and up to breakfast. Where, it seemed, a mistake had been made. As we walked up to our table, the other egg-and-baconeers looked up in awe and wonder. Hmm. What’s this?

A large wire statuette of a hiker had been placed on our table. No no, we wanted to tell everyone. We just did the Wild Coast Lite walk from Morgan’s Bay. You’ve got us confused with fit people. Besides, I fell in the only mud puddle for kilometres around. No glory here.

Trennery’s was old, founded in 1926. The hotel booklet advised:

“Golfers are asked to give right of way to the aeroplanes landing or taking off from the air strip – cattle should be allowed to play through.”

One of the brochures of yore said:

“The nearest station is Butterworth (35 miles), where cars can be hired from Messrs Moore and Taylor. Or visitors can go three times a week by post car as far as Kentani, where the hotel lorry will meet them by arrangement.”

We were to be picked up by someone from the Morgan Bay Hotel so that we could return and fetch our beloved bakkie. But first I had to track down the Lord Lucan of Trennery’s, the Scarlet Pimpernel of Qolora Mouth – manager Don Wewege. I was hoping he was related to my friend Alfie Wewege from Port Nolloth, but he wouldn’t stand still long enough for me to ask him.

For more than a day, we kept ambling after Don, who looked like everyone’s favourite uncle in a hurry, as he amiably avoided us by veering this way and that across the hotel grounds.

“Can’t see you now, awfully busy. Staff to be paid, church to be built,” and off he’d go. Not keen for media attention. At sunset, we strategically parked ourselves outside the bar. Don came scooting past.

“Well, work is finally done,” he announced to no one in particular.

“Then come and have a beer with us,” we enticed in unison.

He glanced with alarm at us and increased his passing speed.

“No, no. Must see a man about a golf course.” So we buttonholed his wife, Yolande, after breakfast instead, and we all made nice until our lift, in the form of Libby Norton, arrived in a Renault baker’s van.

Libby, a pleasant Zimbabwean woman, drove like a dervish over the gravel roads back to Morgan’s Bay. Seeing our slumped shoulders and slightly trip-worn mien, she decided to cheer us up.

She pulled out a motivational tape: Christian preacher Joyce Meyer and her Attitudes of the Mind: Change your Outlook; Change your Life!

I’m not usually swayed by canned motivational talks, but after 53 straight days on the rowdy road this rather homey-sounding, American go-to-it granny hit the spot. As we bumped along on the dirt, I caught snatches of life being the journey, God being long-suffering, someone having Captain Haddock Eyes over someone else’s fur coat and people who drove around with misleading bumper stickers. It all sounded good to me.

But even better still was the sight of our unstolen dusty bakkie parked outside the Morgan Bay Hotel where we’d left it the day before. We loaded up and hit the road to Coffee Bay.

Butterworth and Dutywa looked like post-Apocalyptic rubbish tips, but out in the old Transkei rural lands things began to perk up.

Although the countryside, cut open into yawning dongas by generations of cattle hooves, sleds and footpaths, was bleeding topsoil, life out here seemed a damned sight better than in the towns. This is where miners’ money had been sent since the day gold and diamonds were found in South Africa. But the mines were closing, and the miners were coming home – to what? With what?

Still. Every hillside was dotted with thatched rondavels in colours of pink, sea green, pale blue, apricot and white. There were small patches of crops, herds of cattle and a constant stream of people on the road. We drove past a tiny settlement called Kwaaiman (Angry Man), where there had been shootings of tourists. It seemed a likely ambush spot, but the bad guys were having a day off and we passed safely by.

About 20 km from Coffee Bay, everything suddenly relaxed. People finally returned our tentative waves and we wound our way down into the village with more hope and cheer than before. At the Ocean View Hotel reception, a lovely young woman called Khwezi (which means morning star) took us up to the honeymoon suite, overlooking the deck bar, the pool and the sea. I had me a stiff whisky and fell over on the superb brass bed. Jules was already fast asleep.

Later at the bar, we watched England thrashing Oz at one-day cricket. Pre-supper snacks were plates of delicious oysters. Dinner was a seafood medley. A squad of upcountry boys (fishing, my ass) were being hit on for complimentary tucker and beer by a hardened bunch of lean and hungry backpacker girls from London. The English were winning on all fronts.

The play-play fishermen partied until late. Down at the beach, cars were parked, hip-hop music was turned up and Coffee Bay had itself a bit of a celebration for some reason. We heard nothing. The pounding surf swallowed all sound, up there in the honeymoon suite. We slept like babies. Good ones.

I was up with the sun, taking photographs of the hotel and surrounds. I returned to fetch Jules for breakfast and, out of habit, scrabbled about for the keys to the Isuzu. Nothing. Panic time.

“I know what I’ve done. I left them in the car this morning when I went to take out the tripod,” I confessed to Jules. “I’m sorry. I’m losing it. The trip has been … too long.”

I ran downstairs and met my new hero, a security guard called Nkosinathi Sigonya, who had noticed the keys dangling from the driver’s door, locked the vehicle and was waiting for the dumb driver to appear. Right there, this journey could have gone pear-shaped as the Isuzu disappeared in a puff of dust into the Transkei for its date with a chop-shop in the bush. I left Nkosinathi with cash in his hands and a smile on his face.

After breakfast, Ocean View owner Peter Challis took us for a drive in his 4x4 to the top of a hill, the site of an old golf course. Pointing out to sea, he said:

“On a clear day, you can see Perth and all the South African doctors and dentists. What’s that sound? Can you hear them crying to come back?”

We asked Peter about Wild Coast tourism and community involvement. All the hotels, it seemed, were white-owned, but were situated on tribal ground. It appeared that the European Union had invested more than R80 million in various projects to encourage local part-ownership, the refurbishing of the properties and development of various tourism assets. There had been successes and there had been failures. But no one was giving up yet. Folks around here had seen whites arriving over the past few centuries in the guise of traders, missionaries, colonists and soldiers. All tried to sell them some concept that usually ended up with Xhosas being shafted. There was deep history. And long memory.

If tourism failed up here, then mining would win. It was that simple. A northern stretch of the Wild Coast was particularly rich in ilmenite and a massive Australian prospecting company was waiting in the wings. Pitting the long-term benefits of tourism against the short-term profits of mining is like putting a duck into a dog-fight. Even before the first round is announced, you know who’s going to win, right? Well, maybe.

The only victorious duck we’d ever heard of was up in St Lucia, the home of yet more ilmenite. Maybe there was hope.

Our next tour of Coffee Bay was with 19-year-old Joseph Vulindlela of the Bomvana tribe. This tribe was famous for being one of the few along the coast to welcome and feed the survivors of the Grosvenor in the late 18th century.

“And if I am found to be suitable, I will be a chief one day,” Joseph said calmly. Such a teenager.

We walked to a hilltop village called Rhini. Children and chickens ran rings around the huts. Did they grow mealies?

“Big time. We’re just starting to plough now that the rains have come.”

Joseph, who was just a year away from completing his schooling, still had to go through his manhood rites. Was he looking forward to the ritual?

“Big time. Well, a bit. I think there will be pain.”

His father had been a gold miner, but Joseph said his own future lay in tourism. We spoke about football.

“I am an Orlando Pirates supporter,” he said. “Whenever there’s a match, we walk up the road to a man who has a television set in his hut.”

Why was there a tyre on the apex of every hut, encrusted with broken glass?

“That’s to keep the owls away. Owls bring bad luck, bad spirits. Witchdoctors send them.”

There were so many questions we wanted to put to Joseph, and he seemed nonchalantly happy to answer them all honestly. Why, we asked, pointing at a wooden sled-wagon in a kraal nearby, were they not using wheels?

“That’s because when a wagon with wheels comes down a steep hill, it can roll into the oxen pulling it,” he said. “This can’t happen with a sled.”

Did he surf, we wanted to know.

“I tried it once and I fell off the board,” he laughed. “I stopped surfing. But I did teach myself to swim in the river.”

Joseph took us to the local shebeen. I peered inside, my eyes squinting into the sudden darkness, where half-a-dozen dead-eyed people sat clutching their traditional iJuba beer. Even I (not famous for being picky about my drinking spots) would not venture into that little hellhole.

We asked him about crime.

“There is crime in Coffee Bay, but it is mostly without guns. Just things stolen from houses at night. Sometimes from tourists on the beach.

“In December, people come from inland to rob the tourists; they wave knives in their faces to frighten them,” he said in a matter-of-fact manner. We may as well have been asking about fruit picking. And did they grow dagga around here?

“Oh, big time,” he laughed.

We packed and said our goodbyes.

“Cheerio, then,” said Peter Challis. “Just lay off our potholes and our pigs.”

That afternoon we hid out in a rather beautiful chalet at the Umngazi River Bungalows near Port St Johns. A biblical storm broke, fierce gusts of wind beat at the mock bananas, squalls dumped rain buckets and the electricity supply became erratic. No matter. We were safe with an interesting chunk of Gorgonzola, a bottle of good red and a pack of cards. In fact, for a few hours, we were the Untouchables. Such is the power of truly stinky cheese.

We spent two full days at this fine old resort, which was ‘family holiday’ in its true form. Every morning, teams of jovial nannies would arrive and take the kids off the parents’ hands for the day. By now we’d realised that the backbone of Wild Coast-hotel tourism came in the form of the classic Transkei nanny and her good nature.

The local river ranger and guide, Vincent Mtambeki, took us to meet some of the villagers in the area. We drove to Sicambeni, which also lay on the top of a hill overlooking the river. We stopped at a homestead and met two sisters, each of whom had a baby girl.

Nolukhanyiso Jim, 18, and her 24-year-old sister, Thabisa, lived together in a hut. As rural huts go, this one was well appointed: four beds, dressing table, cupboard, radio and light bulb running off a pre-paid electricity system and linoleum on the cowdung floor.

The fathers?

“They’re not around,” said Thabisa out of the corner of her mouth, because her daughter Athini was poking around in the other corner.

How did they live?

“Social grants for having the babies.”

Vincent, who was translating, indicated that it would be impolite to ask if they had had the babies specifically for the government money. We asked them what they did for fun. Did they ever visit Port St Johns?

“Not so much. We listen to the radio.”

As usual, we grilled our guide about the crime along the Wild Coast. We had to get this information from the ground.

“Those working on the coast are not the ones committing the crimes,” he said. “They get their work from tourism. It’s the people from inland. That’s why we keep a very close eye on the outsiders. The headmen are now stepping in and identifying the criminals.”

Armed with this good news we drove into one of my all-time favourite villages, Port St Johns. I wanted to break the law a little bit in the interests of good research. We made a weak, bourgeois effort to score some famous Pondo Poison. But we were too low on the Cool Scale and the locals laughed at us …

Chapter 28: Port St Johns to Mbotyi

Gone Pondo

The summer of ’79 finds me in Port St Johns for the first time in my life. It’s a press junket to celebrate the launch of Capital Radio, the rebel rock station broadcasting from the Transkei bantustan into the old South Africa. The Capital Radio studio is installed in The White House, a hilltop mansion overlooking the port.

Very exciting, this. In the oppressively boring era that is Grey Shoes Apartheid SA, we cling onto anything new and challenging. An East Rand stripper bares all on stage and dances with a python. Bootleg copies of Last Tango in Paris do the rounds. The banned words of jailed poet Breyten Breytenbach are read to small groups late at night. And here’s a brave little radio station that is going to send us, at last, unfiltered news and music. Broadcasting from a town that has always been frontier chic, designed for vagabonds, traders and drifters. And for me, I think, usually when I’ve had too much to drink.

As we troop into The White House, two of the engineers cull me out of the media group.

“Have you ever tried Lusikisiki Lightning?”

“What’s that?”

“Come with us.”

Goodnight Irene. I smoke from the bong of mystery. The fine Pondo tetrahydrocannabinol and its 60 cannabinoid cohorts jump onto some friendly receptor molecules and ride my Neuron Highway down to Synapse Junction where they calm my fevered brain, offer some cosmic insights and give me the utter munchies.

“You’ve been very quiet this weekend,” says my old friend Gwen Gill, the Sunday Times columnist.

“Yes I have,” I reply, peering down through a puffy peppermint cloud as I float past the hotel reception. “What’s for supper?”

Port St Johns had, over the decades, developed a devilish reputation that was bringing backpackers in by the thousands. They came for the hiking and the beaches, of course. It had nothing to do with the fact that Pondo Poison (or Lusikisiki Lightning) was the best dope in the world. The South African marijuana industry was worth in excess of US$1 billion, and Port St Johns had a fair chunk of it.

Over the years, some rather funky economists backed the suggested decriminalisation of dagga. It would add a pile of cash to the GDP of South Africa. One could ‘sin tax’ it in the same way one did booze and cigarettes and possibly buy a whole bunch more submarines and snazzy jets. Which was still a sore point among taxpayers.

These same economists stated that currently the growers received very little for their crops, most of the profits going to the iniquitous ‘middle man’. But if it were legalised and controlled, it could be the saving of the rural population. Which is what they were saying about the poor coca farmers in South America as well.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, Jules and I met Ben Dekker, who looked like Robinson Crusoe’s love child. Ben, all two metres of him, had been part of my South African experience since I could remember. He’d been just about everything except a fireman and a cowboy in his life: politician, actor, lumberman, Masters student, demon surf lover, castaway and complete character. But I mostly remembered Ben as being a lovable refugee from The System we mere mortals were trapped in.

The first time we encountered him, Jules and I hid from Ben Dekker. Dressed in traditional headscarf, beaded waistcoat and leather flap over short-shorts that displayed, in Jules’ words, “a vast expanse of muscular thigh”, he strode past us on the porch of Lily’s Lodge at Second Beach like a gaudy ship in full sail. Maybe tomorrow, we said to each other, and lurked in the shadows.

We sat outside quaffing beer and cider, watching the circling frenzies of black bats. I went into the pub called Ben’s Bar to get more drinks. The legend turned to me and said:

“Take your lady and look at the full moon tonight.”

I did, and it was quite magnificent, that perfect orb of cratered blue cheese with its rainbow ring.

The next morning we ran into Ben on our way to town. He was dragging a piece of firewood. We formally introduced ourselves and made arrangements to meet later. At exactly five o’clock we arrived at his cave just off Second Beach. He was working on a sneezewood sculpture. He made some tom from finding the ‘inner shape’ in a piece of driftwood, settling it on a plinth and selling it as sea sculpture. I’d seen far worse in the northern-suburbs galleries of Jo’burg.

Ben was busy turning driftwood into the creatures of local myth and superstition: the snake, the one-legged lightning bird, the baboon (the witchdoctor’s familiar) that is ridden backwards and the strange three-legged tree hyrax.

He gave us each a goblet of Tassenberg Red and we discussed his latest river romp, which had landed him and one Loretta Toon in court on charges of public indecency. He smiled like the old rogue he really was.

“I was trying to save her from drowning.”

We continued our encounter at Lily’s over dinner. We had juicy filleted cob. Ben wandered in from the kitchen bearing a large plate loaded with umngqusho, laced with calamari and crayfish sauce. We admired his magnificent beaded waistcoat. The hippie in me shoved my inner yuppie out of the way and really wanted one as well.

“Gail at Pondo People, a local craft shop, gives me a new waistcoat every year on my birthday,” he said.

“And what happens to the old one?”

“They go to a current lovely lady,” was all he’d say. How could the magistrate fine such a discreet gent R200 for public indecency? It didn’t seem right.

Jules asked him if he had a cellphone number, so we could occasionally contact him from Jo’burg.

“I had one once,” he said. “But I threw it into the sea and told the crayfish to phone when they were ready for me.”

That was all back in 2002. Now we were at his door (so to speak) again, on the Shorelines trip of 2005. But he wasn’t home. Instead, there was a note on the window of his shack that read:

“Sergeant Naidoo, I waited until 11.30. Now what?”

We drove back to Port St Johns to look for Ben. We didn’t have to go far. There, on the dirt road, was the incredibly tall, loping figure of Mr Dekker. We stopped, reintroduced ourselves and offered him a lift to town. He said he remembered us and was happy for the ride. Jules opened the back door of the Isuzu for him.

I thought he had climbed into the bakkie, so I drove off. Jules yelled at me to stop. He’d just started folding his massive frame into the small crawlspace (which is all the backseat of a 2003 Isuzu bakkie really amounts to) as I pulled off in first gear, nearly damaging the man seriously. I was very sorry. Ben was very gracious.

“Good grief,” I later gasped at Jules. “I nearly killed the icon of Port St Johns.”

The big news of this visit was that Ben had just turned 65 and was eligible for a state pension.

“Which is great,” he enthused. “Now, once a month, I can go stand in a queue with all my friends and get some money.”

Ben was obsessed with helping the local AIDS orphans and was teaching them to cut firewood and catch crayfish to sell to visitors. He had also discovered the dangerous joys of self-publishing and could occasionally be spotted using a photocopier at a local newspaper’s offices, running off editions of his thoughts.

Ben was a well-travelled philosopher and you ignored his point of view at your peril. But there was also mischief in the man. Standing near his excellent outdoor toilet (one of the finest loo-views in the world), he pointed at a distant cave.

“About a year after nine-eleven, I started a rumour that this was Osama Bin Laden’s hideout. Not long after that, the CIA came to have a look.”

We asked him why he liked to live next to the sea.

“The accessibility of a huge bath. The rhythm of it. And all that seafood …”

Ben gave us perfect directions to our next stop, Mbotyi River Lodge, and on the road to the infamous Lusikisiki we stopped and bought an excellent wicker briefcase from a guy called Jongilanga Cwangula. Just before Lusikisiki, we turned off onto a long, extremely irksome concrete road with hidden ‘traffic calmers’ that enraged me. And then we were in the peaceful haven of the deep-green Magwa Tea Plantation on a road lined with stately blue gums.

The tea plantations gave way to the Mbotyi State Forest, verdant, dark and mysterious. The road wound down and down, through trees and dripping vegetation. A great storm had knocked down several trees across the road, and we silently wound our way around them.

Mbotyi River Lodge was a leader in the field of responsible tourism and had brought tangible benefits to the local community in its recent past.

Once we’d checked in, I challenged Jules to a quick game of darts and won. We stopped when she started making holes in the ceiling. The afternoon settled into a drizzle and we sat on the wooden porch outside the room, looking down the river into mists.

This is where the straggling, haggard survivors of an East Indiaman called the Grosvenor would have passed in August 1782. Captain John Coxon, who apparently couldn’t navigate for shit, thought they were nearly 700 km out at sea when in fact they were dangerously close to the rugged and rocky shores near Waterfall Bluff.

Crunch. The ship hit an outer reef, just 400 metres from the beach. A couple of people were drowned getting ashore, but 123 found themselves in a sudden, unscheduled African transit lounge called The Wild Coast. The wreck of the Grosvenor is one of the most famous castaway stories in southern African legend.

Firstly, let’s deal with the treasure thing. There were more than a dozen little parcels of diamonds on board, mostly kept by Captain Coxon. Nearly 150 years later, way down south in Kei Mouth, a retired seaman and prospector called Johann Sebastian Bock had settled on a piece of leased land. One day his son John came upon a shiny, rounded pebble and showed it to his dad. Bock Snr saw it was a diamond and he pegged his claim. Soon enough, more than 300 diamonds were uncovered on the property. Most of the diamonds were duly registered. Eyebrows were raised. This was not diamond-bearing land. Bock was up to no good. They charged him with “salting” his land using uncut diamonds.

The truth of the matter was, it seemed, that these were indeed Grosvenor diamonds, brought here long before by one of the survivors. They were very hard on Bock, and sent him to jail for three years. It was a crippling prison sentence for an old man of 73, and he broke down and wept in court.

The real mystery of those diamonds, in our opinion, lay in a later development. They were all in a bottle, submitted as evidence in court and then sent to Kimberley. No one could tell us what happened to them after that.

But back to 1782 and the castaways on the beach. They had no gunpowder, they misguidedly flew the Dutch flag as they walked (at that time the local Xhosas still remembered the Dutch – and not in a nice way – from the First Frontier War) and their captain had lost all his spirit. They were easy pickings for the tribes living along the coast. Only 18 of the original party made it back to safety.

Along the way, some of them met up with the followers of Sango, who had married a white castaway many years before. In exchange for a gold watch-chain, the tribesmen gave them a young ox. The Grosvenor passengers ate the ox and wore its hide on their feet. This was one of the few kindly interchanges concerning any of the Grosvenor survivors and the local populace.

More than 20 years before, a little blonde castaway – a white girl of about seven – was discovered by people from the Bomvana clan, who now live around the Coffee Bay area. Some said she was a “frog, having jumped out of the water”. But most thought she was a magical princess and took her into their hearts. It was she who became Sango’s wife.

Other children along this coast were not so lucky. In 1967 a missionary family, the Grays, came to Mbotyi on holiday. At some stage Gray and his eldest son were left to mind the smaller kids, Vinny (six) and Susie (four). They went fishing instead, leaving the family servants to mind the children.

They later returned to find both Vinny and Susie missing. A local called Eleanor Grant remembered:

“Word soon spread that these missionary kids had disappeared. A massive search party gathered and everybody searched the hills, sand dunes and shoreline. The army was called in and the lagoon was dredged. The children had vanished into thin air. To this day nobody knows what happened to them.

“For months afterwards, the Gray family would wander the hills calling out for their lost children.”

In the early 1980s, the daring bank robber and former policeman André Stander had used the village as a hideout while the rest of the country looked for him. Stander, son of a cop general, would rob three banks on a good day. The members of his gang were eventually shot or captured. Stander himself was shot and killed by a Fort Lauderdale police officer in the USA. We spoke to Jennifer Ludidi, the head housekeeper at the lodge. She remembered Stander from his days as a policeman in Kokstad. She had no idea he was a fugitive from justice when he arrived one fine day in 1983. She noticed that he unpacked his meat into the freezer and his beer into the fridge but did not leave his clothes behind when he went to swim in the sea with his dogs. It was only when the police arrived, enquiring about a man wearing a wig, that she realised Stander was in trouble. She never saw him again.

Our best story-keepsake from Mbotyi River Lodge was the Tale of the Untaken Teaspoon.

In 1993, one of South Africa’s most beloved and charismatic new leaders, Chris Hani, was assassinated by right-wingers. It is no exaggeration to say that the country was ready to burn. It took massive work from Nelson Mandela and a number of other former Robben Island prisoners to calm the general populace. Out here in the former Transkei, the situation was particularly tense. Jennifer remembered:

“It was in the month of August. So many people were toyi-toyiing. The guests departed in a hurry. Some even left their cars here and were picked up by aeroplane at the airfield at Magwa Tea.

“We made the beds, we laid the tables, but the hotel was closed.” Two watchmen were appointed and the hotel remained as it was, trapped in political aspic for eight years. From time to time, Jennifer would return to dust inside the hotel. Sometimes she would be paid a little extra to spruce the place up when a prospective new owner came to have a look. But there were no takers. This part of the world was on simmer.

The locals in Mbotyi went through lean times of diminished income. They occasionally sold a crayfish tail to one of the whites brave enough to spend time at a holiday cottage.

“But during that time, not a window was broken, not a teaspoon was taken,” said Jennifer proudly. “People from Mbotyi are just like that. We don’t take what is not ours …”

Chapter 29: Mbotyi to Port Shepstone

Rust Never Sleeps

Coming in out of the morning sun, the Indian Ocean a shimmering wizard’s mirror below, our sleek Eurocopter tips forwards and aims south at the heart of the Wild Coast.

The nests of box houses, strip malls and packaged beaches along the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal give way to wild green hills, sheer cliffs, waterfalls that simply drop into the sea, coppery tannin-stained rivers, secret coves and rocky shores where you can actually see the deep tears left by departing continents when Gondwana divorced itself more than 120 million years ago. One of the only living shapes you would recognise from those days would be that of the Great White shark, whose Maserati perfection was already 230 million years old.

This is the quietest helicopter I’ve ever flown in. We float over the Mkambati Reserve, with eland and wildebeest cantering lazily below us. There’s Waterfall Bluff, near the site of the wrecking of the Grosvenor. No place like it on earth. And it’s just 3 km from our hosts’ favourite hideaway. Mark and Margie Adcock (their friends call them “M&M”) own 5th Dimension Uncharted Helicopter Safaris, a top-end outfit that will take you anywhere in southern Africa in the flash of a rotor blade.

“The working title of this place is Paradise,” says Margie as we hover and land next to cascading waterfalls and a grand parade of beach flanked by emerald hills to the west. We walk through a garden of mosses, wild bananas, milkwood and streams of sweet waters. Around us are ferns, sugarbushes, an array of succulents and milk plum. At the edge of a rock pool, a damselfly whirrs back and forth, finally settling on a stem and folding her lace wings like a miniature Art Deco Fairycopter on final approach.

We drink sweet water in small, dainty sips from my empty film canisters and laugh. Cowbells tinkle and a line of livestock appears on the horizon. A small herd of painted cattle ambles past us and disappears over the hill. We cast for fish, we drink a beer and watch another herd go by, followed by youths on horseback. Two foreign hikers (their packs emblazoned with UK flags) stride past on their long trek south. No one has said a thing. No one needs to.

An hour later, we are packed and flying again, this time landing in John Costello’s Port St Johns back yard for a fill-up of paraffin. His kids and their buddies are playing in the pool 3 metres away. I still find it incredible that one of the world’s most advanced flying machines is able to land on a postage stamp of ground and refuel with standard Transkei trading-store paraffin.

The legendary Costello bats not an eyelid as we land. In fact, he offers us beer.

By sunset, we are well on our way to a family hotel at Mazeppa Bay. Working with backlight now, half my pictures are blown out by the setting sun. The other half are very precious. My lens hood that would normally keep out the sun has already been ripped off by wind and sacrificed to the waters below. We fly over rivers, settlements, fishing lodges and idylls beyond words. The only blot on the seascape is the outflow of fertile silt via the Mzimvubu River through the Gates of St John and into the Indian Ocean.

The Wild Coast, from the big-picture distance of expensive plexiglass and a 100-metre height, is the best landscape in South Africa. It cannot be allowed to fall into the careless hands of miners and the bad-taste brigade, with their low-maintenance intentions and truckloads of pale facebrick.

All that was back in March 2004. More than 18 months later, we were experiencing the Wild Coast at ground level. Although the visit had been a little scarier this time, I still didn’t want it to open its doors to the kind of development we’d seen so far on the trip.

We left Mbotyi River Lodge early one morning in the company of a bunch of peevish elves that had settled somewhere deep inside the Isuzu. They yelled and squealed every time we hit a pothole. I played some Jimi Hendrix to shut them up and then we nestled in behind a very slow, old vehicle called a “Grim Boy Pleasure Bus”, which was holding fast in the slipstream of its brother, called “Grim Boy wa Bantu”.

Lusikisiki (say it softly and you can hear the wind sliding through summer grass on Pondo hills) was waking up. A man was leading a goat to slaughter, and the animal strained at its leash as they quickly crossed in front of us. A small sign said:

“Welcome to Las Vegas. Decent Accommodation For You.”

The minibuses gathering like flies in the town bore names like “Lady Luck”, “After Tears” and, in the words of both Cat Stevens and John Lennon, “Love Is All”.

Just outside Flagstaff we passed an ambulance with its siren on Howl, a cabal of police cars with their blue lights on Flash, and a crippled soft-drinks pantechnikon resting on its side in the Tilt mode. The sweet smell of Fanta Pineapple filled the air, and the outskirters of Flagstaff began to gather. Nothing yummier than roadside loot in Africa.

Flagstaff at peak hour was like a splash of Jo’burg in the face. Bizana was not much better. And then we were out of the old Transkei and into the business end of the South Coast, where we stopped for diesel and the worst meaty pie on the planet. I normally always eat my meat pies right up, but this one was not a keeper.

“Well, at least we’re in the South Coast,” I announced with gusto, a piece of pastry and a blob of monosodium glutamate in my mouth. Yes. After a week of lavish, disgustingly fresh seafood spectaculars all along the Wild Coast, it was just too wonderful to be chomping on microwaved roadkill. We bought a local paper and read about the murder of a young student on nearby Anerley Beach. This news, combined with the deadly traffic around us and the poisonous road fodder on offer, nearly sent us scuttling back to Port St Johns.

We were on a famous route, to be sure. Back in 1842, when Queen Victoria had been in the hot seat for only four years, Port Natal (now Durban) was besieged by Boers. The finest horseman (and, seemingly, the most charmed) among the British was Dick King, and he volunteered to ride the 850 km to Grahamstown to get help. He and his manservant Ndongeni rode south in an epic journey that ended in success for Her Majesty’s forces in Natal.

Nearly 90 years later, a charming young hippo called Huberta left her homestead in the river reeds near Richards Bay and waddled southwards on an even more incredible journey. She walked all the way down, in the space of three years, to a spot on the Keiskamma River near King William’s Town, where she was killed by a hunter. At the time of writing, a dusty Huberta was still on display at the Amatole Museum in King William’s Town.

“Hi, my name is Dorothy,” a charming young housekeeper at The Claridges in Ramsgate greeted us, broom held in the rest position. And then she spotted pie remnants on Jules’s jersey, leant forward and began to groom her like a fussy mother. My wife just sighed happily.

Dorothy Mvundla must have thought she was in the company of tramps. We were not at our dashing best. All our clothes were filthy. The vehicle looked like a scrap-yard dog. And here we were, in the finest penthouse in sight. Rooms and rooms of beds and television and fridges and views over a Blue Flag beach, where people in silly hats cheerfully paddled around in pedalos and the smell of fresh waffles drifted up to our window sill. We hugged Dorothy for all kinds of reasons.

This was just the ticket, after these many weeks of travel. The weather was suitably foul outside, the TV programmes looked enticing and we had a great excuse to treat the South Coast as a pit stop: we needed some serious laundry time.

I had my nose in a local newspaper called South Coast Fever. Page three had a piece about “hinterlanders” who came to the beaches in minibus-loads, set up braai equipment on the sidewalks and began to burn meat at top volume. I didn’t think too much about that item until later, when we heard about the Norwegians who sailed here in 1882.

“The Zulus came over the hills in waves, singing and dancing and beating drums,” our guide, Lood Boshoff, told us a couple of days later. “They slaughtered cattle, drank the blood of the beasts and roasted flesh right there on the beach. The Norwegians regarded this with alarm.”

Then we discovered that, more than 50 years before the arrival of the Vikings, mighty King Shaka visited the kraal of hunter-explorer Henry Francis Fynn, where he was treated to fried beef steak. Shaka loved the meal so much that he ordered his own frying pan up from traders in Durban. And later, he became so adept with this nifty piece of kitchenware that he offered Fynn a pancake from his new pan.

The road from Ramsgate to Port Shepstone was Bucket-and-Spade Alley. I forced Jules to stop the bakkie at Towel World, which sported sheet-sized beach towels embellished with naked mermaids and happy dolphins. We bought two of the less lurid – but still damn spunky, if you ask me – towels for fun.

The turn-off to Pure Venom Snake Park was just ahead, but unfortunately there was no time to visit it. Besides, I’m no great shakes on snakes. The day before, I’d read about a local man who’d been bitten by some sort of mamba.

“He actually held on to it,” I told Jules. “So the authorities knew exactly what had bitten him. They could then give him the right anti-venom medication. And the snake got a life of three squares here at Pure Venom. Win-win all around.”

The South Coast prided itself on being a party venue for the whole country, with foreigners welcome. Mardi Gras came in the form of the winter Sardine Run, as thousands of people flocked to the beaches to gather in the fish.

The Sardine Run: more than 30 000 tonnes of sardines take advantage of a tongue of cold water extending up the Wild Coast and KZN, followed by game fish, dolphins, Bryde and Sei whales and thousands of seabirds screaming blue murder.

During out-of-sardine season, the South Coast was a holiday crèche for teenagers, who came to get trashed on the beaches and chase each other about. Like the old Plett days. At first they scared the locals with all their testosterone and their music. Then the South Coast woke up to the money factor of teenage tourism and began to ‘manage’ the youngsters into beach competitions and beauty shows and such.

“Last year we had a concert by Reverend Thumb and Godly Thunder in Margate,” said Ina Gericke of South Coast Tourism. “With about 40 000 people dancing on the beach.”

We met a great guy sitting in the lee of a rusty fan on Marine Drive at a place called St Mike’s Book Exchange & Sales, where the neon sign flashed Open.

The amiable 45-year-old Bert Kaminer was a retired cook from Jo’burg. He’d managed Al’s Burgers in Hillbrow, which, in its time, had been one of my favourite late-night joints. Now he sold bodice-rippers and Wilbur Smiths to the holiday crowd looking for a cheap read on the beach.

“OK, you want life on the South Coast?” he asked, and launched forth in a most delightful way.

“You first have to learn about the three Rs: Rust, Rot and Relatives. The rust. Now look at my fan,” he said, pointing at the oxidised hunk of spinning metal. “I used to be a stressed-out chef. Now I sit here and watch my fan rusting away. And it’s been painted twice.

“There’s also human rust. We hardly drive anywhere these days. Everything we need is just around the corner. It’s a big deal for me to drive to Port Shepstone. I get tired just hearing about you guys and your trip.

“Then there’s the rot. Well, that’s everywhere. It doesn’t matter how rare a book is, no collector will take one that’s been on the South Coast. You get mildew, you get gecko shit, you get spider shit. I call my books Golden Mouldies.

“Lastly, the relatives. They’re the guys you never knew were family before, the long-lost cousins who suddenly want to bond with you over the summer holidays.”

With all these el-cheapo books gently gathering mould around him, how did Bert keep the wolf from the door?

“It’s feast or famine around here. Holidays, you feast. But the festive season is a nightmare in other ways. Marine Drive is one line of cars that never stops.

“And then suddenly, after the holidays, they’re all gone. Life goes back to normal. The day starts off quiet.”

And then?

“It kind of tapers down from there.”

But we knew. Bert Kaminer would never trade his rusty-fan life for a chef gig back in the Big Smoke. We thanked him for his insights and went bliss-out shopping at Woolworths.

“You! Yes, you!” a thin old lady insisted, poking me in the ribs with one of her painted claws.

“Yes?”

“You look like a tourist.” No shit. Had my beer-drinking Mozambican shirt given me away?

“I am.” I wasn’t going to do the whole Shorelines presentation for an aged crone with a sharp fingernail.

“You people! Whenever you come here, the prices go up! Look at this pizza! Last week it was R6 cheaper!”

I hardly ever meet people who speak in exclamation marks, but this pensioned-off harridan was the real deal.

“I think you should complain to Woolworths. We tourists pay the same prices you do.”

Hmm. I could see her brain ticking away. Loud Shirt has a point. She gave me one more resentful glare, thought about stabbing me again, changed her mind and simply edited me out of her life by staring at the stand with the chocolate-ball specials.

I scuttled for the safety of the Claridges penthouse and looked down at all the potentially murderous South-Coast pensioners stalking the streets below, soothing my fevered brain with Scotch and satellite TV.

The next morning, we met the aforementioned Lood Boshoff, a tourism promoter of note and one helluva cattle auctioneer. He proved this in a private moment in his car later, his sing-song staccato voice reminiscent of the old Rhodesian tobacco auctions. Lood gave us the grand tour of Port Shepstone and surrounds, and by sundown we were ensconced on the wooden deck of the forested house belonging to our friends Dave and Sue Holt-Biddle at Trafalgar. We sat in near-darkness listening to the surf and drinking wine like Mauritian planters or characters from Daphne du Maurier’s world.

Recently (not, thank goodness, today) a spotted bush snake had issued a land claim on their deck and kept dropping in to visit from the roof. Inside, their TV set was permanently switched on – not because they loved TV so much, but because if they didn’t the rust would have it for breakfast.

Which was what we all found ourselves tucking into the next morning at the waffle place below our penthouse, while a mystery pan-piper played some tunes from his hideout in the reeds. And the rust settled in for the day.

Chapter 30: Durban to Ballito

Inner Zulu

“When I was a small boy my folks moved from Jo’burg to Zululand and found me a nanny,” my friend Dave Charles says one morning as we drive towards Durban. “My mother asked the Zulu woman if she spoke English.

“ ‘Yes’, she replied, and was hired on the spot. But ‘yes’ was the only English word she knew, and so I was raised in the Zulu vernacular.”

Over the years, Dave and his wife Sue have developed a network of local Zulu craftswomen who weave tapestries and baskets for sale at the lodge trading store.

Following a trail of rumour, wood smoke and tradition, Dave Charles has discovered an astounding fact: the heart of true Zulu workmanship has moved to the Durban area. Right under the sun-browned skin of this First World holiday city, known more for its beaches, high-rise resorts and trendy nightclubs than for its Deep Zulu nature.

One day he offered to take us ‘Zulu shopping’ with him.

KwaMashu is a vast, technicolour township that rivals Soweto in size and complexity. We drove down ever-narrowing roads past mazes of corrugated iron shacks and wooden huts, each connected to a spider’s web of overhead electric lines.

We passed a tumbledown strip mall of tuckshops, TV repair dens, shoe stalls, and a ‘steakhouse’ where the braai fires had been lit and a cow awaited the chop. Eventually, we arrived at Bheki Biyela’s place, on the crest of a small hill.

If this had been London, Bheki Biyela would have had a shingle out on Bond Street, saying ‘By Appointment To His Royal Majesty’. As a supplier of traditional garb to the Zulu Royal House, he was known to be one of the finest Zulu tailors in the country.

Outside his modest shack was a serval skin, stretched out on a rack. Inside Bheki’s place was a workroom and a bedroom – and little else. A stout Zulu man entered with the air of a regular customer and admired himself in a leopard skin mantle – usually reserved for royalty. Three women who had seen our parked vehicle came by to show off their new isixolo, modern and lightweight versions of the wide red headdress worn by Zulu matrons.

Bheki – who had accepted us because we were with Dave Charles – displayed the striking new trend that had swept through the world of Zulu traditional garb: black and white suedette patterns with coloured car reflectors inset. Which was then worn with buckskin or catskin. It was tough on the local feline populations, but one realised that luiperdlap (faux leopard skin) would never be a runaway item in this part of the world ...

We left KwaMashu and entered Durban from the north, passing fabric shops and the venerable Lion Match factory, stopping at the disused railway station in Umgeni Road. This was where Zulu women ruled. They were mostly rural women weavers who trekked in for a few weeks to sell their wares. They stayed somewhere in the back of the building and each morning they set up shop on the sidewalk, selling sleeping mats, black clay pots and Zulu cutlery. And they didn’t haggle, as I soon found out.

“How much for this mat?”, asked Dave, in his slow, amiable Zulu.

“Seventy rands”, the seller replied.

“How about sixty rands?”

“Seventy rands.”

“Maybe sixty-five?”

“Seventy rands.”

OK then. We’ll take two.

Dave Charles asked the women if they were safe here on Umgeni Road. Weren’t they worried that the men would rob them?

“Let them come”, one said defiantly. “Then they will see what we do to them ...”

Dave was looking for one James Bhengu, the best shield-maker in town. He worked in a hostel near the docks, and for the ten minutes we spent searching the building for him in vain, we felt extremely pale in a very dark world.

We crossed over to the Dalton Road Skin Dealers, a hive of industry. Zulu radio blared out from the stalls, which doubled as bedrooms and shops for the workmen inside. They were making spears, knobkerries, drums, shields and the entire array of traditional Zulu paraphernalia you saw the warriors wearing on TV at special occasions.

Here we found another Bhengu – a powerful, strong-featured man called Kay. He made everything from beautiful cowhide shields to nut-like objects worn at the end of a warrior’s penis – the umncedo. Dave provided a little light background:

“In the old days, a Zulu man could be considered fully dressed wearing only this little widget fitted onto his member. It is said that when King Shaka berated his advisors, all their umncedos would drop off at the same time ...”

Our last stop of the morning was the Victoria Street Muthi Market, a sprawling outdoor display on a bridge overpass with the Durban skyline in the background. This was the second economy of our country, Africa-to-Africa in full throttle. More than 80% of all South Africans used traditional medicine at some time in their lives. Hundreds of metres of stalls were bunched up next to each other selling powders, roots, barks, shells, animal heads, skins of every description, sea beans, wings, feathers and other body parts – each with a specific medicinal purpose.

I caught up with Dave Charles, who was joyously chatting with a woman about one of her potions. They were inspecting some ‘Zulu Viagra’, and it turned into a crowd-stopping passage involving ribald hand movements, raised eyebrows and much laughter. Everyone passing by had something to add to the conversation, and by the way they leered at me I could see Dave was setting me up for a big sale. I was right. The potions lady scooped together a package of twigs and fine brown powder into some newspaper wrapping and told me, via Mr Charles:

“One tablespoon if you’re brave, stirred into a glass of milk or a cup of soup. But make sure there’s a woman in your arms already, because this thing, it works fast.” Jules had wandered off to a discreet distance from us, but I could see her straining to hear the translation...

We continued to Ballito to visit Dave’s cousin, Michael O – an extraordinary man.

Before dawn every day, regardless of the weather, he slips on his Zulu Thousand Miler sandals (with carved-in ‘swoosh’) and walks the 18 minutes from his apartment to the sea.

Michael’s route takes him past some of the more serious money in South Africa. Ballito (Italian for ‘little ball’), less than an hour’s drive north of Durban, is the archetypal playground for the wealthy. In season it’s madness as the rich and beautiful gather in vast apartments, on fairways and in boutique hotels to celebrate the year’s coups in the corporate world. Out of season, they build. Ballito is about as far as you can go from the Wild Coast, in terms of development. And to the eye that prefers a Pondo hut to a condo squat, Ballito is more than a little charm-free.

But Michael O has found a shrine. It comes in the form of Thompson’s Tidal Pool down by the beach. Michael has become the custodian of the tidal pool. In its own way, the tidal pool tries to look after him, too.

Before he swims, Michael goes to the rocks at the ocean side of the pool and just watches the restless waves for 20 minutes. Then he inserts earplugs (swimmer’s ear is the occupational hazard down here), dons his yellow goggles and announces to us:

“Welcome to my office.”

Standing waist deep in the tidal pool, with the deep-green Art Deco change rooms in the background, Michael smiles as the hardy little blacktail fish come to nibble dead skin from his legs. Recently, when he and his partner Harriet were away for a short while, his tidal pool was drained so a leak could be fixed.

“Every single bit of life in the pool vanished,” Michael says. “They ate everything.” But all is never lost. The neap tide is washing fresh seawater into the pool with each wave. And it seems the mud prawns – which help to purify the water – are on their way back. They have already punched tiny little blowholes in the sand at the bottom of the pool. Soon the other familiar forms of life – Michael’s Tidal Pool Club – will be able to return.

“Normally, you’d find sea cucumbers, an octopus, the prawns, more than 40 varieties of fish and crabs here,” he says, preparing for his laps. “The triggerfish used to know me well. They swam underneath me in convoy. I think they recognised my stroke.”

He swam 17 laps around the pool in a deceptively slow but powerful crawl – freestyle. In 90 minutes he covered more than 5 kilometres. Another wave from the rising tide washed into the pool.

Michael O, a tall man with shaggy, sea-bleached hair, exuded a sense of ease and inner joy. One would expect his partner Harriet, a kind, blonde and trim woman, to have fallen in love with the rich lifestyle of the North Coast. But no, she yearned for the friendlier, more familiar lights of the mining town they’d come from. Harriet found the Ballito Inner Set a little difficult to penetrate. It didn’t help that her beloved partner spent his mornings dreaming besides a tidal pool, but she wasn’t going to say that.

“I’ve got my best friend right here,” Harriet said, hugging the good-natured Michael.

For more than 27 years, Michael O worked in the mining world. His dad had been a doctor on the mines.

“Although we moved on average once every five years, it was a wonderful lifestyle,” he said. “Everyone worked and played together, from the highest manager to the lowest worker.”

He lived through the gathering era of labour problems, faction fighting and a corporate takeover that left more than 12 000 people jobless. As a human resources executive, Michael O found himself on the firing side of the corporate table.

“People didn’t live in the mine village any more,” said Michael. “The new focus was all on profits. It became my job to retrench my own colleagues.”

Jules and I had, in our travels up the Wild Coast, met more than a dozen families who had been directly affected by these very retrenchments.

Harriet showed us a photograph of Michael in corporate days, looking into the camera lens like a tired old rabbit pinned in the headlights of an onrushing car.

His management, seeing their star hatchet man was on the brink of a nervous breakdown, offered Michael some ‘indefinite’ time off. They felt he was taking things ‘too personally’.

“What else can you do? Some things you have to take personally.”

Michael and Harriet came down to Ballito for a break, and this was where he discovered the secrets of Thompson’s Pool.

“Gazing at the sea and swimming in the pool every day made me feel better,” he said. “At the pool, things became simple. There was no one to boss me around – and there was no one to retrench. I suddenly realised I could not remember when last I had seen the stars, or the sunrise. I remembered my dad, who had bought a seaside house for his retirement. He died before he could live there.”

Michael O – at the tender age of 49 – took early retirement and went back to his tidal pool.

With every day he spent slowly circling the fringes of the tidal pool, he changed a little. Michael spoke to us about whale numbers in the world, his fascination with sharks and his contempt for shark-fin soupers. He had also begun to train young black kids to swim, and some of the older ones were in his life-saving class.

Dave Charles had begun a news magazine called Ballito Life & Style, which was growing in popularity and was now being circulated from the coast to the foothills of the Drakensberg. Michael O had become Dave’s beach watchdog, and every time some developer eased a load of effluent into the sea, Michael would be there to point it out to the readers of Ballito Life & Style – getting up more than one corporate nostril in the process.

“I have appointed myself the guardian of this little piece of Earth,” he said. “I take this pool very personally.”

Ballito is big money, but insiders told us the real – and far more discreet – wealth lay across the N2 highway at Shaka’s Kraal. This was where Kumarie Suguna Sundharie Ramesh and her family lived, in modest middle-class circumstances.

“Call me Ragni,” she said, and I relaxed. We’d seen Ragni in action some years before out at The Kingdom, as she danced for the crowd in both classical Indian and Bollywood-style. Jules and I asked Ragni if we could crash their family Saturday night sit-down dinner in the interests of Shorelines, and she said sure. Come on in.

Outside, the weather was diabolically sullen. I wondered if Michael O would swim the next day. Inside Ragni’s place, dinner aromas were beginning to waft from the kitchen.

“It’s actually my parents’ house,” she said. “My husband Ramesh, our two sons and I have recently moved in as well.” They’d bought the family home from their parents – a win-win for the whole family.

In the corner of the passage stood a shrine with the photograph of an old lady in the centre, surrounded by candles, family portraits and fresh flowers.

“The spirit of my Aya (grandmother) continues to guide me,” said Ragni as we walked around. “Whenever I pass, I touch her face and pray to her.”

One of Ragni’s first memories was of accompanying her Aya on her rounds of Shaka’s Kraal village, selling fruit and vegetables from the family garden.

Her main obsession was, however, the dance. Even as a small child, Ragni would invent dance moves to entertain the family. And when she turned 11, her mother took her to India, where she danced in a school in Madras (now Chennai) for a fortnight. She begged to return to India.

“When I was 14, I went off to boarding school in Chennai for four years,” she said. Her parents sold off their prized wedding jewellery to fund her stay.

“I had dance classes for three hours and practice for another three hours – every day,” she said. She later met her future husband, Ramesh Gopal, and thus began a chaste courtship, conducted through chaperones. “We decided to come back to South Africa to live,” said Ragni. “I loved my Aya too much to leave her.”

We sat down to supper at a table laden with fragrant Tamil food: mutton curry, prawn curry, chicken curry, fried chicken, roti and basmati rice. We even tried some of the vegan Ramesh’s soya mince curry mix, tucking in with our right hands.

The Naickers began talking about the apartheid years.

“At first, we lived in complete ignorance of the struggle movement,” said Mr Naicker, whose ancestors had been brought over as indentured labourers in the mid-1800s to work on the sugar-cane fields of Natal.

“But we suffered discrimination first-hand – low pay, bad incidents. In 1987, Mrs Naicker and I went travelling around South Africa. At King William’s Town, we stopped at a fish and chips shop for something to eat. The woman behind the counter said we could not sit down. We had to take our food outside and eat it in the car. But enough about that ...”

We finished dinner off with vermicelli – angel-haired pasta that had been fried in butter, sugar and cream – and a dollop of ice cream. And, as we left to return to Ballito, Ragni gave us a box of chocolates, a couple of mangoes from their tree in the front garden – and a little figure of the dancing Shiva ...

Chapter 31: St Lucia

Dune Music

“Now hold still,” says the dentist. “I’m just going to insert this little titanium rod into your tooth to bolster it. And then we can build the bridge.”

Titanium? Hmm. That rings a bell. Titanium not only rings bells but is also found in cars, planes, ships, helicopters, missiles, sunscreens, body piercings, surgical instruments, pacemakers, space-exploration equipment, wheelchairs, bicycles and dental implants. But the largest consumers of titanium oxide are newspaper publishers, who use it to whiten newsprint.

“It gives Smartie chocolate beans their cheery bright colours,” Jules informs me.

It also adds insulation to turtle rookeries, improving the sand quality. That’s why we are out here on the beach at Cape Vidal on this summer night in January with a man called Kian Barker and a Mama Loggerhead ready to drop her load of precious eggs.

The lean, intense Barker plays Vivaldi on the sound system of his Land Rover as we head out in the early evening. Tonight we might see either leatherbacks or loggerheads coming ashore. The leatherbacks can weigh more than a ton, and as they lumber onto the sands it’s hard to imagine them scooting through the ocean at 100 km/h. But when you have a hungry tiger shark or mako on your tail, a dash of speed is always the answer. Then they dive deep into the dark, cold oceanic waters, where sharks are not equipped to follow them.

“The leatherbacks hover offshore down in Leven Canyon or even deeper, over the continental shelf, until dark,” says Kian. “A female will come out and lay more than 1 000 eggs over about 10 visits in the space of three months. After that, you won’t see her again for as long as seven years. Some of them go off to the upwellings on our West Coast, others will head towards the east Indian ocean or even as far as the Pacific.”

Turtles are not supposed to lay eggs this far south. The sand below the Tropic of Capricorn does not hold its heat long enough at night to act as an incubator. A long time ago, leatherbacks must have progressively strayed more than 600 km south of the Tropic of Capricorn and started using the beaches in what is now called the Greater St Lucia Marine Sanctuary. They found the sands to be unusually warm and laid their eggs successfully, starting a bit of a turtle trend.

The metallic titanium (also called ilmenite) in the sand conducts and retains heat and moisture. And if Rio Tinto Zinc’s bid to mine ilmenite here in the early 1990s had been given the go-ahead, this natural turtle incubator would have been destroyed. Eventually, there would be no more summer nocturnal tours to watch these ‘big mamas’ slowly hauling themselves up the beach to lay eggs.

But the potential loss of turtles was not the reason that eventually swayed politicians to reject mining in favour of retaining natural beauty in the mid-1990s. Nor was it St Lucia’s extraordinary ‘sense of place’, invoked by environmentalists who energetically opposed mining because it would destroy a fragile beauty and biodiversity unparalleled in South Africa.

It wasn’t even because legendary conservationist Dr Ian Player threatened to lie down naked in front of the bulldozers.

The real reason was sustainable jobs. Ecotourism promised to employ three times more people directly and thousands more indirectly, compared with dune mining, which offered only 313 lifetime jobs.

Titanium mining is hugely profitable for the mining company concerned. Valued at $1 200 an ounce (in 2006), it’s more precious than platinum – and easy to mine. You just scoop up the dunes, sift them and rebuild them on the other side. That’s the theory, at least. In practice, the ilmenite also lends the dunes structure and strength, which is why they are some of the highest and most ancient beach dunes in the world. Once mined, they often slump. And no one can recreate their generous biodiversity. And then, obviously, the turtles will go elsewhere for an easier lay.

Kian’s second love – loggerheads – are far smaller at about 120 kg. While leatherbacks use a wide variety of nesting sites to lay eggs, loggerheads are a less adventurous lot. They will favour specific sites, adding a few ‘wild-card’ nests just in case of tsunamis, fires, hurricanes and predators.

“They’ve got iron particles in their heads, which become magnetised while developing in the soft warm maternal sands of St Lucia,” says Kian. “So they can accurately locate the birthing area. It’s a type of magnetic memory that apparently kicks in when the females are ready to lay, effectively guiding them back to their original birth ground.”

On our way to the beach, we pick up some foreign tourists. One Aussie guy wants to know: is it true that wild animals roam the streets of St Lucia at night?

“Oh yes,” Kian says, his tone serious. “There are at least three leopards that regularly come into town. Jack Russell terriers don’t live much beyond 18 months around here before they get eaten. That’s why we call them Chinese takeaways.

“And there are hippos that occasionally come to town, especially when it’s dry, like now. They keep the lawns in the public areas down to a decent trim. And when it floods, crocodiles have been found in the swimming pool of a local resort.

“Just over 18 months ago a herd of elephants walked into St Lucia after chasing a stroppy young bull. A helicopter had to be called in to get them back into the park.”

By now, there is silence in the vehicle. The urge to insert a loud feline yowl or elephantine trumpet is almost unbearable – and yet I, in an amazing display of maturity, shut the hell up.

Then we come across (and wake) a pygmy kingfisher on a thin branch, being whipped by the night wind.

“Meet the most photographed pygmy kingfisher in the world,” says Kian. The bird opens one eye, favours each of us with a glare and goes back to sleep.

The drive is full of these encounters and little factoid bytes from Kian. At Cape Vidal we eat a late meal of spare ribs, samoosas and salad. It’s 10.30 pm and we’re only expecting our first turtle well after midnight. Kian drives onto the beach and turns north along the high-water mark, the surf nipping at our wheels. A scant 50 metres on, our guide gasps:

“I can’t believe it.”

He points at fresh loggerhead tracks. This old turtle is heading for a spot just below the normally packed carpark, where the ocean roar is often smothered by loud music. Tonight, there is no sound beyond that of the waves.

Kian keeps us all at bay until the turtle has gone into an ‘egg trance’ and our presence matters no longer.

“I call it a genetic epidural,” says Kian. “Nature just switches off the senses and instinct takes over. Everything slows down. It’s a bit like an old Windows 92 program. Once a certain action (such as digging) ends, there’s a couple of minutes’ break, and then the next one (in this case, egg laying) starts. Always the same – and always very slow and methodical.”

We kneel in reverence behind the loggerhead mother. It is a perfect night, with only a slight sea breeze. Here before us is a seaborne creature the size of a modest coffee table, digging a hole in the earth for her eggs, her flippers flicking sand away in a 200-million-year-old ritual.

Kian whispers his praises for her choice of egg-laying spot.

“This is a very successful place. It’s not too close to the forest, so the hatchlings have a good chance of reaching the sea without being too exhausted. But it’s also far enough up so as not to be disturbed by beach walkers and high-tidal waters that could swamp the nest.”

The eggs begin to pop out in quick succession. The mom is finished. You can see it costs a turtle an enormous amount of energy to crawl out of the buoyant sea, submit to exhausting gravity, and dig a careful hole for her babies.

As we drive away, we see the waiting ghost crabs skittering away in the headlights. In a few months, the tiny turtle babies will have to run the gauntlet of these ravenous creatures, pale death riding on eight hydraulically operated legs.

“Just a warning here,” says Kian. “If you ever come across a nest of hatchlings as they emerge, never pick them up and carry them off to the surf. They need the distance between nest and waves to open their lungs and coordinate their limbs. If you interfere, they’ll just drown.”

The rest of the night drive along the beach reveals wonders such as a long-dead melon-headed whale, a live crocodile that runs off into the surf and rides the breakers, a distant shadow of a hunting leopard and a dehydrated python that allows Kian to lift and display him to his guests. The snake has been destined to be the leopard’s late supper, Kian reckons. To give it a better chance, he ascends the closest dune in darkness to deposit it gently on the dune floor.

“Are you walking across the lake tomorrow?” he asks Jules later, just before dropping us off. She nods.

“Watch out for the Mpate Monster,” says Kian ominously, with laughter somewhere behind those intense eyes.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a 7-metre-long crocodile that lives somewhere in the lake,” he says. I can see that as a young boy he loved putting spiders in girls’ lunch boxes. But then, who didn’t?

“During World War II, the Catalina pilots would strafe the larger crocs as they flew over them. It was good gunnery practice. But they never got the Mpate Monster.”

The next day we crossed the utterly dry plains of Lake St Lucia with a group of Bhangazi elders, including Ephraim Mfeka.

“As little boys, we used to wade across the lake from the eastern shores to a trading store on the other side,” he said. “But now, just look at this drought.” We were in an open plain that was once lake, speckled with small, white, crustacean shells. Only little clumps of grass survived here now.

If the Mpate Monster was indeed in the neighbourhood, he was no doubt in lurk mode until the next bout of good rains fell over Lake St Lucia.

Ephraim told us how his clan would shout and sing and beat the water in the crossing to frighten off gathering crocodiles. But they were not always successful.

“My mother was taken by a crocodile,” said Ephraim. “We went out and killed that one.”

This was the first time the elders had crossed the lake in more than 40 years. In the mid-1950s the apartheid government began forcibly removing thousands of people from the eastern shores of Lake St Lucia in order to plant what the bitter Bhangazi community would later refer to as “soldier trees” – a parade ground of pines and gums.

“They removed us in trucks. It was up to the driver where to drop us,” said Ephraim. “If he liked a certain hill or a tree, that’s where he would take us.”

When democracy came and their land claim was deemed successful, the Bhangazi clan opted for a cash payout instead of occupation. They still retained the right to develop a small peninsula for a lodge and heritage centre. After much negotiation the cash payment worked out at R30 000 per household.

“The money,” said Ephraim, “has been a curse. Families were fighting over it. One man bought a car with his money. Then he had an argument with his son, who stole it and later wrecked it. Others died before they could use their share, and their children fought over the spoils.”

“If I had known then what I know now,” said Ephraim. “I would have invested in a tourism thing. Maybe a camp with luxury tents.”

Many of the people dispossessed in the 1960s and 1970s went to live in the Dukuduku Forest outside the town of St Lucia. They dug their heels in here and refused to be budged. Jules and I met four Dukuduku Forest people the next day who had also embraced the Rastafarian faith.

“Just call me Phungula,” said BA (Bhekinkosi) Phungula, the leader of the Manukelana Art and Nursery project. He had dreadlocks and a guileless smile.

Five years before, Phungula and his group decided to start a plant nursery. A local chief gave them land.

“For funding, I suppose we could have asked the municipality for millions,” said Phungula. “But we didn’t. Instead, we asked everybody for their leftover things, whatever they really didn’t need.”

So they ended up with old tyres (plant containers), drums, plastic bags, shade netting, assorted pipes and planks from the sawmill down the road. Phungula showed us an array of seedlings that included Natal gardenias, jacket plums, coastal coral trees and flat tops. We walked past a place called The Alex Frisby Tower.

“Last year, a group of students from England visited us and wanted to know what we needed most,” said Phungula. “Of course, we said we had a water crisis.”

So the group returned and spent two weeks setting up a raised water tank and establishing a vegetable garden for the project. The only one of the English friends who couldn’t make the trip was someone called Alex Frisby. But he ended up being here anyway, if only in name.

“We never thought that people from the other side of the world could mix concrete and push wheelbarrows,” said Phungula. “It gave us so much hope. We knew we were doing something good.”

The water pipeline between Mtubatuba and St Lucia flowed right past them on the other side of the road, but their application to tap into it looked as though it would take another five years to be considered. So now they were drawing from the ever-dropping water table with a foot pump.

What did the project name, Manukelana, refer to?

“It’s the name of one of the old regiments loyal to King Cetswayo,” said Phungula. “It also means ‘sixth sense’ – the one that makes you know by instinct.

“Our lives depend on plants. If a woman is breast-feeding, she might need a certain herb. In our culture, if a woman is anxious, she must go to the marula and chew on the bark. While she has the bark in her mouth, she must speak out about everything that is worrying her. She must tell it to the tree. Then she must spit out the remains of the bark and put it back in the tree. And she must cry until she feels better.”

The project also supplied the local healers with medicinal plants. A famous and powerful healer in the St Lucia area known as Mkhize brought them valuable seeds for planting.

“Especially the pepper bark,” said Phungula. “It is very good for clearing chest infections.”

Phungula and his friends all came from families that had snuck into the Dukuduku Forest in the 1970s and remained.

“Now, if you take us out of the forest, it is like taking a fish out of the water,” he said.

Their forest home had morphed into a settlement called Khula Village and had become a real political hot potato. What constituted destruction? Was it a man making a small garden for sweet potatoes, maize and cassavas? Was it someone who cleared wild land and planted a sugar-cane empire? Much of this province was a vast swathe of waving green.

What used to be simple thatching grass in old New Guinea was eventually found to taste sweet. The sugar-cane craze spread through China, India and the Mediterranean. The Crusaders brought it back to England and then it became the main Caribbean crop. And a modern-day obesity curse, not to mention the major reason my upper right molar now carried a stiff bolt of very expensive titanium that was, thankfully, not ripped out from under a couple of loggerhead eggs …

Chapter 32: St Lucia to Kosi Bay

Kosi Corner

His childhood name was Skebenga (mischievous one). If his wife Tracy weren’t around to keep an eagle eye on what he ate, his basic diet would consist of copious cups of sweet milky tea, crisps, bread and apricot jam, with a stiff Jameson’s in a tin mug to end the day.

His ideal mode of dress is a khaki shirt and a sarong worn with rough-tread sandals. Whenever he comes across a piece of water he has a very strong urge simply to fall into it.

His musical tastes stretch no further forward than 1977, encompassing the work of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby Stills Nash & Young and Cat Stevens.

That’s Andrew Zaloumis, who never thought that one day he’d be the CEO of a complicated social and geographical patchwork of land that takes up almost a third of the entire KwaZulu-Natal coastline.

“He came out of the bush at Bhanga Nek with long hair, a beard and leather sandals, looking like Jesus,” one of his colleagues told us. “I had serious doubts about him then. But he’s accomplished so much. Andrew thinks on his feet.”

Andrew and his team had to consolidate 16 separate parcels of land into one park and prepare it for linkage with wilderness areas in Swaziland and Mozambique.

In 1999, the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park was listed as South Africa’s first World Heritage Site. But while it had been designated a natural treasure of great importance, the Park was still very much a work in progress, something the UNESCO committee found refreshingly unconventional.

Pristine areas usually get the World Heritage nod. Here, on the other hand, was a place so riddled with alien pine trees that Australian delegates to the 2003 World Parks Convention in Durban teasingly referred to it as “That Swiss Alpine World Heritage Site”. Given the chance, those Aussies would probably have staged a mock cheese fondue on the eastern shores just to drive the point home.

By 2005, six million pines had been chopped down – with more than 7 000-ha of plantations still awaiting clearance. One of the greats of South African conservation, Dr Ian Player (brother of golfer Gary Player), said a circle of his life had now been completed – he was witness to the 1953 forced removals to make way for these ‘soldier trees’. There was another poignant circle being closed: Andrew was helping to shape the country’s great new national park that his late father Nolly, along with Dr Player and many others, had helped to save from mining.

The water-thirsty pines were barely out of the ground and their stumps burnt before marshlands began to reappear. Water-dependent species such as reedbuck, waterbuck and saddle-billed stork were extending their ranges as the pines vanished and the wetland-dappled coastal grasslands returned. A family of hippo came to enquire about real estate in the area – and were accommodated in a reconstituted lakelet.

This vast 380 000-ha expanse of lake, islands and estuary not only incorporated an astonishing variety of habitats but was home to nearly half-a-million local inhabitants as well. Zaloumis & Co had to think out of the box and help provide a living for as many as possible. The dune-mining option would probably always hang like the Sword of Damocles over what bigwigs in the World Heritage Centre called “a clear example of the new style of protected area management”.

But already there were more tangible benefits than the recuperation of coastlands. Ecologically sensitive roads were linking isolated communities to markets, medical centres and schools. Lake St Lucia was malaria-free for the first time in human memory. The last elephant in the St Lucia system had been shot in 1916. In 2001, they were brought back to the eastern shores.

Previously, the St Lucia complex was known to few holiday-makers. It was the diver’s den, the fisherman’s friend and a place where senior policemen could have a burnt meat ball. Now, because of its World Heritage status, it had an international profile. Community-shared tourism was the way to go, and luxury lodges and backpacker camps stood shoulder to shoulder at carefully selected sites.

Not only could you fish and dive, but there were turtles and dolphins and whales to be watched, dune forests and beaches and rock pools to explore, and birds, big game and belly safaris to experience. Suddenly the whole St Lucia thing had blossomed into dozens of new possibilities. Different kinds of tourists – both local and international – were arriving.

With each new inspiration came a spurt of job opportunities for the local people. Jules and I were going to visit some of those who lived along the KwaJobe Road to share in their recent good fortune.

Bronwyn James, who came to pick us up in her double-cab 4x4 for the KwaJobe drive, was as tall as her title: head of the Social Economic and Environmental Unit (SEED), operating under the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park Authority.

The road towards Mtubatuba was a strip mall of tropical fruit, sweet with the smell of pineapple. Bronwyn told us about the Mr Price deal.

“Mr Price [a popular retailer] has placed 120 000 rands’ worth of craft orders over two months,” she said. “There are already 400 women creating baskets and mats, and this will probably increase the number of people employed and boost earnings for this area.”

Each group of about a dozen women produced products specific to the area, using available materials such as reeds, ilala palm fronds and sisal. The magical ilala palm also made a very potent, high-energy wine that gave a spring to the local step – and one helluva hangover to outsiders such as myself.

We were on our way to meet Mr Majindi ‘Weekend’ Gumede and his many wives, who had banded into a highly productive cottage-industry unit. On the way we stopped at a small river to watch the women driving fish into their reed baskets. They waved back.

Carefully avoiding cattle and goats as they drank from rainwater puddles along the KwaJobe Road, we reached a small village in a clearing of trees where curious children peered out from behind huts.

A large bare-chested man with white hair and a beard greeted me from where he sat in his doorway, watching the Zulu rain drop down in a gentle drizzle. This was Weekend Gumede, husband to 10 wives, father of 62 children. He was currently ill, we were told. I asked permission to take a photograph of him, he nodded and we turned to the women under the trees.

The women had arranged themselves and their goods in a photo-friendly semicircle. We were all seated on chairs in front of them and were handed umbrellas. But then the rain simply bucketed down and we all decamped to someone’s bedroom, where the handwritten sign on the back of the wooden door read:

“I love Christian No 1.”

When craft training began for the people of St Lucia in 2000, Bongi Gumede stepped forward, secured the orders and recruited the rest of her family into the project. She was still the money administrator. Did lots of it get handed over to Weekend, we wanted to know. This was greeted with raucous laughter. Perish the thought.

“We don’t give the money to him,” she said. “But we do show him how much we’re making. And then sometimes we buy him something nice.”

The lives of these women – and of their children – had changed immensely since they’d started earning money from their crafts. Suddenly, school fees and clothes and groceries could be paid for.

“It was difficult to earn money before,” they said. “We used to cultivate mealies and vegetables and we made traditional beer to sell in the villages nearby. But we got far less money than now. Also, many of our children did not go to school.”

Not one of the Gumede wives had had a formal education. Before ‘the change’, their children would also have dropped out of the system early. Now all those of school-going age were being educated. Most of the working mothers now had cellphones, fridges and wardrobes, as well as beds and blankets. Power came from car batteries. Outages? What outages? KwaJobe would survive.

Gugu Gumede was particularly proud of her new goat.

“You must keep a goat, for just in case,” she said. “You can always sell the kids.”

Sisters. Doing it for themselves. I walked over and said goodbye to Mr Majindi ‘Weekend’ Gumede, the luckiest guy in Zululand.

The imperturbable Molly Zaloumis and her granddaughter Georgina took their chances with us in the Isuzu. Andrew, Tracy and their son Emmanuel (“E-Man”) led the way in their 4x4. Jules and Georgina had a competition to see who could keep Smarties unmelted in their mouths the longest.

The homesteads thinned out and the trees grew taller. The sand was ever-present. At one point, our gallant bakkie hesitated in deep sand and sank, wheels spinning. Andrew showed me how to deflate tyres, activate difflock, keep one wheel on the grass and get through. He’d been here before.

We drove over a beautiful iron bridge that spanned tea-coloured waters and clattered with the weight of our vehicles. This was where an erstwhile Environment Minister (Valli Moosa) had been controversially photographed skinny-dipping years before. I personally thought all Environment Ministers could do with more skinny-dipping and less office-ministering. But that’s just me.

Andrew Zaloumis looked down longingly at the water. Today, however, it was very shallow and not swimmable. It still brought back memories for him.

“Once, I was coming out of here and had to be hidden from the cops,” he said, speaking for once about his work up here during the apartheid era. “Just as the driver was covering me with a blanket at the back of the vehicle, an old Tsonga couple came up and asked for a lift. They climbed in at the back.

“At some stage, however, the couple realised there was something under the blanket. They thought the car was bewitched and leapt out, yelling.”

We pulled up at Hlalanathi Camp, which had a splendid view of Kosi Bay’s third lake, which was then turning pewter in the soft afternoon light. Amos Ngubane and his wife Maria welcomed us.

Amos Ngubane had assisted the late activist and sociologist David Webster in his work up here from 1984 until 1989, when he was gunned down by apartheid cops in Troyeville, Jo’burg.

“I was in his house that day. I heard the shot outside,” said Amos. “My grief was great.”

That night at dinner, Andrew told us about the social problems of Manguzi.

“In years gone by, there were only a few dozen people living around here,” he said. “Now there are more than 20 000, many of them retrenched miners. Others are immigrants from Mozambique. There’s a lot of people-pressure on a smallish piece of environmentally sensitive land.”

Early the next morning, Jules and I discovered the delights of a cold-water bucket shower, had breakfast with the Zaloumis family and were picked up by Dr Scotty Kyle for a day on Kosi Bay.

I had no trouble calling Scotty Kyle ‘The Laird of the Bay’. The doughty Scotsman (definitely not ‘dour’) had been here for more than a quarter of a century, keeping a watchful eye on the natural assets of Kosi Bay in his role as resource ecologist for the area.

We climbed aboard his flat-bottomed sleigh-boat called Poch Mahon (a Celtic blessing, he cryptically assured us) and rode through choppy waters towards the fish traps.

“Fish traps have been here for centuries,” Scotty said loudly above the din of the outboard motor. “Portuguese-shipwreck survivors noticed them 500 years ago – but they probably go back to prehistoric times.”

The famous fish traps of Kosi Bay had continued in the same successful, sustainable manner until the mid-1990s, when the first waves of retrenched gold miners came back home.

“The number of fish traps trebled in four years,” said Scotty. “And in this case, human efficiency became nature’s enemy. The new guys started using nylon to tie the saplings together, closing the gaps and making them more efficient. Which meant that the fingerlings were caught and could not escape to breed and grow big.”

It had taken Scotty Kyle many years of quiet negotiation with the local indunas to get most of them to return to the old sustainable methods, using rope made from the fibres of wild-banana stems.

We chugged up to where a well-built, older man was busy with his traps and his spears. I wanted photographs.

“Maybe, maybe,” said the 72-year-old Amon Mkhize. “But, you know, there is nothing for nothing.”

We settled on a photo fee of R50 and I jumped into the unexpectedly deep water, hoisting my rather expensive Canon 20D camera above my head just in time. With Amon’s grinning face looming out of Kosi Bay in front of his old-style fish traps, me dancing in the warm waters, and Jules and Scotty bobbing about nearby in the boat, a good time was happening all around.

Amon Mkhize used to work in Jo’burg on the gold mines, for the very company with which our friend Michael O (the Prince of the Tidal Pool) had been associated. The small world was spinning in on itself.

“But I was lucky,” he said. “I retired way back in 1985 – before they could push me.”

He caught king fish, rock salmon and crabs for the pot. Whatever was left over he sold to others. Why did he not use nylon in his traps?

“I use what my grandfather used,” he said. “I don’t like nylon. It doesn’t let the small fish escape.”

Scotty beamed.

A big ski-boat loaded with beer bellies surged up behind us like Goldfinger on the rampage against James Bond in a skiff. It prudently slowed down when Scotty’s official Parks Board epaulettes made an appearance.

“I once collided with one of those ski-boats in a channel,” said Scotty. “It ended up with a blonde in a bikini upside down in the boat, the skipper leaping off it to save the beers and me dangling over the side in the water, still holding the steering wheel.”

And then we went off to Scotty’s house on the hill to meet his wife Diane and a pear-shaped mongoose called Mungus. Scotty met Diane in Etosha when he was a game ranger in the mid-1970s. His courtship methods were simple. At night, he’d mingle with tourists, dressed in a kilt and occasionally playing the bagpipes. He had two pick-up lines, Diane remembered:

“Would you like to see the rhinos?” or “Have you seen any anthrax carcasses today?”

She fell in love with him anyway.

Scotty showed us all his snakes, while I sort of hung about in the background. One of them was a gaboon viper, one of the deadliest you could find. There were also eight baby vipers, saved from a sand dune about to be mined.

“Unfortunately, one of them died,” said Scotty Kyle. “It bit itself by mistake.”

Jules and I spent our last night of the Shorelines trip at the Turtle Shack at Bhanga Neck with Andrew and his family. The sea roared in our ears, the cast and fetch of the waves rocked us to sleep.

On our way out the next morning, the bakkie fell deep into the soft sand once more. Everyone, including Grandma Molly, pitched in to help us out, bringing sticks and branches to put under the back wheels for traction. Even their Jack Russell puppy called Harry came running up with a couple of twigs in his mouth.

After the farewells, there was one more small mission left for us: to get to the Mozambican border and put an official cap on the trip. We drove the few last kilometres through grasslands and mealie fields and scattered kraals to the north-eastern edge of South Africa.

As we turned to go back, finger grasses bobbing in the wind at the side of the road waved us goodbye …

Chapter 33: Aftermath

Storm Warning

In the late winter of 2006, as we were putting Shorelines to bed, trouble was brewing off the West Coast of South Africa.

It had started five years before. Like the West Coast rock lobster, the sardines, and to some extent hake stocks, had slowly been taking leave of the most nutrient-rich, productive fishing grounds in the world, rounding the corner of Cape Point and spreading out eastwards.

When it happened in 2001, it astounded scientists and infuriated fishermen. Scientists had set high fishing quotas for sardines (also known as pilchards) and anchovies because there seemed to be a simultaneous boom in their populations – a highly unusual event.

But the sardines mostly eluded the pelagic fishermen, the shoals shifting almost to Port Elizabeth, making it uneconomical to follow them.

At the time, scientists said it was an anomaly, and fishermen hoped for better luck the following year. But the anomaly persisted, and grew even worse. The big fish shoals didn’t come back to the West Coast.

“Now there is not a pilchard left between Lambert’s Bay and Cape Point,” lamented René Zamudio, the retired pelagic fisherman we met at Laaiplek.

René still had his finger on the pulse of the industry. The steel trawler Aranos he used to skipper until 1994 was moored upriver from his house, and he continued to run the Weskus Pelagiese Vissers Pensioenfonds (the West Coast Pelagic Fishermen’s Retirement Fund), which has 700 active members.

“It’s a small community, and fishermen talk. The West Coast is in real trouble. Only the other day, I had dozens of fishermen outside my office, begging for help from the pension fund. Their cars are being repossessed. A few of them are at risk of losing their houses. They don’t know what to do. Some of the new entrants into the fishing industry, part of the transformation, are in so much financial trouble they can’t even pay their pension fund premiums.

“It’s not too bad for the big steel trawlers like the Aranos. The skipper tells me he is taking it around to Stilbaai, and they’re finding fish there. But the guys in the wooden boats, they can’t get there. They’re the ones in trouble.

“And you know what scares me? After August, the fish become fewer because they head down to the Agulhas Banks to spawn. I think the big problem is overfishing.”

Mossel Bay was now the unplanned epicentre of the pelagic fishing industry, with 27 purse seine vessels and four big steel trawlers operating out of the industrial town’s harbour. But all the canneries and packing plants were still spread out on the West Coast, from St Helena Bay to Saldanha, over 600 km away.

Horst Kleinschmidt, former head of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism’s (DEAT) Marine & Coastal Management branch, now managing director of Feike (Pty) Ltd – a fisheries and aquaculture advisory firm – said he recently calculated that the fishing industry spent R80 million last year alone, trucking the fish from Mossel Bay to Saldanha. The fishing companies have no idea whether they should be setting up their canneries at Mossel Bay or not, and no one can advise them. Will the sardines stay on the south coast?

And is overfishing really the problem? South Africa’s fish stocks have long been lauded as one of the most responsibly managed in the world. Our hake fishery was awarded the Marine Stewardship Council standard for sustainable fisheries two years ago, and generates R2 billion in foreign revenue a year from it.

But this white gold is in trouble too. It has also moved somewhat eastwards. More worryingly, Kleinschmidt says the size of the hake fished in South Africa’s waters has declined dramatically over the past few years, something that crops up in all overexploited fisheries. This creates a problem for the packing factories, which are not tooled up for such small fish. Some trawlers are tossing 30%, “or maybe even more”, overboard before they get to shore, says Kleinschmidt.

“It’s turning a crisis into a near calamity.”

There are also preliminary studies showing the sardine biomass may have halved from a peak of 2.5 million tons in 2003.

The problem seems to run deeper than overfishing. Kleinschmidt and fisheries scientists are now starting to believe the other smoking gun is climate change.

For decades now, biologists have been tracking the eastward movement of hundreds of species in South Africa, everything from plants to beetles to mammals. Atmospherics scientist at the University of Cape Town, Dr Bruce Hewitson, confirms that average global temperatures have risen by 0.63º C, and that they will continue to rise. No one knows where they will stabilise – the most conservative figure is a worrying 2º C higher (if nations cut down dramatically on greenhouse gas emissions) up to a catastrophic four to six degrees higher later this century (if they don’t), or even higher still. The entire country will become hotter, says Hewitson, especially in the interior, and drier on the west side of the country with higher rainfall in the east.

Species are voting with their feet, wings or roots – for a better chance in moister areas. But it’s only in the past five years that the fish have joined them, catching everyone by surprise.

The scientists focusing on the Benguela current that links Angola, Namibia and South Africa say there is “an increased frequency of warm events” in the northern Benguela.

They call them “Benguela Niños”. Fisheries writer Claire Attwood described them in an Africa Geographic article as “sustained events [with] large swathes of warm, highly saline water moving into northern and central Namibia from Angola.”

Dr Carl van der Lingen, pelagic ecologist at DEAT, is not entirely convinced that climate change is responsible for shifts in fish distributions, although he concedes that other species simultaneously moving eastwards could hint at it.

There may be other reasons for distribution shifts, he said. If the South African sardine population is divided into sub-stocks, each of which has a ‘preferred’ habitat from other sub-stocks, overfishing of the West Coast sardine population might be a factor. Or there could be some kind of climate variability (as opposed to change), which means the sardines may move back to the West Coast in the future.

Scientists have not picked up major environmental signals, such as an increase in sea temperature. And in any case, sardines are hardy fish that can withstand a wide temperature variation, Van der Lingen points out. They’ve been observed spawning in water with temperature ranges between 15º C and a balmy 22º C.

“We haven’t found a long-term environmental reason for the sardine shift eastward and I doubt it’s a simple one. Everything is so interconnected.”

What happens when sardines and other fish vanish from a region as rich in nutrients as the West Coast? For that, it’s necessary to look north.

Namibia’s pelagic industry crashed in the early 1970s after reaching breathtaking catches of 1.4 million tons at the boomtime peak in 1968.

By the early 1980s, Walvis Bay had hundreds of empty houses – it nearly became a ghost town as a result of the pilchard-business collapse. Thousands of dead Cape fur seals washed up on the beaches. The sardines never really recovered. Today, Namibia keeps its canneries ticking over with an annual catch of less than 25 000 tons, even though scientists advise zero take. The stock is erratic. In 2003, the research ship Welwitschia did not find a single pilchard in Namibian waters.

Yet the marvellous West Coast upwelling just rolled on, the wind-driven currents bringing up nutrients from the depths – the very reason these waters were once so rich in fish. Now mostly uneaten, the plankton do not enter the food chain and slowly sink back to the deep, their decomposition sucking oxygen at the bottom of the sea to create dead zones and sulphur eruptions.

Benguela ecosystem scientists are starting to talk about a serious degradation of the system.

DEAT ecosystems modeller Dr Lynne Shannon confirmed that jellyfish, millions of tons of them, have partially taken the place sardines and anchovies have left vacant in Namibia. They’re voracious eaters of floating plankton – and, more worryingly, of sardine eggs – so Namibia may never see the return of its pelagic wealth, apart from pelagic gobies, survivors because they are bottom and midwater feeders.

Could the same happen in South Africa? No one knows for sure, because no one can tell whether the change is permanent.

The seabirds, meanwhile, have followed the fish eastwards.

Namibia’s offshore islands used to be covered with seabirds. Now many of them are completely barren, and the same may happen on the West Coast.

Keith Harrison, chairman of the West Coast Bird Club, says that 2006 is the first year a colony of 800 hardy kelp gulls he sees regularly on the lower Berg River wetlands has produced only a handful of chicks.

“They can survive on trash and termites themselves, but they need to feed fish to their young, and they just aren’t finding fish. The Caspian terns that breed here, the biggest population on the West Coast, left after a few days.”

The numbers of seabirds might have plummeted on the West Coast, but are up on the southern and eastern coasts.

Hartlaub’s gull is now breeding near Port Elizabeth, 550 km further east than it did 10 years ago. Wilfred Chivell of Dyer Island Cruises in Gans Bay has noted a dramatic increase in swift terns nesting on Dyer Island, from 1 250 pairs to 6 700 pairs in one year. More albatross are being seen, especially the shy albatross, but also the Indian yellow-nosed and the grey-headed, perhaps because of the wealth of fish crowding the Agulhas Bank.

Cape gannets have mostly followed the shoals. About 11 000 pairs of gannets were flushed off their nests by marauding seals eating adults and nestlings on Lambert’s Bay’s Bird Island in November 2005. But gannets, somewhat tragically in view of the vanishing fish stocks, are very loyal to their nesting sites and mates. By July 2006 a few hundred had come back in preparation for the September breeding season, and were being guarded by a marksman ordered to shoot any seal that approached the gannet nests.

There are also reports that 87% of gannets fledged from Malgas Island were eaten by seals on their first flight to sea.

By contrast, Bird Island off Port Elizabeth is now home to a soaring gannet population – 170 000 at last count.

Why are seals attacking birds on the West Coast? Are they desperate because there are not enough fish to eat?

Dr Tony Williams, seabird biologist for Cape Nature, based at the Avian Demography Unit at UCT, has studied the back story of seals. In pre-European history, they were simply never found on the mainland, because any seal that swam ashore was clubbed by Strandlopers who pursued them for fat to supplement their otherwise lean shellfish diet.

It was only in the 1930s that they began to set up colonies on the mainland, on the undisturbed beaches within West Coast and Namibian diamond concessions. The population limits of islands fell away. Cape fur seals now number a million in Namibia and two million in South Africa. (Namibia recently announced it planned to cull 91 000, saying they posed a serious threat to their fishing industry.)

Dominant males create harems of compliant females. But the young males are always on the lookout for “something on the side”, explained Dr Williams, and they want to stay close to the colony, unwilling to forage far offshore. If there is little or no fish in the water, they’ve learnt to supplement their diet with seabirds, attacking them on their nests. Some male seals now specialise in eating gannets on their nests, others in eating penguins in the sea – a vicious process called degloving, when the penguin is shaken so hard that its skin comes loose from flesh and bones. Seal attacks are one of the main reasons for a serious decline in penguin numbers.

What is the solution? The climate change issue will be with us for decades, probably centuries. South Africa produces 1.4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and has taken some preliminary steps to cut this down, but the world’s coal power stations are steaming on.

Kleinschmidt proposes that the West Coast fishing industries look to the underutilised horse mackerel instead, and the cultivation of perlemoen and oysters. And there are other things to do with anchovies than make fishmeal, he says. “It is astounding that we buy filleted anchovy from Italy and Portugal at R50 a tiny bottle. That could create a few more jobs.

“Most importantly, we can do something about overfishing. Even the fishing companies are starting to call for larger Marine Protected Areas. Argentina had similar overfishing problems, but they set up massive MPAs, stretching right out to the edge of the Exclusive Economic Zone 200 nautical miles out, and rigorously policed them. Now their fish stocks are increasing in number and size.”

Julienne du Toit

19 July 2006

CONTACT DETAILS

Alexander Bay

www.diamondcoast.co.za;

museum@alexkor.co.za;

027 783 11330

Helené Mostert: 084 513 0871

Springbok

Springbok Lodge + Restaurant

(Jopie F Kotze): 027 712 1321;

e-mail: sbklodge@intekom.co.za

Port Nolloth

Bedrock Guest House: 083 259 8865

or 017 851 8865/71/76

Kleinsee

De Beers: 027 807 2999;

082 225 8313;

e-mail: nmtourism@debeersgroup.com

Hondeklip Bay

Die Honnehok Guest House:

027 692 3041;

e-mail: dog@hondeklip.co.za

Doring Bay

Die Anker: 027 215 1016;

e-mail: waves@kingsley.co.za

Elands Bay

Bottergat Fisherman’s Cottage:

082 823 1300

Velddrif/Laaiplek

Harbour Lights Guest House:

022 783 2099; 082 773 6486

St Helena Bay

West Coast Peninsula Tourism Bureau

in Vredenburg: 022 715 1142

Lighthouses

Cape Columbine: 021 449 2400

Cape Town

Carnival Court Backpackers,

Long Street: 021 423 9003

False Bay & Cape Point

Traditional Kalk Bay Fishing Trip,

Surfing & Sandboarding School:

Sun Scene:

083 517 9383; www.sunscene.co.za

Nomthunzie Township Tours:

Charlotte: 083 982 5692;

nomthunzie@webmail.co.za

Cape Point: 021 780 9010;

www.capepoint.co.za

Cotton’s Cottages (Simon’s Town):

021 701 0377;

073 253 5252

Cape Point Route Marketing:

021 783 0054;

www.capepointroute.co.za;

e-mail: info@capepointroute.co.za

Boulders Beach Lodge:

021 786 1758;

www.bouldersbeach.co.za

Hermanus, Gans Bay and Arniston

Brian McFarlane: 082 320 1288;

brian@sharkcagediving.net;

www.sharkcagediving.net;

028 312 2788

Dyer Island Cruises:

083 402 8541; 028 384 0406

e-mail: dic@isales.co.za

Arniston Hotel: 028 445 9000;

e-mail: Derek@arnistonhotel.com

Victoria Bay and Knysna/George/Victoria Bay

Land’s End Guest House:

044 889 0123; e-mail: rod@vicbay.com

Endlovana Tented Camp:

044 382 6361;

082 570 6894;

www.endlovana.co.za;

e-mail: sucam@mweb.co.za

Knysna Tourism: 044 382 5510

Storms River Village

Storms River Adventures:

042 281 1836;

e-mail: ash@kingsley.co.za

Woodcutter’s Cottage: 072 299 1760

Jeffreys Bay

African Perfection Accommodation:

042 293 1401;

084 207 1337;

e-mail: aperfection@mweb.co.za

Port Elizabeth

Windermere Boutique Hotel:

041 582 2245;

info@thewindermere.co.za;

www.thewindermere.co.za

Calabash Tours:

041 585 6162;

e-mail: calabash@iafrica.com

Port Alfred

Port Alfred Tourism:

082 866 8873; 0466 241 235;

e-mail: tourism@ndlambe.co.za

Wild Coast

Wild Coast Meander:

043 743 6181; 083 260 5588

www.wildcoastholidays.co.za;

e-mail: meross@iafrica.com

South Coast

South Coast Tourism:

039 682 7944: 083 344 1437;

e-mail: margate@venturenet.co.za

THE READING ROOM –

Suggested Literature on the SA Coastline

Works Quoted From

•    Baai van Diamante Pieter Coetzer (Nasionale Boekdrukkery, 1997)

•    Glamour of Prospecting, The Fred C Cornell (David Philip, 1986)

•    History of Copper Mining in Namaqualand, A John M Smallberger (Scholtz Trust, 1975)

•    Fortune through my Fingers, A Jack Carstens (Howard Timmins, 1962)

•    Discovering Southern Africa TV Bulpin (Self-published, 1970)

•    Fishermen of the Cape Frank Robb and Bruce Franck (Longman, Penguin SA, 1975)

•    Fishing for Fortunes Robin Lees (Purnell, 1969)

•    History of the Stephan Family of the Western Cape, A Eric Rosenthal (unpublished, 1955)

•    Hilda’s Diary of a Cape Housekeeper Hildagonda J Duckitt (MacMillan SA, 1978)

•    Labour, Capital and the State in the St Helena Fisheries 1856-1956 Lance van Sittert (UCT dissertation)

•    Eccentric South Africa Pat Hopkins (Zebra, 2001)

•    Tavern of the Seas Lawrence G Green (Howard Timmins, 1947)

•    South African Beachcombers Lawrence G Green (Howard Timmins, 1958)

•    Thunder on the Blaauwberg Lawrence G Green (Howard Timmins, 1966)

•    On Wings of Fire Lawrence G Green (Howard Timmins, 1967)

•    The False Bay Story Jose Burman (Human and Rousseau, 1977)

•    Historical Simon’s Town Edited by BB Brock and BG Brock with the collaboration of HC Willis for the Simon’s Town Historical Society, (AA Balkema, 1976). Excerpt from ‘Whaling in False Bay’ Abdullah Moses – courtesy of Simon’s Town Museum.

•    To Catch a Whale Terence Wise (Geoffrey Bles Publishers, 1970)

•    Dawn at Dyer Jan Fourie (Self-published, 2002)

•    The People of De Hoop Nature Reserve Anne and Mike Scott of the Overberg Conservation Services (undated)

•    Camp Life and Sport in South Africa TJ Lucas (Africana Book Society, Johannesburg, 1975)

•    Frontiers Noel Mostert (Pimlico, 1993)

•    The Dead Will Arise Jeff Peires (Jonathan Ball, 2003)

•    A Fish Caught in Time Samantha Weinberg (Fourth Estate, 2000)

Further Reading

•    In the Company of Diamonds Peter Carstens (Ohio University Press, 2001)

•    Overberg Odyssey – People, Roads and Early Days Edmund H Burrows (Self-published, 1994)

•    The Overberg – Historical Anecdotes SJ du Toit (Self-published, 2005)

•    Swept by Wind & Wave WL Speight (Howard Timmins, undated)

•    Village of the Sea – Story of Hermanus Arderne Tredgold (Human & Rousseau, 1965)

•    Bay Between the Mountains Arderne Tredgold (Human & Rousseau, 1985)

•    The Absolute Border Alan Jefferies (Self-published, 2001)

•    Our Coast for Life Edited by Karey Evett (Project Co-ordination, undated)

•    Paradise Under Pressure Alan Mountain (Southern Books, 1990)

•    The Caliban Shore – The Fate of the Grosvenor Castaways Stephen Taylor (Faber & Faber, 2004)

•    Oceans of Life off Southern Africa Edited by Andrew Payne and Robert Crawford (Vlaeberg, 1989)

•    Currents of Contrast Life in Southern Africa’s Two Oceans Thomas Peschak (Struik, 2005)

•    Old Four Legs JLB Smith (Longmans, Green & Co, 1956)

•    The Truth in Masquerade Jane Meiring (Juta, undated)

GLOSSARY

abaKwetha – young black males undergoing initiation

Aloe pillansi – an endangered bush aloe

bakkie – a van

braai – a barbecue

broekielace – ‘panty lace’: filigreed metalwork

bokkoms – dried fish

dassie – a rock hyrax

dikkop – a bird

droster – a runaway slave

frikkadel – meat ball

fynbos – scrub-like vegetation, part of the Cape Floral Kingdom

harder – a type of fish

hotnotsvis – a type of fish

IDB – illicit diamond buying

induna – a local traditional leader

kwaito – township music

kabeljou – cob

kloof – a ravine or chasm

matjeshuis – a small dwelling constructed from reed ‘mats’

melkbos – milk bush

rooibos – red bush, from which a tea is produced

sandveld – a rare type of fynbos

smouse – travelling peddlers

schlentering – crooked dealings

shukka – tartan tribal cloth

sjambok – a heavy whip

smoorsnoek – fish stew

Strandlopers – ancient beach-combing community

skoroskoro – a wreck

tsatkes – bits and pieces, memorabilia

umngqusho – a dish of maize kernels and beans

vetkoek – deep-fried dough balls

witblits – ‘white lightning’: strong alcoholic spirit

First published in 2006 by Struik Publishers

(a division of New Holland Publishing (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd)

This ebook edition published in 2012 by Struik Travel & Heritage

(a division of New Holland Publishing (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd)

Wembley Square, First Floor

Solan Road

Cape Town, 8001

South Africa

www.randomstruik.co.za

Copyright © 2006, 2012 in published edition: Struik Travel & Heritage

Copyright © 2006, 2012 in text: Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit

Copyright © 2006, 2012 in photographs and map: Chris Marais,

except photograph on p 22: Jopie F Kotze

Publishing manager: Dominique le Roux

Managing editor: Lesley Hay-Whitton

Project co-ordinator: Samantha Menezes-Fick

Cover and concept designer: Daniele Michelini, Hirt & Carter Cape (Pty) Ltd

Typesetter: Tamlyn Phillips, Hirt & Carter Cape (Pty) Ltd

Editor: Deborah Louw

Map illustrator: Gillian Vermaak

Proofreader: Adri Mey

Print ISBN-13: 9781770073319

PDF ISBN: 9781920545192

Epub ISBN: 9781920545185

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.