Table Of ContentShorelines
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
