Shorelines Read online

  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.