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