Shorelines: A Journey Along the South African Coast
Chris Marais, Julienne du Toit
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN: 1770073310
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Award winning travel writers Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit pack their trusty bakkie and drive the entire length of South Africa's shores, from Alexander Bay in the west to Kosi Bay in the east, meeting the weird and the wonderful, the criminal and the crazy elements of seaside South Africa en route.
This popular author duo pack their trusty bakkie and drive the entire length of South Africa's shores, from Alexander Bay in the west to Kosi Bay in the east. On their 10-week journey, they meet the weird and the wonderful, the criminal and the crazy elements of seaside South Africa. The issues, the drama, the history, the adventure and the comic humour one finds every day on the coast of this country make for an enthralling armchair travel read. Shorelines is all about diamond divers, surfers, skippers home from the sea, fishermen, smart baboons, dodgy developers, Rastafarians, Cadillac collectors, forest adventurers, Transkei nannies, sushi chefs, Zulu-shield makers, abalone poachers and a modern-day Robinson Crusoe. It's a generous slice of South African life, with its foibles, squabbles and the occasional homicidal oyster. Come in, the water's fine—for now...
Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit - authors of A Drink of Dry Land and Namibia Space - are travel writers who have won numerous awards for their magazine work over the years. They traverse Southern Africa in search of good stories and interesting people. Shorelines is their latest trip and, in terms of encounters and issues, their biggest - and most rewarding - challenge so far.
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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
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
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
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.
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