Free Shorelines by Chris Marais

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 18 th 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