Shorelines by Chris Marais Page A

devastated. I could not find Herman’s cottages anywhere. Yuppie suburban rot had eaten most of the village. Prince Tourism had simply ridden up on his big white 4x4 horse and kissed Princess Paternoster to life.
    “And then she immediately turned into a cane toad,” I said as we drove in from the east.
    The bourgeoisie were still well represented in Paternoster, riding around in lycra-wrapped family packs on purple mountain bikes and sipping cappuccinos on the porches of their ‘fisherman-style’ shuttered homes amidst the faux seine nets and chintz.
    Today the Somerset West Photo Club was out en masse , cheerily stalking the main beach and fish market in search of iconic shots – as I was – of those wizened old fishermen and their boats.
    But we had been to Strandfontein. After the pre-Christmas ghostly sterility of Strandfontein, Paternoster was just fine. At least some fishermen still lived in the village among the moneyed encroachment of weekend warriors from Cape Town. At least the ‘Shoo Wah Brigade’, with their Land Rovers and their private-school kids and their red setters, had mostly built their homes in the West-Coast fisherman style.
    “And there’s always the Panty Bar,” I exulted as we parked outside the Paternoster Hotel and walked in according to Pat Hopkins’s instructions. But we were early for opening time, so I read some Hopkins, Eccentric South Africa, to Jules:
    “The crowded pub is decorated with such appalling taste that it takes on an appeal of its own. Signs like ‘Fuck the seals. Save the fishermen’ and ‘Traffic cops are proof that prostitutes do fall pregnant’ compete for space with panties and G-strings collected from honeymooning brides, plastic flowers, rubber breasts, penis candles …”
    At Saldanha Bay we checked into a self-catering spot for mice that offered ‘generous duck frontage’. As we packed our nine million pieces of luggage into the tiny space, three dark-eyed ducks came waddling up for a scratch on the head. And maybe something from one of our tucker boxes. They blinked happily in that mindless smiley-beaky way that ducks have. I closed the sliding door on them. They began pecking insistently on the glass and then, to really get our attention, commenced to crap all over the show.
    Jules and I had been room-trapped by possums in Tasmania, a brown hyena in Botswana and a crazed (I still think it was rabid) cat in Springbok. Three small ducks were not going to get the better of us. I went off to Management and requested their removal. Done.
    We drove up to the top of a hill overlooking Saldanha Bay, where we encountered a man smoking the largest dagga spliff in the world. It looked like a giant steaming carrot wrapped in the day’s newspaper headlines and it seemed to make the bearer very happy as he weaved across the tracks of the Great Sishen – Saldanha Railway Line.
    Saldanha Bay was first famous for its lovely guano, stashed on Mad Goose Island nearby. In the 1830s, Mad Goose Island was a blur of activity as the guano hunters bustled about, shovelling shit for a living.
    The mainland settlement used to be a motley pile of impoverished fishermen’s shacks. Then the fishing industry discovered the bounty of the Benguela Current and the town grew. The South African Navy built a base there and, after drinking water was piped in from the Berg River, an exporting harbour was developed. And the millionaires’ yachts began arriving in the bay, on wings of craven canvas.
    By lunchtime we were ensconced at The Slipway Restaurant down by the jetties. The dress code said “no overalls”, but you could smell the wealth as the moguls puttered in on skiffs from their ocean-going palaces to come and mingle with the common folk. Feeling pretty Greekish, we drank beer and ate a medley of snoek, hake, calamari and garlic mussels while Abba sang ‘Mamma Mia’.
    We dozed off in the sun as beady-eyed gulls kept a watch over us. Then there was a slight commotion