by Chris Marais
Before he swims, Michael goes to the rocks at the ocean side of the pool and just watches the restless waves for 20 minutes. Then he inserts earplugs (swimmer’s ear is the occupational hazard down here), dons his yellow goggles and announces to us:
“Welcome to my office.”
Standing waist deep in the tidal pool, with the deep-green Art Deco change rooms in the background, Michael smiles as the hardy little blacktail fish come to nibble dead skin from his legs. Recently, when he and his partner Harriet were away for a short while, his tidal pool was drained so a leak could be fixed.
“Every single bit of life in the pool vanished,” Michael says. “They ate everything.” But all is never lost. The neap tide is washing fresh seawater into the pool with each wave. And it seems the mud prawns – which help to purify the water – are on their way back. They have already punched tiny little blowholes in the sand at the bottom of the pool. Soon the other familiar forms of life – Michael’s Tidal Pool Club – will be able to return.
“Normally, you’d find sea cucumbers, an octopus, the prawns, more than 40 varieties of fish and crabs here,” he says, preparing for his laps. “The triggerfish used to know me well. They swam underneath me in convoy. I think they recognised my stroke.”
He swam 17 laps around the pool in a deceptively slow but powerful crawl – freestyle. In 90 minutes he covered more than 5 kilometres. Another wave from the rising tide washed into the pool.
Michael O, a tall man with shaggy, sea-bleached hair, exuded a sense of ease and inner joy. One would expect his partner Harriet, a kind, blonde and trim woman, to have fallen in love with the rich lifestyle of the North Coast. But no, she yearned for the friendlier, more familiar lights of the mining town they’d come from. Harriet found the Ballito Inner Set a little difficult to penetrate. It didn’t help that her beloved partner spent his mornings dreaming besides a tidal pool, but she wasn’t going to say that.
“I’ve got my best friend right here,” Harriet said, hugging the good-natured Michael.
For more than 27 years, Michael O worked in the mining world. His dad had been a doctor on the mines.
“Although we moved on average once every five years, it was a wonderful lifestyle,” he said. “Everyone worked and played together, from the highest manager to the lowest worker.”
He lived through the gathering era of labour problems, faction fighting and a corporate takeover that left more than 12 000 people jobless. As a human resources executive, Michael O found himself on the firing side of the corporate table.
“People didn’t live in the mine village any more,” said Michael. “The new focus was all on profits. It became my job to retrench my own colleagues.”
Jules and I had, in our travels up the Wild Coast, met more than a dozen families who had been directly affected by these very retrenchments.
Harriet showed us a photograph of Michael in corporate days, looking into the camera lens like a tired old rabbit pinned in the headlights of an onrushing car.
His management, seeing their star hatchet man was on the brink of a nervous breakdown, offered Michael some ‘indefinite’ time off. They felt he was taking things ‘too personally’.
“What else can you do? Some things you have to take personally.”
Michael and Harriet came down to Ballito for a break, and this was where he discovered the secrets of Thompson’s Pool.
“Gazing at the sea and swimming in the pool every day made me feel better,” he said. “At the pool, things became simple. There was no one to boss me around – and there was no one to retrench. I suddenly realised I could not remember when last I had seen the stars, or the sunrise. I remembered my dad, who had bought a seaside house for his retirement. He died before he could live there.”
Michael O – at the tender age of 49 – took early retirement and went back to his tidal pool.
With every day he spent slowly circling the fringes of the tidal pool, he changed a little. Michael spoke to us about whale numbers in the world, his fascination with sharks and his contempt for shark-fin soupers. He had also begun to train young black kids to swim, and some of the older ones were in his life-saving class.
Dave Charles had begun a news magazine called Ballito Life & Style, which was growing in popularity and was now being circulated from the coast to the foothills of the Drakensberg. Michael O had become Dave’s beach watchdog, and every time some developer eased a load of effluent into the sea, Michael would be there to point it out to the readers of Ballito Life & Style – getting up more than one corporate nostril in the process.
“I have appointed myself the guardian of this little piece of Earth,” he said. “I take this pool very personally.”
Ballito is big money, but insiders told us the real – and far more discreet – wealth lay across the N2 highway at Shaka’s Kraal. This was where Kumarie Suguna Sundharie Ramesh and her family lived, in modest middle-class circumstances.
“Call me Ragni,” she said, and I relaxed. We’d seen Ragni in action some years before out at The Kingdom, as she danced for the crowd in both classical Indian and Bollywood-style. Jules and I asked Ragni if we could crash their family Saturday night sit-down dinner in the interests of Shorelines, and she said sure. Come on in.
Outside, the weather was diabolically sullen. I wondered if Michael O would swim the next day. Inside Ragni’s place, dinner aromas were beginning to waft from the kitchen.
“It’s actually my parents’ house,” she said. “My husband Ramesh, our two sons and I have recently moved in as well.” They’d bought the family home from their parents – a win-win for the whole family.
In the corner of the passage stood a shrine with the photograph of an old lady in the centre, surrounded by candles, family portraits and fresh flowers.
“The spirit of my Aya (grandmother) continues to guide me,” said Ragni as we walked around. “Whenever I pass, I touch her face and pray to her.”
One of Ragni’s first memories was of accompanying her Aya on her rounds of Shaka’s Kraal village, selling fruit and vegetables from the family garden.
Her main obsession was, however, the dance. Even as a small child, Ragni would invent dance moves to entertain the family. And when she turned 11, her mother took her to India, where she danced in a school in Madras (now Chennai) for a fortnight. She begged to return to India.
“When I was 14, I went off to boarding school in Chennai for four years,” she said. Her parents sold off their prized wedding jewellery to fund her stay.
“I had dance classes for three hours and practice for another three hours – every day,” she said. She later met her future husband, Ramesh Gopal, and thus began a chaste courtship, conducted through chaperones. “We decided to come back to South Africa to live,” said Ragni. “I loved my Aya too much to leave her.”
We sat down to supper at a table laden with fragrant Tamil food: mutton curry, prawn curry, chicken curry, fried chicken, roti and basmati rice. We even tried some of the vegan Ramesh’s soya mince curry mix, tucking in with our right hands.
The Naickers began talking about the apartheid years.
“At first, we lived in complete ignorance of the struggle movement,” said Mr Naicker, whose ancestors had been brought over as indentured labourers in the mid-1800s to work on the sugar-cane fields of Natal.
“But we suffered discrimination first-hand – low pay, bad incidents. In 1987, Mrs Naicker and I went travelling around South Africa. At King William’s Town, we stopped at a fish and chips shop for something to eat. The woman behind the counter said we could not sit down. We had to take our food outside and eat it in the car. But enough about that ...”
We finished dinner off with vermicelli – angel-haired pasta that had been fried in butter, sugar and cream – and a dollop of ice cream. And, as we left to return to Ballito, Ragni gave us a box of chocolates, a couple of mangoes from their tree in the front garden – and a little figure of the dancing Shiva ...
Chapter 31: St Lucia
Dune Music
“Now hold still,” says the dentist. “I’m just going to insert this little titanium rod into your tooth to bolster it. And then we can build the bridge.”
Titanium? Hmm. That rings a bell. Titanium not only rings bells but is also found in cars, planes, ships, helicopters, missiles, sunscreens, body piercings, surgical instruments, pacemakers, space-exploration equipment, wheelchairs, bicycles and dental implants. But the largest consumers of titanium oxide are newspaper publishers, who use it to whiten newsprint.
“It gives Smartie chocolate beans their cheery bright colours,” Jules informs me.
It also adds insulation to turtle rookeries, improving the sand quality. That’s why we are out here on the beach at Cape Vidal on this summer night in January with a man called Kian Barker and a Mama Loggerhead ready to drop her load of precious eggs.
The lean, intense Barker plays Vivaldi on the sound system of his Land Rover as we head out in the early evening. Tonight we might see either leatherbacks or loggerheads coming ashore. The leatherbacks can weigh more than a ton, and as they lumber onto the sands it’s hard to imagine them scooting through the ocean at 100 km/h. But when you have a hungry tiger shark or mako on your tail, a dash of speed is always the answer. Then they dive deep into the dark, cold oceanic waters, where sharks are not equipped to follow them.
“The leatherbacks hover offshore down in Leven Canyon or even deeper, over the continental shelf, until dark,” says Kian. “A female will come out and lay more than 1 000 eggs over about 10 visits in the space of three months. After that, you won’t see her again for as long as seven years. Some of them go off to the upwellings on our West Coast, others will head towards the east Indian ocean or even as far as the Pacific.”
Turtles are not supposed to lay eggs this far south. The sand below the Tropic of Capricorn does not hold its heat long enough at night to act as an incubator. A long time ago, leatherbacks must have progressively strayed more than 600 km south of the Tropic of Capricorn and started using the beaches in what is now called the Greater St Lucia Marine Sanctuary. They found the sands to be unusually warm and laid their eggs successfully, starting a bit of a turtle trend.
The metallic titanium (also called ilmenite) in the sand conducts and retains heat and moisture. And if Rio Tinto Zinc’s bid to mine ilmenite here in the early 1990s had been given the go-ahead, this natural turtle incubator would have been destroyed. Eventually, there would be no more summer nocturnal tours to watch these ‘big mamas’ slowly hauling themselves up the beach to lay eggs.
But the potential loss of turtles was not the reason that eventually swayed politicians to reject mining in favour of retaining natural beauty in the mid-1990s. Nor was it St Lucia’s extraordinary ‘sense of place’, invoked by environmentalists who energetically opposed mining because it would destroy a fragile beauty and biodiversity unparalleled in South Africa.
It wasn’t even because legendary conservationist Dr Ian Player threatened to lie down naked in front of the bulldozers.
The real reason was sustainable jobs. Ecotourism promised to employ three times more people directly and thousands more indirectly, compared with dune mining, which offered only 313 lifetime jobs.
Titanium mining is hugely profitable for the mining company concerned. Valued at $1 200 an ounce (in 2006), it’s more precious than platinum – and easy to mine. You just scoop up the dunes, sift them and rebuild them on the other side. That’s the theory, at least. In practice, the ilmenite also lends the dunes structure and strength, which is why they are some of the highest and most ancient beach dunes in the world. Once mined, they often slump. And no one can recreate their generous biodiversity. And then, obviously, the turtles will go elsewhere for an easier lay.
Kian’s second love – loggerheads – are far smaller at about 120 kg. While leatherbacks use a wide variety of nesting sites to lay eggs, loggerheads are a less adventurous lot. They will favour specific sites, adding a few ‘wild-card’ nests just in case of tsunamis, fires, hurricanes and predators.
“They’ve got iron particles in their heads, which become magnetised while developing in the soft warm maternal sands of St Lucia,” says Kian. “So they can accurately locate the birthing area. It’s a type of magnetic memory that apparently kicks in when the females are ready to lay, effectively guiding them back to their original birth ground.”
On our way to the beach, we pick up some foreign tourists. One Aussie guy wants to know: is it true that wild animals roam the streets of St Lucia at night?
“Oh yes,” Kian says, his tone serious. “There are at least three leopards that regularly come into town. Jack Russell terriers don’t live much beyond 18 months around here before they get eaten. That’s why we call them Chinese takeaways.
“And there are hippos that occasionally come to town, especially when it’s dry, like now. They keep the lawns in the public areas down to a decent trim. And when it floods, crocodiles have been found in the swimming pool of a local resort.
“Just over 18 months ago a herd of elephants walked into St Lucia after chasing a stroppy young bull. A helicopter had to be called in to get them back into the park.”
By now, there is silence in the vehicle. The urge to insert a loud feline yowl or elephantine trumpet is almost unbearable – and yet I, in an amazing display of maturity, shut the hell up.
Then we come across (and wake) a pygmy kingfisher on a thin branch, being whipped by the night wind.
“Meet the most photographed pygmy kingfisher in the world,” says Kian. The bird opens one eye, favours each of us with a glare and goes back to sleep.
The drive is full of these encounters and little factoid bytes from Kian. At Cape Vidal we eat a late meal of spare ribs, samoosas and salad. It’s 10.30 pm and we’re only expecting our first turtle well after midnight. Kian drives onto the beach and turns north along the high-water mark, the surf nipping at our wheels. A scant 50 metres on, our guide gasps:
“I can’t believe it.”
He points at fresh loggerhead tracks. This old turtle is heading for a spot just below the normally packed carpark, where the ocean roar is often smothered by loud music. Tonight, there is no sound beyond that of the waves.
Kian keeps us all at bay until the turtle has gone into an ‘egg trance’ and our presence matters no longer.
“I call it a genetic epidural,” says Kian. “Nature just switches off the senses and instinct takes over. Everything slows down. It’s a bit like an old Windows 92 program. Once a certain action (such as digging) ends, there’s a couple of minutes’ break, and then the next one (in this case, egg laying) starts. Always the same – and always very slow and methodical.”
We kneel in reverence behind the loggerhead mother. It is a perfect night, with only a slight sea breeze. Here before us is a seaborne creature the size of a modest coffee table, digging a hole in the earth for her eggs, her flippers flicking sand away in a 200-million-year-old ritual.
Kian whispers his praises for her choice of egg-laying spot.
“This is a very successful place. It’s not too close to the forest, so the hatchlings have a good chance of reaching the sea without being too exhausted. But it’s also far enough up so as not to be disturbed by beach walkers and high-tidal waters that could swamp the nest.”
The eggs begin to pop out in quick succession. The mom is finished. You can see it costs a turtle an enormous amount of energy to crawl out of the buoyant sea, submit to exhausting gravity, and dig a careful hole for her babies.
As we drive away, we see the waiting ghost crabs skittering away in the headlights. In a few months, the tiny turtle babies will have to run the gauntlet of these ravenous creatures, pale death riding on eight hydraulically operated legs.
“Just a warning here,” says Kian. “If you ever come across a nest of hatchlings as they emerge, never pick them up and carry them off to the surf. They need the distance between nest and waves to open their lungs and coordinate their li
mbs. If you interfere, they’ll just drown.”
The rest of the night drive along the beach reveals wonders such as a long-dead melon-headed whale, a live crocodile that runs off into the surf and rides the breakers, a distant shadow of a hunting leopard and a dehydrated python that allows Kian to lift and display him to his guests. The snake has been destined to be the leopard’s late supper, Kian reckons. To give it a better chance, he ascends the closest dune in darkness to deposit it gently on the dune floor.
“Are you walking across the lake tomorrow?” he asks Jules later, just before dropping us off. She nods.
“Watch out for the Mpate Monster,” says Kian ominously, with laughter somewhere behind those intense eyes.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a 7-metre-long crocodile that lives somewhere in the lake,” he says. I can see that as a young boy he loved putting spiders in girls’ lunch boxes. But then, who didn’t?
“During World War II, the Catalina pilots would strafe the larger crocs as they flew over them. It was good gunnery practice. But they never got the Mpate Monster.”
The next day we crossed the utterly dry plains of Lake St Lucia with a group of Bhangazi elders, including Ephraim Mfeka.
“As little boys, we used to wade across the lake from the eastern shores to a trading store on the other side,” he said. “But now, just look at this drought.” We were in an open plain that was once lake, speckled with small, white, crustacean shells. Only little clumps of grass survived here now.
If the Mpate Monster was indeed in the neighbourhood, he was no doubt in lurk mode until the next bout of good rains fell over Lake St Lucia.
Ephraim told us how his clan would shout and sing and beat the water in the crossing to frighten off gathering crocodiles. But they were not always successful.
“My mother was taken by a crocodile,” said Ephraim. “We went out and killed that one.”
This was the first time the elders had crossed the lake in more than 40 years. In the mid-1950s the apartheid government began forcibly removing thousands of people from the eastern shores of Lake St Lucia in order to plant what the bitter Bhangazi community would later refer to as “soldier trees” – a parade ground of pines and gums.
