Shorelines Read Online Free Page B

goat tobacco, wearing bonnets and generally being ‘19 th -century crusty’ every day of the week. And certainly not for nothing.
    Like a typical low-rent tourist, I had come roaring into town in my shiny pickup truck (OK, maybe not so shiny), dispensing smiles and asking dumb questions and expecting all the locals to shuffle into cultural-village mode. How naïve. This is the hot, dry country. You only rush about when it’s absolutely necessary. The mostly unemployed townsfolk are poor, often miserable, occasionally drunk and entirely without a sense of humour about rich, romping tourists and their invasive ways.
    “Blast that bonnet picture,” I cursed.
    “Forget it,” advised Jules. “Let’s concentrate on what really happens to us.” I drove on in a huff and promptly got us hopelessly lost in the wide wastes of the Richtersveld.
    We came upon two Land Rovers that looked packed for an around-the-world-andback trip. Someone in this khaki ensemble would know the road to Lekkersing. Or, at least, the words to ‘You Are My Sunshine’ . They looked as though they carried a global positioning system in every pocket of their war-correspondent jackets. I made for the driver of the lead vehicle and nearly choked in wonder and surprise.
    “Pieter du Plessis, you old bastard!” I shouted. Out here in the Richtersveld, profanity works a charm. The last time I had seen this cheerful, swarthy young man had been eight years previously in the jungles of southern Borneo. He had been the star of Team South Africa in the daunting Camel Trophy race. I was one of the steaming, heaving media guys covering this celebration of mud, sweat and gears. It was Pieter who charmed the girls from Balikpapan to Pontianak in Indonesian Kalimantan and won the Team Spirit award with his partner, Sam de Beer. Pieter now earned his crust as a specialist overland-safari guide.
    I rushed over to his guests, a party of Belgian tourists, and told them about Pieter, Borneo and me. They could have been a little more impressed.
    Oh God, I thought. I’m romping again.
    “It does not surprise us,” the alpha Belgian said, with an accent one could only describe as Franco-Asterix. “You South Africans all know each other.”
    I noticed that there was a wooden snake wound around the edges of the windshield of the Belgians’ Land Rover and one of the doors bore a sign saying ‘Live Specimens In Transit’, but I said nothing at the time. Later on, when we’d all shaken hands and parted, it was a different story.
    “Forget alarm systems and tracker devices and gear locks,” I enthused at Jules. “I’m gonna get us a wooden snake and a ‘live specimens’ sign. Then no one will ever break into the bakkie . Who likes to tangle with a snake, especially a snake curled up somewhere in the luggage?”
    Babble, babble, blah, blah. Some days you just wake up and behave like an overheated Labrador puppy, running in all the wrong directions at once and peeing on the carpet to boot. I think it had something to do with the knowledge that we’d be sleeping in Port Nolloth that night. The tree house of my rowdy youth.
    Just up the road, the barren veld turned into a sea of soft green, dotted with clumps of purple succulent flowers. We walked around silently for a while, the sun on our necks, the buzz of insects at our feet. The Land Rover convoy had become two distant puffs of dust.
    The village of Lekkersing was backstage Richtersveld. We saw tin-roofed houses cooking like pizza ovens in the summer sun and a diamond-quartzite mine that had ripped chunks from the land. We found a man walking in the street and asked about someone called Willem Diergaard, another contact from Alexander Bay.
    “Who wants to know?” he asked, glaring at me. I shrugged and drove on, past shops wistfully named Goeie Hoop and Paradise. Again, not a bonnet in sight.
    The Richtersveld is fabulously rich and obviously flawed. It has diamonds, copper and all manner of minerals. It has