11
The Light Between Worlds
“Between night and day there is a narrow hour when the world forgets to pretend—when whales rise, cliffs breathe, and the ocean tells the truth to anyone awake enough to listen.”
John Sparks
WHEN THE OCEAN HOLDS ITS BREATH
There are mornings before sunrise when the ocean feels like it’s holding its breath.
Those are the mornings I love most on the Hermanus cliff path.
I stand at New Harbour while the dark retreats toward Madagascar, 1,800 miles to the east. The air has that particular Western Cape spring bite—sharp enough to wake every nerve, gentle enough to feel like permission.
Walker Bay stretches in front of me like brushed pewter. The surface is so calm it looks poured rather than blown into shape. Somewhere beyond the horizon, the Kleinrivier Mountains are starting to gather light.
I begin walking east.
FIRST LIGHT, FIRST EYES
The cliff path unfurls ahead—twelve kilometres of trail that somehow manages to be both engineered and eternal. Beneath my feet, centuries of wave‑carved rock have been tamed just enough that my eighty‑nine‑year‑old father can still walk sections of it; wild enough that every footfall still feels like a small trespass.
The first light arrives quietly.
It touches the distant peaks first—Mount Baviaans and his neighbours—turning their silhouettes from charcoal to copper. Then it spills down the slopes like honey until it finds the bay.
The bay surrenders.
What was pewter becomes pearl. The stillness deepens. The surface tension of the Atlantic seems barely able to contain whatever is rising beneath it—not whales yet, although they are somewhere out there—but something older: the morning itself, coming into focus.
Near Fick’s Pool, I round a slight bend and find the usual
congregation in their usual pews: the dassies.
THE GUARDIANS OF THE WALL
A colony of rock hyraxes occupies the prime spots near Gearing’s
Point: thick brown fur catching the first gold, bodies pressed against sun‑warmed stone. Mothers and babies. The youngsters are only a few weeks old, born in this kinder slice of Cape spring. Perfect miniatures, fully furred, eyes like polished obsidian, already capable of the improbable little leaps their kind specialise in.
I slow my steps.
One of the mothers raises her head, rounded ears twitching. Her baby presses closer into the curve of her body.
We look at each other: fellow mammals separated by sixty million years of evolution and a few metres of cliff, sharing the same cold air and the same thin moment between dark and day.
I take one more step.
A sentinel chirps—a high, sharp, ancestral alarm. The colony explodes into motion. They scatter into low vegetation and rock cracks with a speed that makes me feel ridiculous on two legs. In seconds they’ve vanished into seams and pockets in the old harbour walls I still can’t see, even knowing they’re there.
Then, slowly, small heads reappear. From safe shadow, they look back at me.
In their eyes I recognise that same brief, efficient assessment I’ve seen in animals across sixty‑two countries: threat or temporary?
Predator or passing?
Today, I am passing. I move on. They keep watching. The sun climbs a little higher.
THE OLD HARBOUR’S MEMORY
The Old Harbour is one of only two open‑air maritime museums in the world preserved in their original state. It doesn’t feel like a museum at this hour. It feels like it’s still working.
Stone sea walls curve around the old slipway. Historic boats rest on concrete slopes, hulls casting long shadows that lengthen and shrink with the seasons. Above, the Whale House holds the suspended skeleton of a young Southern Right female that washed ashore in 2003—a pale, weightless question hanging in the rafters.
I stand where generations of fishermen have stood—on these very stones, looking at this same horizon, trying to guess the weather and the catch.
Behind me, the town is mostly asleep. In front of me, the reason I’m here is just about to write itself into the morning.
THE BREATHING MOUNTAIN
Past the Old Harbour, the path swings toward Kwaaiwater—“angry water”—even though today the sea is anything but. A proper swell is rolling in from the south, maybe six feet, but it’s well behaved. Each wave lifts long strands of kelp, curls, folds itself over the rocks with crisp efficiency, then slides back in a polite hiss.
Then I see it.
A single, vertical blow about fifty metres offshore, catching the low sun and turning briefly to gold dust. Then another. And another.
Southern Right whales. Close enough to hear the sound of their breath—the deep, wet whooosh that feels like it comes from somewhere under the ribs of the continent.
I stop walking.
The part of me that is a guide immediately starts cataloguing: distance, number, wind direction. The part of me that is just a human being goes very, very still.
Near Roman Rock—a jagged offshore formation where thirty‑foot winter waves test surfers’ bravery—the whales begin to do the thing that photographs never quite show properly.
They dance.
THE DANCE
The first move is lobtailing.
A tail lifts high into the air, broad and black, water pouring off its trailing edge. It pauses in that improbable position, then slams down onto the surface. The sound reaches me a heartbeat after the sight—a hollow, rolling crack of displaced water and shared gravity.
Then spy‑hopping.
A head rises from the horizontal like a slow question mark, moving vertically until the eyes and callosities are clearly visible. The callosities—those rough, pale patches of thickened skin that hold whale lice and give each whale a unique pattern—stand out almost white in the early light.
One eye looks in the direction of the cliff. In my direction.
For five, maybe ten seconds, we regard each other: an animal that has crossed oceans and decades, and a man who has walked down a path with a cup of coffee.
Threat or temporary? Predator or passing?
The whale decides I am not worth bothering about and folds back into the bay with barely a ripple.
Through all of this, my hands have been itching toward the drone bag. I know what might be possible from the air today. I also know that every time I put a machine into this sky, I’m adding something to the whales’ morning that isn’t originally part of it.
There’s a balance, and it isn’t mine alone to decide. Today, the water is quiet, the light soft, the whales close, the wind right. I make the call.
I unzip the bag.
THE FOOTAGE
The drone hums into the golden air, rotors a faint buzz against the surf. Through the screen, Walker Bay rearranges itself. The cliff path becomes a dark ribbon. Hermanus shrinks to a scatter of houses and trees balanced between mountain and sea. The Kleinrivier
Mountains now stand fully lit, their folds and fynbos slopes picked out in every shade of spring green and gold.
And there, near Roman Rock, in water so clear the kelp forests trace themselves below the surface, I see what almost nobody ever gets to see this cleanly in the wild.
Two Southern Right whales, bodies parallel, rolling together in the old choreography of mating.
From this height they move with a tenderness that would surprise anyone who has only ever thought of whales as weight. They surface and submerge in slow synchrony, lines of motion crossing and uncrossing. The male—forty, fifty tons of animal—positions himself with a care that would be the envy of any careful lover. The female receives, adjusts, rolls. Their tails push slow vortices into the blue.
Sunlight catches spray and for three, maybe four minutes, the whole scene is absurdly, almost indecently beautiful.
On the screen it is spectacular. With my own eyes, leaning over the railing, it is something else. Something that makes the back of my throat tight.
I think, briefly and sharply, of my own mother—gone now—but somehow still present in every big, quiet moment like this. Love, across time and distance, is never neat. This, down there, is its own version of it, old and wordless.
Then it’s over. They separate, sound, vanish into the deeper blue beyond the reef as if they were never there.
I know the footage will matter. Marine biologists, documentarians, conservationists—they will all want a look at what the whales allowed us to see today.
But standing here, salt drying on my lips, I understand again that the footage is only evidence. The experience lives somewhere else entirely.
THE SOUND OF SHELLS
The path carries me on past Roman Rock toward Kammabaai, and the soundscape changes.
The tide is falling. Water withdraws across a billion shells—limpets, mussels, periwinkles—making a noise like soft rain played backwards. Tiny waves lay themselves over shingle, then slide away with a faint, rattling applause.
To my right, houses cling to this cliff with glass and steel and ambition. Some of the most expensive real estate in South Africa stares out at this bay. I don’t begrudge a single window. If I had won different lotteries—genetic, financial—I might have tried to buy this view too. Instead I rent it by the morning, on foot.
THE FISHERMEN’S GOSPEL
Near Sievers Punt, where the path dips close to the waterline, the brotherhood of dawn is already at work.
Three fishermen stand spaced along the rocks, rods angled toward the horizon, lines vanishing into water now catching full sunlight.
They wear the uniform of their trade: old caps, salt‑stained jackets, boots that have argued with a thousand tides. Tackle boxes sit open like small altars to patience.
“Môre,” the nearest one says, Afrikaans thick as the mist that was
here an hour ago.
“Morning,” I reply. “Any luck?”
He grins, gap‑toothed, entirely at ease.
“The sea gives what the sea wants to give,” he says. “Today, she’s been generous.”
His bucket holds four decent fish. One in particular catches my eye: a Red Roman, maybe three kilos, flanks the colour of burnt coral, still shining faintly with the cold of the deep.
“Beautiful fish,” I say.
“Roman Rock fish,” he nods at the reef offshore. “They’re thick there this time of year. The whales stir up the bottom. The Romans follow.”
We talk for fifteen minutes about what really matters in his world: whale migrations because they shift the fish; the spring run; how the path has and hasn’t changed in forty years. He tells me he sees mating whales more often than people think. The way he says it is not boastful; it’s matter‑of‑fact. This is his office.
When I make to leave, he reaches into his bucket and lifts out the Red Roman.
“Here,” he says. “Take this one. You have somewhere to cook it?”
“I’m staying in a villa,” I say. “There’s a chef—”
“Perfect,” he interrupts. “Tell your chef: lemon, butter, garlic, hot pan. Nothing else. Don’t insult a fish this fresh.”
I try to pay him. He waves the money away with a flick of annoyance, as if I’ve missed the point entirely.
“Just enjoy it,” he says. “And remember where it came from.”
I walk on, plastic bag in hand, carrying five pounds of still‑cool fish and the weight of a kindness you can’t buy.
KAMMABAAI
By the time I reach Kammabaai—Nanny’s Beach—the secret is out.
The sun has taken full possession of the day. The cove lies in a clean, bright curve, rock pools at the northern end already holding small armies of hermit crabs and anemones. Eight surfers dot the line‑up, bodies black against the white of breaking waves. Sets roll in with machine regularity—shoulder high, peeling right to left with a precision that makes people cross oceans.
I have board shorts under my clothes. I’ve had them on since I left the villa. I’ve been carrying this possibility all morning.
The water is a shock—Benguela cold, maybe fourteen degrees—the
kind of cold that grabs you by the lungs. It strips everything away: sleep, stray worries, the list of things that need doing next week.
What’s left is one simple fact: you’re a warm‑blooded animal voluntarily entering a cold‑blooded ocean.
I duck‑dive the first set. By the third I’m laughing into my own bubbles.
I catch a single wave, a smaller one the locals let pass. I ride it badly and joyfully all the way to the sand, where it deposits me with a tumble of white water and the sound of kids laughing somewhere up the beach.
Twenty minutes in the ocean. Twenty minutes of being just another body pushed where the wave wants to go.
I emerge grinning, salt on my lips, heart banging, the world rearranged to a simpler setting.
MILKWOOD CATHEDRAL
The last mile approaches, and with it the sun’s harder edge. Spring light in the Cape looks gentle; the UV index disagrees. My shoulders begin to prickle. My water bottle is nearly empty.
Then the path offers mercy.
Piet se Bos unfolds ahead: an avenue of ancient milkwood trees—Sideroxylon inerme—gnarled branches weaving into a canopy so dense the temperature drops ten degrees in a single step. Light filters through in green‑gold shafts. It feels less like walking into shade and more like walking underwater.
These trees are old. Some may be three hundred years or more, trunks twisted by centuries of wind into shapes that would look over‑designed in a gallery. Their wood is so dense it sinks in water. Their growth so slow that a tree my height may be older than many countries.
Birdsong layers itself above us: robin‑chats, thrushes, the faint tap of a woodpecker. Waves, moments ago loud and insistent, are now a softened rumble beyond the leaves.
I slow my pace. Not from tiredness, though the kilometres are in my legs, but from something closer to reverence.
Through occasional gaps in the canopy I glimpse what lies ahead: the huge white expanse of Grotto Beach, stretching eighteen kilometres toward mountains stacked like books in the distance. The finale. But for once, I’m in no particular hurry.
In this tunnel of milkwood, time thickens. You remember dassies on the rocks, the fisherman’s grin, the whales below the cliff, the cold slap of Kammabaai. It all sits here with you, under this green roof.
GROTTO BEACH AND UITSMIJTER
The path spills me onto Grotto Beach and suddenly the world is all light and space again.
Eighteen kilometres of Blue Flag sand run eastward. Behind the beach, the Kleinrivier mountains rise in purple and blue layers. The surf is bigger here, more exposed to the south: overhead sets marching toward shore in parallel lines.
Families are starting to arrive. Coolers. Umbrellas. Children with buckets in hot pursuit of the perfect sandcastle. Dogs chasing tennis balls into the shore break and returning with the proud, ridiculous joy only dogs manage.
I walk the last stretch to the restaurant at the official end of the cliff path. It’s Dutch‑owned—clean lines, big windows framing the sea, the smell of proper coffee so strong it feels structural.
I collapse into a chair on the deck, order, and sit with my legs quietly humming and my heart still at Roman Rock.
When the breakfast arrives, my chest does a small, private flip.
Uitsmijter. Two eggs fried in butter on thick bread, draped with ham and cheese, grilled until it bubbles and browns. Solid Dutch comfort food.
“You know this dish?” the waitress asks, amused at my expression.
“My kids are Dutch, I used to live there,” I tell her. “I haven’t had a proper uitsmijter since 2019.”
“Then welcome home,” she says.
I eat slowly. The yolks break gold across the bread. The cheese is sharp, the ham smoky, the butter unapologetic. But what threatens to undo me is not the taste. It’s the collision: Dutch breakfast in African light, whales still breathing in my peripheral memory, salt still on my lips.
Around me, the restaurant hums. Afrikaans, English, German, French. Staff move with that easy rhythm of people who live where others come to escape.
Out beyond the glass, Grotto keeps doing what it does. A pod of dolphins works the surf line, herding a bait ball into shallower water while gulls scream their approval overhead. Somewhere beyond them, the whales I watched at dawn are still there, doing whatever whales do when no one is pointing a camera.
THE RECKONING
I pull out my phone, scroll through the morning’s images.
Sunrise over the mountains, all orange and impossible. The dassie mother and her wide‑eyed baby. The fisherman’s hand on the Red Roman. The spy‑hopping whale’s eye. The drone footage of mating whales in that clear blue cathedral.
It’s good footage. It will be useful, even important, to people who understand what a gift it is.
But sitting here with coffee and eggs and three hours of cliff path stitched into my body, I realise something that both comforts and frustrates me as somebody whose job now often involves cameras.
The footage isn’t the thing.
The thing is the cold shock of Kammabaai. The fisherman’s refusal to take money for a perfect fish. The brief meeting of eyes with a whale.
The green‑gold silence of the milkwood. The taste of Dutch breakfast in African air.
Those only really exist in nerve endings and in the stories we choose to tell afterwards.
Sixty‑two countries into my own restless movement across this planet, I’ve seen my share of “once‑in‑a‑lifetime” landscapes. The Himalayas. The Amazon. Angkor. Marrakech. Icelandic auroras. Patagonian skies.
This simple walk—a harbour at dawn, a path, some whales, a fisherman, a few waves, a sandwich with eggs on it—somehow stands with the very best of them.
For me, it is one of the days I’ll measure all other days against.
THE RETURN
I pay the bill, leave a tip that makes the waitress raise an eyebrow, and step back onto the sand. The beach is hot now; I dance a little until I reach the damp, cooler strip near the waterline.
I could walk back, retrace my steps past the milkwood cathedral, Kammabaai, Roman Rock, and the Old Harbour. Make the morning into a perfect loop.
I don’t.
I stand for a moment, let the surf soak my ankles, and think of the family still asleep at the villa, the fish in their fridge, the paths we’ll walk together this afternoon. I think of my own father, who has walked parts of this route with me, and my children, who will hopefully do the same when my legs no longer feel like they could happily take another twelve kilometres.
Then I turn toward the road, still tasting coffee and uitsmijter, still hearing whales breathe in the back of my mind.
Not every walk needs to be symmetrical. Some are meant to take you one way and leave you changed enough that you’re someone slightly different on the drive home.
This was one of those.