Gorgeous views of paradise

Published Dec 4, 2001

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By Vivien Horler

For anyone who has ever lived in, visited, or driven through Plettenberg Bay on the Garden Route, and fallen in love, this has to be the ultimate coffee table book.

Large format, with some of the most stunning pictures I have ever seen of the area, this book is really gorgeous.

And it's not just a pretty face - author Patricia Storrar both knows and is deeply devoted to her subject, and the result is a book rich in the geography, archaeology, history, and people of the area.

Storrar, a former reporter on The Star newspaper in Johannesburg, retired to Plettenberg Bay and found a new career as a social historian. Her first book, published in 1974, George Rex - Death of a Legend, debunked the popular theory that Rex, commonly regarded as a the founder of Knysna, had been the illegitimate son of George III and a Quaker called Hannah Lightfoot.

She wrote others, about Plettenberg Bay, the Bain engineers, father and son, who left 30 fine mountain passes to the old Cape Colony, about a Portuguese shipwreck in 1630 and a book about the village of Belvidere, near Knysna.

Drawing on this material, and updating it in the light of recent geological, archaeological, political and historical research, Storrar has produced a wonderful book.

She tells us that the 250km stretch of rugged coastline, so much of it now a modern holiday playground, was shaped by cataclysmic ice ages and meltdowns. It has also been at the point of often violent contact between various groups of people, including white settlers, the San, the Khoikhoi, the Xhosa and the Griquas.

The violent geological history of the area meant it was not easy to reach or cross. Mountain ranges, rivers set in craggy gorges, dangerous seas and perilous estuaries, floods and fires, seemed designed to keep people out. But humans go where treasure is to be found, and the area was rich in good soil, game and timber.

The N2 sweeps today's driver from George to Plettenberg Bay in about an hour, but it took Baron Joachim van Plettenberg, Governor of the Cape of Good Hope, nearly four days in 1778.

Two of the people who made travel in the area possible were Andrew Geddes Bain, a Scottish self-taught roads engineer who did all his own surveying, and his son, Thomas. Between them they constructed a series of magnificent mountain passes including the Bain's Kloof Pass, the Montagu Pass, the Storms River Pass, the great Swartberg Pass, and closer to home, Victoria Road from Sea Point to Hout Bay.

But the human history of Storrar's "Paradise Coast" goes back a long way before Van Plettenberg and the Bains - caves on the Robberg Pensinula at Plettenberg Bay may have sheltered their first humans up to 120 000 years ago.

Robberg itself has a fascinating history: ancient rock formations prove it was once an island, and long before that in the last Ice Age, animals roamed over a coastal plain that extended into the seabed.

The book discusses the flora and fauna - including marine fauna - of the area, and then gets on to some of the interesting locals who made the Paradise Coast what it is, including the Harkers of Plett, the Rexes and Thesens of Knysna, the Le Fleurs of Kranshoek and the Duthies of Belvidere.

All this is good stuff, but what makes the book really awe-inspiring are the pictures. Waves breaking, whales breaching against a backdrop of mountains, seals poking their noses out of the water, a pair of oyster catchers walking briskly across a beach, mountain ranges dwarfing farm houses, fine modern bridges across gorges, dawns, sunsets, craggy fishermen's faces, shells, San artifacts, wildflowers, modern hotels, old sepia pictures of ancient buildings, and a hundred different views of the meeting of land and sea.

Two quibbles. Although Storrar is author of most of the text - a few articles have been contributed by other writers - there is no credit for the pictures on the title page. I eventually discovered the names of more than 20 photographers tucked away at the back of the book. I suppose with that number of photographers it would have been difficult to byline them more prominently, but seeing the book depends so heavily on their work for its magnificence, perhaps a better way of acknowledging them could have been found.

The other quibble is more personal. I have been holidaying on the "Paradise Coast" for the past 25 years, on an island in an estuary which I and my extended family believe is the most lovely spot on the Garden Route and still, unlike Plettenberg Bay, relatively unspoilt. Yet our village comes in for barely a mention, and there is only one, very small, modern picture of the estuary.

The point is that this is really a book about Plettenberg Bay.

Publisher Trevor McGlashan says if this book sells, he hopes to do three more, going into further detail on the stretch between Plett and Mossel Bay.

Plettenberg Bay and the Paradise Coast, by Patricia Storrar (Trevor McGlashan)

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