The Light Between Worlds

The Light Between Worlds - A September Dawn on the Hermanus Cliff

Path

Walk it with me: A Hermanus Morning That Stopped Time

13 September 2025

I’m sitting at a restaurant above Grotto Beach, shoes off, sand still stuck to my ankles. The umbrella over my table flaps every now and then when the wind comes off the bay, and my coffee’s gone lukewarm because I keep forgetting to drink it. The place is busy now—cutlery, kids, someone arguing cheerfully about poached versus fried eggs—but my head is still back at New Harbour in the dark, where this walk started a few hours ago.

I want to write this now, before it turns into just another “nice coastal walk” in my memory.

When I stepped onto the path this morning, it was that strange non-time before sunrise—too late to be night, too early to be day. The bay didn’t really have a colour yet; it was just a flat, quiet surface, more like brushed metal than water. The Kleinrivier Mountains were still mostly silhouette. It felt like the town and the sea were both holding their breath, waiting for someone to give the signal.

The light came in slowly. No dramatic “ta-da”, just a gentle leaking of grey into blue, then the first soft yellow on the peaks. I remember thinking, if I turned back right then, the walk would already have been worth it.

But I didn’t turn back.

The dassies were my first company. At Gearing’s Point, the rocks were full of them—little rock hyraxes squashed together in the first warm patch of sun. Some of the babies still had that wobbly, not-quite-in-control way of moving. They watched me with those shiny black eyes, completely silent, clearly deciding if I mattered. When I got too close, they scattered into the cracks in the rocks in an instant, then started peeking out again a few seconds later. It made me weirdly happy to be filed under “harmless” in someone else’s mental system—even if that someone was a small, nervous mammal.

The whales are the part I really don’t want to forget.

Past the Old Harbour, heading toward Roman Rock, I heard the first blow before I saw anything. That heavy, wet exhale cut right through the quiet. Then another. When I finally spotted the first back breaking the surface, it was so close to shore it didn’t feel real. Southern Right whales, right there, in shallow, clear water, in this soft, slanting morning light.

They weren’t in a hurry. One lifted its tail and slapped it down, hard enough that I felt the thump in my chest. Another rose straight up, head out of the water, like it was having a look at the land. Through the drone, it was even clearer: two whales rolling together, belly to belly, huge and slow and oddly gentle. I know I have a few minutes of beautiful footage, but what I think I’ll remember more is my hands shaking while I was filming, and that strange, quiet feeling of being allowed to see something that wasn’t meant for me at all.

The fishermen at Siever’s Punt felt like they belonged more to the morning than I did. Three of them, spread out just enough that they could talk without raising their voices, rods angled toward the same horizon I’d been staring at all morning. We talked about the whales, the seasons, how the fish “aren’t what they used to be.” It wasn’t a big conversation, just little pieces of their routine they were willing to share with a stranger walking past.

When I turned to go, one of them stopped me and handed me a Red Roman from his bucket. It was heavy, solid, the colours almost too bright—pink and orange and silver in the sun. I tried to give him money and he shut that down immediately, not angrily, just firmly, like we’d both missed the point for a second.

“Just enjoy it,” he said. “Tell them: lemon, butter, garlic, hot pan. Nothing more.”

That’s why there’s a wrapped fish behind the bar here at the restaurant now, with my name on a scrap of paper. They’re going to cook it for me tonight. I have a feeling that when I taste it, I’ll think less about “fresh seafood in South Africa” and more about that man’s face at dawn and the way he said, “Remember where it came from.”

Kammabaai reminded me that the ocean here isn’t just something pretty to look at. It bites back a bit. The water was properly cold—the kind of cold that makes your scalp tingle. I paddled out on a borrowed board feeling like an imposter among locals who actually knew what they were doing, but the waves were kind enough. I stood up a couple of times, fell a lot more, swallowed at least half of Walker Bay. It didn’t matter. For twenty minutes or so, all the stuff I usually carry (deadlines, logistics, the need to “capture content”) fell away. There was just my body, the board, the timing of each wave, and a lot of laughing at myself.

By the time I reached Piet-se-Bos, the day had properly begun for everyone else, but not for that stretch of forest. Walking under those old milkwoods felt like stepping into a different day entirely. The temperature dropped as soon as I moved under the branches. The light went murky and green. Everything got quieter, even though the ocean was only a few meters away.

Those trees are twisted and knotted and low, like they’ve spent their whole lives pushing back against the wind and the salt. Some of them have been standing there for centuries. I stopped and laid my hand on one of the trunks and tried to imagine how many mornings like mine it had already seen. People like me come and go; the path changes, the town grows, the clothes and languages shift—but that tree just stays and keeps doing its slow, patient work. For some reason, that thought settled something in me instead of making me feel small.

And now I’m here, at this café, with Grotto Beach stretched out in front of me like every beach I’ve ever known and none of them at the same time. Kids are building lopsided sandcastles. A dog is going berserk over a tennis ball. Someone at the next table is talking about real estate prices. It’s all very ordinary, and that might be why I’m writing this down with more urgency than usual.

This morning could so easily become a single line in my head: “Walked the Hermanus cliff path—amazing views, saw whales.” True, but not enough. I want to remember the small details: the way my toes went numb on that first duck dive at Kammabaai, the exact sound of a whale’s breath cutting through early silence, the sting of salt drying on my face as I walked into the shade of the milkwoods, the unexpected weight of a gifted fish in my hand, the first bite of breakfast with sea air still in my nose.

If, a year from now, someone asks me why I keep chasing new places, I hope I think of this morning. Not the big headline moments, but the feeling of walking through a waking town while the sea and the sky quietly rearranged themselves around me. The sense that, for a few hours on the edge of Africa, I wasn’t just looking at a beautiful coastline—I was part of its routine. And that’s something I don’t want to forget.