Over the past three decades I’ve spent much of my life on the road across Southern Africa – guiding guests, designing journeys, and quietly collecting moments that never made it into brochures.

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I’ve started turning those days into a 12‑volume series: A Year in Motion – 365 Days in Southern Africa. One book per month. One chapter per day. Each chapter a single, real moment.

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This is an excerpt from September (Volume 9) – one of my favourite mornings in Hermanus, watching Southern Right whales from a cliff‑edge villa:

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Eye‑to‑Eye with Giants – Whales from the Villa Stoep
2 September (excerpt)

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There are mornings when the ocean feels like it is leaning in to listen.

The first day in Hermanus breaks like that.

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I step out onto the stoep of the villa just after sunrise, coffee in hand, barefoot on cool stone. The house hangs on the cliff’s edge, the kind of place someone once dreamed up and then had the courage—and the capital—to build. Glass and clean lines and understated luxury. But this morning, all of that is background. The real theatre lies sixty metres below.

Walker Bay is barely moving.

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The water is not flat—not exactly—but its small, slow swells look as if some great hand has smoothed the surface. The sky above is pure September: high, clean, a blue that has not yet decided to turn harsh. A single gull scribbles across it. The air carries that particular mixture I have come to associate with this stretch of coast: salt, kelp, and a faint metallic tang that belongs only to deep water.

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I lift the binoculars before I even sit down.

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I don’t need them to see the first blows.

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From the villa’s stoep, my world is framed by glass railings and low white walls, but the view is pure wild theatre. To the right, the coastline runs toward the New Harbour, all serrated rock and white water. To the left, the cliffs curve away toward Kwaaiwater and beyond. Directly in front of me, Walker Bay opens like a giant amphitheatre—the stage a few hundred metres wide, the backdrop a slow, indifferent horizon.

Out there, the whales are already at work.

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Even with the naked eye, I can count at least twenty Southern Right whales scattered across the water. Blows show first—vertical white exclamations against the calm blue. Two blowholes, two jets, a brief, hard‑edged V of steam that hangs for a moment in the still morning air before dissolving. Then backs surface: black, smooth, enormous, rolling up and over in slow arcs. Occasionally a tail lifts, dark and wide, draped in water that streams silver in the light, then disappears with the weighty inevitability of a closing door.

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Hermanus likes to call itself the world’s whale‑watching capital. On days like this, it isn’t marketing. It’s geography.

Every year, between about June and November, hundreds of Southern Right whales leave the icy abundance of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and move north into warmer coastal waters. They come to places like Walker Bay for the same reasons humans seek out warm, safe rooms: to make love, to give birth, to raise the next generation without having to fight for every breath.

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They are loyal to their maps. A third of the world’s Southern Right population uses a handful of bays in the southern hemisphere to breed and calve. Walker Bay is one of them. The same whales return, year after year, to the same curves of coast. Some even come back to the very bays where they themselves were conceived—circles within circles, written in salt and memory.

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It takes me a few minutes to notice the three directly in front of me.

The rest are scattered—pairs, trios, solitary animals moving with the ponderous grace of things that have mastered their medium. But about sixty metres out from the villa, slightly to the left, three whales lie close, in an almost suspiciously neat triangle. They are just far enough from the others to feel deliberate.

I set the coffee down carefully, heart rate already a few beats higher than caffeine alone can explain, and reach for the drone case.

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From fifty metres up, Walker Bay rearranges itself. The villa, which moments ago felt substantial and central, shrinks to a pale geometry on the cliff edge. The shoreline becomes a ragged scribble of rock and foam. The whales, which from the stoep seemed like ink marks on a flat sea, reveal their full, three‑dimensional selves: forty‑ton bodies suspended in water so clear I can see the paler scars on their backs and the shadows they cast on the kelp beds below.

Two of them are lying side by side now, bellies almost touching, bodies angled slightly toward each other. The third holds position a little ahead and off to one side, turning, watching. There is no rush. Not even much movement. Just small adjustments—a slow rolling of a flank, a fin lifting a little higher than usual, a turn of the head.

After thousands of hours with these animals, something in the pattern is unmistakable.

Courtship.

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Through the camera, at 2x zoom, the intimacy is almost unbearable.

The male eases himself into position with a patience that belies his size. He could, if he wanted, move with enormous force—these are animals that migrated here from Antarctic waters, travelling thousands of kilometres at speeds that would leave most boats behind. But here, in this moment, everything is gentleness.

Their bodies trace overlapping curves in the blue. There is a moment when the male’s pectoral fin lifts and then lowers onto the female’s back, resting there like an arm. Later, as they surface side by side, their upper jaws meet. From this angle, it looks like a kiss—two massive mouths touching, callosities brushing, a brief contact that, if you were inclined to sentimentality, could pass for affection.

I am inclined.

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I’ve watched enough animal behaviour to know projection is a dangerous habit. Whales are not people. They do not live under our narratives of romance and loyalty. And yet: Southern Rights return to the same bays; they recognise individuals; mothers nurse calves for a year in these waters before leading them back south. They endure. They memorise. They remember.

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If love has a shape in the ocean, I would not be surprised if it sometimes looks like this.

When I lie in bed that night, window open to the sound of waves on rock, I will hear, under the ordinary noise of a coastal town, the memory of that slow, deliberate dance. On days like this, I think of my own mom too—how love can cross years and oceans and still find its way back to the same quiet harbours in the heart, long after the person is gone. And I will think, as I often do in September, that for all our attempts to organise and interpret and own the world, the most romantic thing about it is this:

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The whales come back, whether we are here to see them or not.

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If you’d like to read the full chapter in book layout, it’s here: 👉 www.visitorstoafrica.com/september-tides/2

 

Over the next months I’ll share more of these small pieces – rivers, dunes, horses, stone houses and skies – as the year on paper takes shape.

 

If this kind of journey speaks to you, you’re very welcome to travel along with me, one chapter at a time.