At Muizenberg we found half the population of South Africa in the
water in front of the biggest bathing-house I have ever seen. The
handling of the surf-plank requires some care, for it is a short,
heavy board, and in the back-wash is apt to fly back on the unwary,
hitting them on their food-receptacle, and effectually (to use a
schoolboy term) "bagging their wind." You walk out in the shoal water
up to your shoulders, and as a big sea comes in, you throw yourself
chest foremost on to your plank, and are then carried along on the top
of the roller at the pace of a leisurely train (an Isle of Wight
train), to be deposited with a bang on the sandy beach. It is really
capital fun, but alas for my flower-wreathed South Sea Island maidens!
Excluding our own party I only saw many amply waisted ladies
disporting themselves staidly in the water, and the surrounding
cinemas and tea-shops might have been at Brighton, except that they
were far smarter and much better kept. Owing to the strongly marked
facial characteristics of some of the customers in these places, who
were mostly from Johannesburg, I at first imagined that I must have
wandered inadvertently into Jerusalem, or that I had perhaps drifted
to some fashionable health resort on the shores of the Dead Sea.
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