Most of the time, however, they loll around on the surface "spouting" (blowing unpleasantly smelly water vapour into the air) and "spy-hopping" (poking their heads out of the water to look around) or, more impressively, "fluking" (lifting their tails into the air before diving).Whereas boat-based whale watching has become highly organised in centres like Kaikoura in New Zealand, South Africa is taking the opposite approach Laws forbid boats from getting within 300 metres of whales. Few would dispute the claim, least of all between June and January when huge groups (known as "pods") of whales can often be observed swimming only metres away from the shore, and "breaching" spectacularly as they surge up and crash down like thunder into the sea. The body boasts that South Africa possesses "the world's best land-based whale watching". Because of its excellent cliff-top viewing, the town has become the focal point for the MTN Cape Whale Route, a small but influential promotional and educational body launched in February. It has already established dozens of information boards at viewing points - the first established in the sleepy but charming resort of Still Bay - and has set up a Whale Hotline to give hourly updates on where whales can be spotted.

While generally dispensing information on his mobile phone, he often reverts to tooting on a horn which he has fashioned from the kelp lying in tangled mounds on the seashore near his fishing cottage: "I blow on my horn in morse code - it's a great way of attracting attention, but no one seems to understand the messages!" Hermanus, once famous for being the country's first leper colony, has now become the whale-watching capital of South Africa, and holds its owns arts jamboree, the Whale Festival, every September. But in the small coastal resort of Hermanus - an hour's drive east of Cape Town - Peter Claesen is stopped by passers- by and actually quizzed about his sandwich board. The world's first and only known whale crier, Peter has one mission - to publicise the day's early sightings of winter breeding whales so that watchers know where to head for the best viewing. By contrast the cheerful air of amateur dramatics that pervades Fenton's collection is not to be missed. `Pasha and Bayadere' is published by the Getty Museum in the Studies in Art series..

It's not often you take notice of sandwich boards - unless your interests lie in golf sales, leather jacket offers or predictions of when the world's going to end. In the summer of 1858 Fenton staged and recorded over 50 images of the odalisques, musicians, and hookah-smokers in his London studio. Delacroix assidulously took sketchbook and paints onto the streets to capture his Orient. The book is written in a light, conversational style which lends itself particularly well to the heroine's frequent attempts to get herself back on the straight and narrow.Although How Stella Got Her Groove Back could benefit from a more complex plot, it is a pleasant, undemanding tale of emotional awakening.`A little gentler on the G-String, Mr Smith': Pasha and Bayadere from the camera of the early Victorian photographer, Roger Fenton. Suddenly, all the things she has previously valued - security, financial success, control - seem to lose their allure as she finds herself falling for a 20-year-old Jamaican man. She has a son, Quincy, she adores, a toned and youthful body, and a hobby designing original pieces of furniture.