2003.12: Zimbabwe

Thoko, Jasmine and myself travelled out to Zimbabwe in December 2003. We stayed for 4 weeks using Bulawayo as our base. The money was crazy! For £100 we got $1,000,000! Rates have dropped now but the BCs are still in use and be carefull as they all carry expiry dates!

Zimbabwe is so desparate for money that they are overprinting $50 notes with these 5, 10 and 20 thousand dollar "Bearers Cheques"!
Be carefull - they have expiry dates!
Click to enlarge

 

From here we spent time in Intabazinduna with Thoko's folks: her old man slaughtered a beast so we had a big family "braai"! I was given a haunch to make biltong and so her dad and I sat down and prepared 15-20kgs of meat for the drying process. This didn't go as well as planned as, being the rainy season, there was alot of moisture in the air and the meat didn't dry quick enough to stop maggots hatching out. No problem, we just took them out and resalted the meat to make it edible again!

We traveled from Bulawayo, through Gwayi and up to Main Camp, Hwange National Park, where we stayed in National Parks chalets - clean and basic - and we spent some time at the Hwange Safari Lodge. The bush was dense and we did not see any predators at all and the game we did see was staying hidden as there was plenty of surface water away from the main pans.

The Gwayi is the area where I used to work for Oom Buck de Vries and his family business, and I had many friends there - now they are either dead or they have been chased out by Mugabes thugs and their farms have been stolen and are being asset stripped by his ZANU (PF) cronies. Buck even funded my Environmental Education Project: KwaThembeka, I did lots of PR work for Buck and the other Gwayi residents and I even ended up designed the logo for their conservancy.

We then travelled up to Vic Falls with a company called "Circle Court Tours & Safaris" - Do not touch them with a barge pole! They were dis-honest, dis-organised and they overcharged us. They checked us into unsatisfactory accomodation so we checked out and moved into "The Kingdom Hotel". Fantastic! A super hotel that is modelled on Great Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe Ruins.

We took a river cruise on the Zambezi and watched 3 eles swim from Zambia to Zimbabwe, obviously they haven't read the news about poachimg in the Gwayi Valley Conservancy yet.

We thought that nothing could beat our old flat on Main Street but when we saw a friends place in Burnside we immediately fell in love with it. Set on an acre of land filled with indigenous plants and trees it seemed the perfect "getaway" from chasing the English Pound and so when John and Cecile Knight said they were selling we snapped it up! Currently the place consisits of two large rondavels joined with an extention off the back for the kitchen and scullery but we will be building a third rondavel there. Two more rondavels, used by the maid and for storage, are in close proximity and I'll be converting them into extra guest bedrooms and relocating the maid to the bottom of the garden!