Watch out Polokwane, the Swazi’s are here...

SOUTH AFREEEEKA AGAIN. So we’re having another pit stop in Pretoria the ‘student city’ before hitting Polokwane. After a terrifying ordeal of our taxi not turning up and fearing we might miss our bus the staff at the backpackers find us a ride and we make it to the bus station on time with minimal shit in our pants. Obviously a saying, Ashley and I aren’t incontinent.

View over Pretoria

The bus pulls into Polokwane at ‘Mall of the North’, the BIGGEST shopping centre I’ve seen since the last time I was at the Metro in Newcastle, which was a long time ago. This shopping monstrosity is only 2 minutes walk from where the girls work; Mitchell House. No wonder none of them have any money, they’ve all developed an addiction to a shop called ‘Factorie’ which I admit is fantastic as it is on the level of Topshop, but when you convert the price tag you’re paying more a New Look price... and if you shop on the sales rack (haha, me) you find yourself paying Peacocks prices for awesome clothes!  Needless to say Ashley and I treated ourselves to a little bit of retail therapy while we were in Polokwane.

Mitchell House is a private Primary School and High School with an Enrichment Centre for children with disabilities; the Enrichment Centre is where the girls are working. They have a Junior class, a Senior class and a Life Skills class for the older students; the girls have a really full on day and work from 7:00am until 5:30pm with incredibly challenging children.
They have small classes as the children need constant one on one attention so there are a lot of hands on deck; the children themselves are lovely, no matter what their disability is it doesn’t  affect how friendly, funny, witty or loving they can be!

Our last day in Polokwane was spent at Mitchell House and then going for pre-drinks at Spur Steak Ranches with the best waitress ever – Dudu. Ashley and I also joined in with the new rule that the girls have set up; everyone who visits them in Polokwane is expected to go and get a piercing. Not too sure where this originated, but we obliged and Ashley braved the tragus whereas I just settled for the second hole in the lobe. Nicola also joined in and had her tragus done too, just the thought of it makes me want to be sick, I don’t know if I could handle it!
So after our visit to the jewellers some pain relief was in order... we hit the liquor store just before closing time and then made our way back to the girls apartment to get ready for our night out!

In true British style we braved the cold African winter night in dresses and skirts, determined to look good even if it meant suffering. We then hit one of their regular bars called Ngunies (which came as a shock to Ashley and myself because it was very white, something we haven’t experiences in a loooong time!) and proceeded to dance embarrassingly. We all had a good time, but I regretted it the next morning when we woke up at 6:00am to catch our bus to Johannesburg. 

We must have looked pretty worse for wear because as we sat on the concrete parking lot of a petrol station wearing last night’s makeup waiting for our bus a man approached us with a loaf of bread asking if we were okay... we assured him we were okay but he insisted that we take the bread anyway. After taking bread off a stranger I realised that I felt the lowest I’d ever felt in my life, in turn  this made me feel awful because this must be what homeless people feel like on a good day when someone is actually being kind to them.
To make the story even more unbelievable the same man returned 5 minutes later with two portions of MacDonald’s fries and insisted that we take them as well, he’d driven to MacDonald’s to buy them especially for us. This is the single most crazy thing that has ever happened to me; technically I felt like I should be mortally embarrassed, obviously we looked such a mess we appeared to be either homeless, in trouble or attack victims (or a combination of the three), but it’s hard to take a moral high ground when you’re sat on concrete with a hangover and your hands have just been filled with a portion of steaming hot FREE fries. Silver lining, yep, I see it.

So after the rough journey back to Swaziland via our favourite Park Central Station in Johannesburg we spend a comfortable night in Manzini at Kathy and Richards house, complete with homely meal, warm shower and actual bed before arriving back at hostel to throw ourselves onto our beds, sigh relief, wash our bag full of stinking clothes and sleep.

Holidays, you are wonderful. But is sure is good to be home.

Kate xx

BOTSWANA! “I know it’s video.”

First things first, Botswana is a HUGE country yet it seems there’s not all that much there. Apart from the delta, amazing National Parks and the odd few largish towns the rest appears to be full of sand, donkeys and annoying compulsory road blocks. At these road blocks you have to open out all your possessions, be declared ‘meat free’ and then proceed to dip all of your shoes into a white chemical substance. Something about trying to prevent the spread of foot and mouth... but it’s a right pain in the arse. Plus they confiscated and orange off me, an orange, not very life threatening – they probably just get the munchies and abuse their position of power. :(

Anyway, after a tedious 7 hour journey on a public bus that stopped at every microscopic village and only had 40% of the seats actually attached to the chair frame we arrived in Shakawe. Shakawe is a small village one hour and a 10minute ferry ride away from the boys project, they met us there in a massive pickup truck with Ben the German (another volunteer at their project), and quite severe sunburn. Even though it had been nearly 5 months since we had last seen each other we picked up from exactly where we had left off, basically ripping each other about everything and I just knew that the next 5 days were going to be hilarious and brilliant.
After a hairy drive in the dark to Bana Ba Metsi we were greeted (or rather not greeted) by a group of nervous boys sat in the kitchen and then proceeded to meet Mr Peter Dow the boy’s host and shown to where we would be staying.

Ferry Ride

Unlike Ashley and I the boys live in their own little house; they cook, clean (or not) and braii by themselves and have a shower outside. It really is a lovely little place and you can feel the Project Trust presence from the years of writing on the walls and sticking up letters, messages and photos. Ben lives in a fancy tent set up on a house on stilts on the very edge of the school compound; you can sit on an elevated balcony and watch the sun set over the bush. Ben chivalrously gave up his beautiful home to us for the 5 days to go and sleep with the boys in their house and we had the place to ourselves, also equipped with an outside shower. I have to say, I love taking outside showers, you feel free... however, showering in the early mornings in the freezing cold with cold water isn’t ideal, so best to wait until midday! 

The Sam’s (and Ben) do a really great job on their project, they’re teaching at a primary school level to teenage boys around their own age and from sitting in on them teaching they have a really difficult job with it! Keeping the boys attention and motivating them to do work seems near impossible and they don’t get much appreciation in the classroom from their students. However watching them do manual with the boys is another story – in the afternoons they are split into groups and set physical tasks to do, mainly maintenance and improvement of the school and its facilities. They’re currently making urinals, and they’ve constructed a building complete with a traditional thatched roof, what they’re teaching the boys in invaluable, workmanship skills that will help them later in life and they are undoubtedly learning just as much in return.
They also do sports with the boys at the school; swimming, football, table tennis and volleyball – I sat and watched on a ‘swimming lesson’ and it seems to be 45 minutes of boys throwing each other into the pool and wrestling in the water, but they seem to have fun and that’s what it’s all about.

Bana Ba Metsi school is also well known in Botswana for its marimba band, they travel to Maun and Gaborone (the capital) to play concerts for people, and they really are fantastic. If you don’t know what marimba is imagine the colourful xylophones that we all had as children... okay, right, now image that it’s larger, made of wood and actually sounds nice. The boys come to the school and learn marimba from the other boys who are there, there’s to music to read, they just learn off one another and work by ear. They play typical African marimba tunes but can also play renditions of some chart favourites such as Waka Waka by Shakira and Whistle by Flo Rida!

Luckily I was at Bana Ba Metsi for my 19^th Birthday and even more luckily for me the 1^st May is some sort of African Independence day and is therefore a national holiday! That means so school, no teaching for the Sam’s and we get to go out on the delta on the schools boat!
It was the most insane birthday ever, we cruised along the Okavango waters for 4 hours or so with drinks on board, sunbathing on board, driving the boat, stopping off at a lodge along the river for more drinks and getting off to explore an island that the boys know. We spend a decent amount of time swimming in its pools while on constant lookout for hippos and crocodiles as they’re known to be in the area... Luckily we didn’t have any unfortunate run-ins with any dangerous animals while on the water however we did see a massive crocodile on the sand banks and stumbled upon a herd of 15 hippo up out of the water within the reeds! It was an incredible sight and we doubled back for more, unfortunately they had scarpered and the humongous bull hippo had slid into the water pretty close to our little boat... so then we scarpered!
We had a lovely lunch at the Dijo Deli, one of Shakawe’s best kept secrets off the beaten track and then hitchhiked back over from the ferry to Bana Ba Metsi.
Definitely one of my most awesome birthdays to date, and what an amazing place to have it! My 19^th will be forever unique. Making things even better Ashley and the boys had made me a birthday video which they showed me before we went out on the boat... hilarious and I will always have it as a reminder!

After another hellish public bus journey back from Shakawe to Maun we camped at the Old Bridge backpackers for 4 nights. Old Bridge has to be one of the most idyllic places that I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting, perched on the banks of the Okavango you can literally sit on a sofa less than 1 metre from the water or lie on a hammock half dangling over the water! I spent many glorious hours prostrate on that hammock, happily filling myself with copious amounts of salted peanuts and raisins while watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother. Everyone’s idea of perfect. 
Oh yes, I feel obliged to inform you of my very sudden and incredibly violent peanut addiction; I’m really not sure how it came about between travelling on buses and jumping off gorges but it has appeared. I can’t get enough of them; I’ve taken to destroying a 150g bag in less than 10 minutes which drives Ashley crazy because she hates peanuts and can’t stand the smell. I’m addicted, what can I do. They are simply delicious.

Most of our time in Maun was spent relaxing and putting off travelling to the next place; apart from one day when we went on another boat trip. Animal spectation wasn’t really the aim of this trip... rather it was alcohol, and sort of harassing locals. We were with a crazy guy we met at the backpackers who called himself ‘Captain Bob’, and we were now part of ‘Captain Bob’s Drunken Safaris’ where he sets off into the beautiful African landscape to get completely smashed and make mental videos. We had a wild time with Captain Bob and the rest of our crew! Ashley jumped ship to take control of a mekoro boat (dugout canoe) full of Motswanan children, we made a slight scene at a family gathering when Captain Bob decided to don a pair of bright red bikini bottoms he found in a bush and our boat driver got do drunk that he went arse over pecs and ended up half out of the boat, so Ashley and I drove to boat back to the lodge to ensure that no one died. No one died, we were brilliant. 

After leaving Maun we had a pit stop at the best hidden backpackers in the world (honestly didn’t think it even existed after our fruitless search with a pretty peeved off taxi driver) in Gaberone before heading to South Africa the next day.

Before I came to Africa my expectations of what it would look like are exactly like how Botswana looks; covered in sand, minimal vegetation and animals roam everywhere. Botswana has definitely got a donkey problem (I think I mentioned the donkeys already, oh well); I have never seen so many donkeys in my life.

What I have come to realise is that my initial impressions of Africa were incorrect; yes, Botswana is hot and covered in sand and wild animals but it is so far the only place I have visited that is like this. I’m sure other countries are similar (Namibia I’ve heard), but Africa also has its fair share of lush green areas! Prime example is Swaziland itself... we’re defiantly under informed about this continent in our Westernised countries! BBC, sort yourselves out and get over here, I’ve heard David Attenborough recently took the trip, so I hope all you British people at least have a better idea about what Africa is like!

Crack onto the internet and educate yourselves, Africa is a collaboration of literally every climate and landscape in the whole world, it’s awe-inspiring.

Kate xx