Zimbabwe

I am breaking my pattern of posting my blogs on a Sunday to cover the previous week; but breaking up the holidays into blogs of the countries seems to make more logical sense, so here it goes...

First impressions of Zimbabwe were not great; sat at a border post at 3:00am in the morning with our luggage open waiting for 2 hours for a bag check. In the end they barely even looked in anyone’s bags, they just signed our declaration sheets and we had to pack everything back up again. I was cold, tired, annoyed and quite frankly surprised that I walked away without getting piles seeing as there was nowhere to sit apart from on the road.
We eventually got away at 5:00am, only to reach Bulawayo in the afternoon and have to wait through a 3 hour delay for our next bus! Sometimes I just hate travelling.
We reach Victoria Falls and finally get to our backpackers, which turns out to be one of the best places to go for a night out in the town so it’s totally buzzing! Definitely a decent choice.

The falls themselves are absolutely amazing, they are called ‘Mosi-Oa-Tunya’ which is taken from the Lozi language and means “The Smoke That Thunders”... and thunder they truly do!
Victoria Falls is among the Seven Natural Wonders of the world; along with the Aurora Borealis, Grand Canyon, Paricutin Volcano, Harbour of Rio de Janeiro, Mount Everest and the Great Barrier Reef, so if I count the times that I’ve seen the Aurora Borealis from Darlington or Scotland (although they won’t be to their full beauty unless seen from further North), I’ve technically experienced 2 of the 7 Natural Wonders! Now I shall add the remaining 5 to my bucket list.

Oh yeah! Darlington is on an information board in ZIMBABWE.
Now that's a pretty decent achievement for Darlington. 

Walking into the falls there are many shops selling crafts, and the guys owning the shops are trying to get you to hire hideous ponchos to protect you from the spray; feeling brave Ashley, Matt and I (Matt’s a guy from our backpackers) shook our heads and decided we were just going to roll with it. Turns out that the spray was a little more than just ‘spray’, it started out quite light but as we progressed along the viewing platforms and came closer to the falls it became heavier and heavier... So heavy that it felt like you were standing in monsoon rain! We were drenched through, our bags and everything in them were soaking wet, my camera stopped working and my passport suffered slight water damage.

Simply Soaking

The falls give off so much moisture that the land directly close to them is thick rainforest, huge ferns drape themselves over the pathway glistening with droplets of water, flowery vines strangle the mottled trunks of thick trees in whose canopies monkeys and baboons skip chatter and dance. It really is another world. 

The falls can be viewed from both Zambia and Zimbabwe, however I can’t imagine what can be seen from the Zambian side seeing as we were stood at the very point where the falls cascade over the edge of the rock... you can see the water thunder down in all its glory and watch as the spray rises like smoke from the bottom of the gorge to obscure your view and engulf everyone and everything. The very best viewing platform was one called Knife Point; its entrance path was graced with a ‘Danger – Slippery Cliff Edge’ sign, and it wasn’t joking. Moss grew on every drenched stone and we waded our way through puddles with the edge of the cliff merely 1m away. The pinnacle of Knife Point was a high sharp rock (it had a definite likeness to the one in Lion King, so that’s awesome), we blindly fought our way to the top, eyes closed against the spray battering our bodies and hands groping for some sort of security that our feet were failing to provide. Visibility was 0%, it was like we were standing inside a cloud. There was nothing left to do apart from stand tall with our arms spread wide, listen to the waterfall roar past us and savour the spray as it bounced off our bodies.
Just as we turned away to leave Knife Point I took one look back and caught a rare ‘spray free’ moment, the white fog lifted and I could see the whole expanse of waterfall thundering barely 10m away from the sharp pointed rock that we had been standing on. Absolutely amazing.

Another spectacular thing about the falls is that multiple rainbows form in the gorge due to all the spray and the wonderful African sunlight, as you walk along you can see the rainbows stretching from one side of the gorge to the other... how many times are you above a rainbow?!

After a calming morning at the falls we set off for a little adrenalin rush! We had both booked to do a flying fox from the Zimbabwe side of the falls to the Zambian side, but when we got there and I laid eyes on the gorge swing I knew I just had to pay more money and do it instead!
Similar to a bungee you jump off a high platform and fall quite a distance; but unlike a bungee you are not connected by the feet... no, you are connected by a harness at the chest and you freefall with all your limbs flailing into a gorge. This was so much more terrifying than a bungee because there’s no control! I honestly felt like I was on a suicide jump off a building and I screamed like an ignored baby the whole way down. I think that the dogs in Zambia were aware of my presence.
Anyway, so you’re in freefall with your arms and legs waving around like an epileptic in a disco and the water is coming faster and closer to you, just before you reach the water you reach the length of rope and swing in a huge arc over the thundering rapids. My pants were all but soiled but I felt amazing! Scaring the crap out of myself is definitely one of my favourite pastimes.      

Flying Fox, amazing view!

The next day we went for an activity that was arguably safer but just as amazing! We booked ourselves in for an Elephant ride. The Elephant ride is definitely one of those ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunities and we were not going to be disappointed. The elephants were led along in what can only be described an elephant convoy, decked out with their babies and all! After taking photos with the elephants and getting to touch them we were taken to the largest mounting stand you have ever seen and we climbed onto our elephants with our riders. Our rider was called Amos and we were riding elephant Tendai, who had her baby along with her too and was always by our side! We spent an hour touring around the nature reserve; being on an elephant has its advantages because the other animals are used to their presence – we came really close to herds of giraffe and buffalo and could observe them on their own level! 

Tendai and Amos waving bye, cute!

After the elephant ride we had the unknown surprise of meeting Sylvester the Cheetah, he is the only surviving cheetah from a litter that lost its Mother and was attacked by a Lion. He is used to educate people on the risks of animal endangerment and plus we were allowed to stroke him! TOUCHING A CHEETAH NOW HOW COOL IS THAT.

Seeing and being with these animals in the flesh is something that I would never have expected myself to do, coming to Africa touches your life in many many different ways, and it makes me feel sad that most people go through life without ever having the chance to explore further afield and experience these things for themselves. Yes we see these animals on TV and in photos, but nothing can beat the surprising realisation of touching the rock hard leathery skin of an elephant and feeling it’s disgustingly wet truck sucking at your hand after taking a drink of water! These places, animals and people are real and they’re in our reach to visit – I’m so grateful that I’ve been lucky enough to get to experience such things.

One thing that stood out about Victoria Falls to me was the freedom of the animals; I’m not sure whether it is to humour the tourists that visit or because it’s a really ‘African’ place but it isn’t normal (even for Africa) to walk along the street and be faced with baboons sitting on the pavement. Nor is it normal to walk out of the Mama Africa restaurant after eating a delicious dinner of spicy beef and crocodile tail to be faced with a fully grown elephant just chilling on the street outside. This IS Africa, but not everywhere is as crazy as this!
I know what you’re thinking... what does crocodile taste like?! Honestly, it was delicious, it tasted like chicken with the tiniest fishy hint and you chew on it like it is beef. I also have no idea what African seasoning was on it but Ashley and I could not get enough!

So that’s a little bit of Zimbabwe for you!

Kate xx

“What’s it doing now?” “Spraying urine.”

This week has been a busy but fun week! Last Sunday Ashley’s Mum Jane and Step-father Paul arrived in the country so since then it has been a hectic mash-up of showing them our projects and trying to give them a real Swazi experience!

The day they arrived we went in the hire car to Malolotja Nature Reserve which is past Mbabane and right up in the highvelds of Swaziland. It was COLD; I had goose bumps and I was shivering. The Tree Top Canopy Tour’s base was on the top of a hill in the reserve; the wind was blowing, it was overcast and I hadn’t brought anything warm – I keep forgetting that Big Bend is the hottest place in Swaziland; you basically wear the least amount of clothes that’s socially acceptable.
We were so high up that when you looked out over the mountains the clouds were literally sitting on the summits, it was beautiful.
Ashley, Paul and I did the Malolotja Tree Top Canopy Tour; which was a series of zip lines that took you from the top of a valley in the game reserve to the bottom. It was great fun! You could go seriously fast on the zip lines and when you were hanging over the valley you could look right over the carpet of treetops beneath you and hear the river gurgling below.

Cloud Level!

After the Tree Tops we headed to ‘Swazi Candles’; Swazi Candles along with some other independent shops come together to create a lovely Craft Market in Malkerns near Manzini. The place is full of hundreds and hundreds of handmade candles all with a Swazi/African feel to them; there are 2 or 3 people who sit in the shop itself to make the candles for shoppers to watch, but in total there are 12 candle makers in a small workshop elsewhere. We saw one man make an elephant from a ball of wax in about 5 minutes flat, the craftsman ship is amazing and the candles really are beautifully made!

Monday brought Injabulo into the lives of Jane and Paul; the kids went absolutely crazy (as they do when we get any visitors) and carried on their new obsession of stroking manly arm hair... They really are fascinated, I think it must be because black people have less body hair than white people – they must think we’re some sort of animal! 

Jane and Paul had brought out 3 30kg suitcases from the UK, and about 50kg of their luggage was toys, presents and clothes for the kids. So at Injabulo on Monday they had a whale of a time throwing bean bags around and dressing up as princesses, ladybirds, Woody from Toy Story and a Little Miss from The Mr Men!

(Jane and Paul's Pictures)

(Jane and Paul's Pictures)

Tuesday was the Moriah Center; the day started out great as we were reading a story that included making popcorn for all the kids to eat... They loved watching the popcorn maker spit out the popcorn; however they had to wait a little while longer to try some because the teachers were more interested in eating all of the popcorn their selves rather than handing it out to the children, haha! 

Unfortunately at play time the day took a turn for the worst; one little boy came up to us in the playground crying and he had a plastic truck toy sticking out of his side. Two of the wheels had came off and we presumed that there was an exposed metal spike which had lodged itself into his skin. We’re still not sure how it happened; we thought he had fallen on it, but the rest of the kids said that someone threw it at him and it got stuck... no one is sure how it happened.
Luckily Jane and Paul had the car there so we managed to get him to the private hospital down the road in 2 minutes of it happening. The doctors weren’t sure how deep the metal was so they had to give him a full anaesthetic to knock him out in case he wriggled when they were removing the truck. Thankfully the metal wasn’t deep enough to puncture anything and all he needed was a few stitches and some medicine.
Everything turned out fine; but if Jane and Paul hadn’t been there we don’t know what would’ve happened, the kombi we usually drive was in South Africa because the missionaries had been taken to Pongola in it. Inevitably we would have been in a horrible situation if it wasn’t for their car, we wouldn’t have been able to pull it out because we wouldn’t have known the extent of the damage so we would have had to carry him 20 minutes to hospital.

After the drama at Moriah on the morning we headed off to Hlane the Royal National Park for a sunset safari! We saw loads of rhino, impala (obviously)and warthog; we also saw elephants for the first time! I couldn’t have been any more excited and I was not disappointed, there was a herd of about 8 elephants and the bull was MASSIVE. It was walking directly behind our truck and at one point I’m pretty sure it started charging at us because it picked up some speed, started flapping its ears and our ranger put his foot down pretty hastily to get us away. Amazing.
After what I now call a hideously expensive dinner (E140 - £10), we watched all the staff of Hlane do a traditional Swazi dance, the third proper one that we have seen... and by far the longest. I love watching them dance but it is rather repetitive and when it goes on for about 40 minutes you start to get a little bit bored. But at the end everyone got up together and had a bit of a stomp around with the staff before retiring to their paraffin lit huts. There’s no electricity in the accommodation at Hlane so you have to put paraffin lamps everywhere to create some light, personally I love it as I feel that electricity kills the atmosphere of sleeping in a hut even if it has a kitchen, bathroom, living room, two double rooms and a platform in the rafters with four single beds! This was a party hut for sure, it was brilliant.

Perfection.

Swazi Secrets

The next morning we left Hlane and went to a factory called Swazi Secrets; Swazi Secrets produce beauty products from the oil extracted from the Marula nut.    

Every year in March the people of Swaziland celebrate Marula season by drinking the traditional Swazi beer ‘buganu’, I have spoken about it before on this blog. After the women have used the actual fruits to ferment and make the beer they take the nut from the fruits and dry them for weeks in the sun. During March/April time the workers of Swazi Secrets go out into the rural impoverished communities of the lowveld areas of Swaziland to buy the marula nuts from the local women who have made the beer; they weigh the nuts/kernels on the spot and pay by cash per kg.

Marula Tree

They then take these kernels to the Mpaka factory to be crushed by hand and the oil to be extracted and made into beauty products. Instead of having one large mechanical machine that crushes the nuts Swazi Secrets have opted for a number of smaller man-powered machines that crush smaller quantities of nuts. For every 40kg of nuts crushed 11kg of pure marula oil is gained.
The smaller machines make the extraction process much more sustainable as each machine has the community name written on it; therefore only the nuts from that community may be crushed in that machine. Therefore if there’s a bad batch of products the workers can trace which machine the nuts were crushed in and then know which community the nuts were bought from; this allows them to pull the rest of the communities batch for testing before shipping and they can go back to the community and find out what caused the marula nuts to be contaminated.
Whereas if all of their nuts were crushed together they would have to destroy larger batches of products without knowing the problem, so the smaller machines prevent cross-contamination, promote sustainability of the factory’s process and they save money!

Crushing the kernels for natural oil

The visit really was very interesting and we were shown around the production room where the products are actually made. It couldn’t have been any larger than a store room and there were 3 workers in there doing everything by hand; one lady was painstakingly heating up and measuring out ingredients for marula lip-balm by hand (this allows higher control of the temperature so that the oil doesn’t degrade at a too high heat), and man was packaging the lip-balms into their containers while another lady stamped on the date of expiry. 

After seeing this production on such a small scale I wasn’t expecting the company to be large or well known; therefore it surprised me when they said that they export to the UK and Germany and their products are very popular in Europe, they have even been given a ‘Product of the Year’ award by Elle! 

The company is also co-funded by the WK Kellogg Foundation, that’s right, the very same Kellogg that brings you your cornflakes in the morning. 

I really enjoyed our visit to Swazi Secrets and it is fantastic knowing that they are supporting the rural women in the communities who harvest the raw materials; these communities include places that we are very familiar with... For example Mpolongeni where we run our soup kitchen is one of the areas that provide Swazi Secrets with marula kernels for crushing, and I think that it is fantastic that there are some companies out there who are dedicated to providing fair business to the Swazi population.

www.swazisecrets.com

Thursday brought soup kitchen with Jane and Paul! The first thing that Aunty Vinah said to them was along the lines of ‘where are the surprises?!’, although what she was getting wasn’t really a surprise because she had been asking for chocolates ever since we arrived in the country.
Either way she was happy with her gifts and there were even more clothes that had been brought for the kids to wear; I’m pretty sure that we’ve clothed these children about 3 times over in the time that we've been here!
One of the little girls at soup kitchen, SiSi pleasantly surprised me this week; she’s the one in the pictures that always wears the white and blue chequered shower cap. She never smiles, is really timid and gets scared really easily, but this week is was like she was a different person!
She was smiling, laughing, letting me tickle her, hugging me rather than sitting rigid in my arms and gripping on like a little monkey. I even started jiggling her around in my arms (which normally terrifies her) but this time she stared throwing herself into it, laughing and waving her arms around.
I know that this probably doesn’t make sense to you but after knowing someone for 6 months and suddenly seeing a personality change for the better just made me feel so proud and happy for her, it’s like she’s a new little girl and I don’t know what has happened to make the change but I am grateful that it has happened.  I just hope it carries on and she doesn’t go back into her shell.

We finished off Jane and Pauls visit with a trip to Manzini to see Kathy and Richard and eat at our favourite Portuguese Manzini restaurant, Gil Vicente (one that we have been seeing quite a lot of lately!)

So now Ashley, Jane and Paul are gallivanting around South Africa, they’re currently in Durban before going to Cape Town and finally Johannesburg. 

So for a week I am alone on project and running everything by myself, hahaaa let’s see how this goes shall we?!

I am interested to see what this week brings, hopefully there will be no more drama otherwise I will have a lot on my plate... Wish me luck!

Kate xx

P.S. The name of this blog is a quote from our ranger on safari at Hlane; Paul asked him what a rhino was doing now and he bluntly replied ‘spraying urine’. His accent and the way he said it reduced Ashley and I too immature fits of laughter for about 5 minutes straight and I almost chocked on my Hunters Dry. It’s a memory I will cherish forever.