December 2011 - Lesotho

Our urge of getting back to the ocean has been compensated by the extreme busyness of the coastal region to which, as we realised, everybody is heading over the Christmas season. So we decided to change plans (once more) and it was a good decision.
Within South Africa’s boundaries there are two distinct countries Swaziland (which we briefly passed on the way out) and Lesotho, they have nothing to do with South Africa and you even get your passport stamped when entering and exiting.
Above the Drakensberg where we spend the last couple of days there is Lesotho. It’s a tiny country with only 2 million people living here. It is referred to as the “Kingdom of the Sky” because it is entirely above an altitude of 1200m and yes it has its own king.
Since we were so close by we could not resist on driving through.
Lesotho is a different world compared to SA! The moment you cross the border the tarmac ends, cars disappear and are replaced by horses and houses turn once more into huts; making one wonder again about this weird phenomenon of national borders.
Many villages are so remote that they do not have roads to access them so people are used to walk for endless stretches if they do not use horses to transport them. The temperatures are much lower here because of the high altitude and in winter the country is covered in snow, so most people walk around with is a woollen blanket wrapped around them. Their main income source is cattle and they can spend endless hours on the fields with their animals.
We did not stay very long but long enough to do some hikes and one of the most common things to do in Lesotho go on a pony trek. Although everybody here calls their horses ponies it’s not really what we had in our mind when we arrived here.
It was great fun for us although you would have not wanted to be in the pony’s duty, this country is extremely stony and hilly making you feel sorry for the poor animal to have to carry the tourists around, but it seems that this is what they are used to. One does not really have to do much apart from letting the pony go its way and holding on steep sections. Sometimes even the poor pony though can be mistaken and one wrong step on a slippery rock is all it needs to fall. Unfortunately on one of those occasions, Fred was on its back luckily though neither of the two got hurt.
Nice break and beautiful country!

December 2011 - South Africa Limpopo & Drakensberg

We are back to the USA of Africa, South Africa!!!
The moment we crossed the border the extreme difference of South Africa to all the countries we had seen in the last almost 5 months struck us immensely, it felt like entering a different planet.
First of all, the map changed from having one clear road to follow to a spider-web of roads, so many options and all tarred! Apart from that, the roads are overloaded with cars, all of them! Driving on a 4-lane highway was a clear shock to the system and after 2 hours we needed to break and recover. From being the or one of the fastest on the road we end up here being the slowest, even massive trucks fully loaded with 20 or so cars overtake Cruisi on the highway while the poor engine is struggling to keep up with a ambitious limit of 120 kmph.
There are petrol stations all over the place, no more thinking and calculating whether we can reach our planned destination with the full tank or whether we need to fill up jerry cans. For the first couple of days we thought that there was a fuel shortage in South Africa because cars were cueing at most petrol stations we were passing, it took us plenty of kilometres to realise that there are simply more cars that need to refill than anywhere else, no fuel shortage whatsoever!
Its incredible how quickly one can forget and adjust to a different way of doing things.
We do not have to be planning our stops anymore but whenever we get tired we just stop at the closest campsite as there are so many around. With the festive season coming up and many people being on holidays already the campsites are pretty full.
It is quite interesting to swap from being the obviously wealthiest people around to feeling like the last gypsies. It is incredible the level to which those people here have taken camping! Apart from the amazing campsite facilities like having access to 25 meter swimming pools (!), washing machines and driers, boiled water on demand, firewood and even a sauna once it can become something like a campsite hobby to stroll around and marvel over the facilities people bring with them (one of our neighbours was doing so completely unembarrassed with binoculars...)! Amongst the top of those (excluding TVs, play stations and freezers) rank air-conditioning (not joking), garage tent for the precious car and automated ventilators to get the fire started (blowing seems way too much effort).
So obviously we have the most basic things, the oldest and dirtiest car, we don’t speak the same language as 98% of the people up here are Afrikaners and on top of that we seem to be the only people out of the sometimes up to 100 (!) on the site that are braaing butternuts and potatoes, no meat (and no, not even chicken), which seems to be the biggest sacrilege of all! Despite all this once people are not too inhibited anymore to speak to us they are all really nice.
In the same way we had somehow forgotten the level of development and non-Africanism of South Africa we had also managed to put on the side of our memory how incredibly beautiful and diverse South Africa is! We feel really happy in a way to be back and have the opportunity to discover parts of this country which we had not seen before and which make us love it even more and travel with such an ease.
We entered South Africa in a region called Limpopo, nobody ever told us that this is an area worth visiting and so we did not expect much of it, the greater our surprise was of how beautiful it is here. It is very mountainous and full of dense pine forests; it feels much more than driving through Europe than anything else. By choosing country roads, after experiencing the shock of the highways, which of course are also tarred with two lanes, we reached wonderful little villages that could have been any little place in the Eifel of Germany. We found amazing campsites next to rivers full of trout (Forrellen) amongst the pine trees. So strange!
We discovered the cutest organic farm making their own cheese, and inevitably went for the first wine and cheese feast in plenty of months. This is definitely one of those things that reminds you that it cannot only and always be routes adventure!
After leaving green Limpopo we entered the rather monotonous but nevertheless beautiful Free State. Farmed land and cattle grazing fields as far as the eye can see for kilometres on end.
In our 4 years in SA we had not visited the famous Drakensberg so we did so now and it was truly worth it. The Drakensberg is the highest mountain range in Southern Africa and a UNESCO world heritage site. All those impressive green hills and escarpments, the rivers, gorges and rock pools make you feel more like in Scotland than anywhere in Africa. The perfect place for hiking! We spend a couple of days here walking, acclimatising and surprisingly enjoying the finishing stretch of being back 
P.S. The baboons’ policy people follow here in Kwazulu Natal (a district of South Africa) is quite different than the rather friendly approach of Cape Town!

December 2011 Zimbabwe - Great Zim Gonarezhou National Park

Hello, hello,
The last official blog post from outside of our adopted home, South Africa, but let’s not think about that just yet.
Zimbabwe is an incredibly beautiful country, so diverse and so different again to what we had seen so far.
Everything is so green and looks so tidy and clean...
The big attraction we could not miss was the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Great Zimbabwe. It is the largest ancient stone structure south of the Pyramids and it given its name to the country.
It was build around the 13th century. Who exactly build it is for some a mystery for others crystal clear so overall a pretty heated topic of discussion. The first historians to discover it believed that it could have been a lost kingdom of Solomon. Views like these are astonishingly considered racist today. The only locally accepted view is that the local tribes build the construction.
Why the local people nowadays still prefer to live in mud huts instead of impressive structures like that one remains a mystery then. It’s good to see that even today not everything can be proven, without any mystery whatsoever life would be boring anyhow.
After spending a couple of afternoons walking through the ancient ruins we headed to the wilderness of the Gonarezhou National Park. We were still travelling with Ron and Sabrina and were happy to have some people with us in this isolated place, we prayed pretty often for Cruisi not to break down there! Its an amazing place, so far off from everything.

Again completely unexpected it is extremely green. Contrary to Hwange one should not come here for any sort of wildlife but rather for the scenery and isolation. Despite this, we saw tones of animals and even the rarrest of all two lions, this just after having a walk on a beautiful setting not knowing that there were mere two meters away from us.
The less you know the better sometimes.
Unfortunately we did not make it to Harare, the capital but instead made a visit to the second biggest city of Bulawayo.

At the time of our visit, the Zanu-PF, the party of Zimbabwe’s “leader” Robert Mugabe had its annual conference there. About one hundred thousand people had gathered to praise the party’s achievements (...) and elect or rather re-establish their leader. Mugabe’s convey drove past us while we were walking on the streets. Maybe it was because of this event that this stop was one of the least pleasant ones of our trip but the atmosphere in the city felt anything but welcoming.
For no particular reason, one was given the overall feeling of being apologetic for being white (and in fact being the only whites walking the streets) and simply wanting to hide away. The humble little bit we know about the recent history of the country might have contributed as well to this perception.
We met Warren, a 25 year old Zimbabwean in Victoria Falls who was returning for the first time after 8 years to his home country after as part of the Land Reform programme, introduced by Mugabe and the Zanu PF in 2000, his and his family’s farm had been confiscated.
In short, the programme stipulated the transfer of white owned farm land to black citizens. The farm on which Warren lived had belonged to his family since 3 generations, his father, grandfather and grand-grandfather had all lived and worked their whole life on what sounded like a farm out of a text book. Now it is in the hands of the vice president and completely ran down (as they were told by a neighbour), years and years of hard work were taken away within days without any sort of compensation. The family went to Australia to make a new start. Warren did not go to visit the farm, he said he managed to come back to Zimbabwe because he missed it but it was still too early to see the place where he grew up. His father is not planning to ever come back.

This is not an isolated story, hundreds of white farmers and their families were kicked out of their homes. The land they cultivated had made Zimbabwe one of the biggest agricultural exporters of Africa, to the extent that it was called the ‘bread-basket of Africa has now lost over 50% of its productivity and nowadays exports are close to zero.

There are always two sides to the story, so yes why should the black population not also have a more equal share of the land? But this radical act was clearly not the solution, as the mismanagement of the newly appointed people in powerful positions had devastating consequences; millions of people lost their jobs, industries and infrastructure broke down, inflation reached a point which made the country’s money completely worthless and it was replaced with the US dollar. Lawyers, doctors, teachers were amongst the 4 million people that left the country with the hope to find a better living elsewhere.
Nowadays, to our tourist eyes signs of this disaster are not evident, things seem a bit more balanced with the present ‘power-sharing’ government in place. The dollar is still there but apart from that everything seems to be pretty much functioning normally. People (outside of Bulawayo) have been extremely welcoming, and we were constantly being stopped on the road and asked where we were from and how we liked Zimbabwe and if we would come back. People seem happy to see that outsiders are not scared of their country and that they are starting to come back to visit this beautiful land which is highly equipped for tourism with amazing facilities that can only be compared to those of South Africa.

Of course one does not want to support in any way a repressive regime like that of Robert Mugabe who despite all the destruction around him is still benefiting from a thriving diamond trade from the rich soil of the country. Knowing that our visa fees as well as the entry fees into national parks go straight into his pockets is not a good feeling. But in the end it does not seem to make a damn difference when countries like South Africa and many Western multinational companies are still doing business with Zimbabwe and buying Mugabe’s diamonds while China is supplying him with weapons to suppress his own people; the few dollars we are spending in his country appear completely irrelevant.

Boycotting tourism (instead of Zim diamonds) seems to only have a negative effect on the ordinary people of Zimbabwe. Tourism used to employ thousands of people who all lost their jobs once the situation escalated. With tourists returning to the country do not only those people profit financially but also morally as it seems that a feeling of normality of slowly returning.

Zimbabwe has been an amazing stop on our trip and we will need to come back to see the rest of the country! For now the ocean is calling us, it has been far too long since we did not see it so we plan to spend some time on the coast of South Africa before heading back to lovely Muizenberg.

December 2011 - Zimbabwe Whange National Park

With two more people, Sabrina and Ron and all their backpacking things Cruisi is truly as full as it gets. We set off to Whange National Park to see some more animals.
Whange National Park has the biggest population of elephants anywhere to be found and despite it being the size of Belgium and the biggest park in Zimbabwe we were sure to see plenty of animals.
The first nights we stayed in an amazing campsite on top of a cliff with the view of a huge plain below. Herds of up to 700 buffaloes and elephants or supposed to be passing from there but during the 3 days we stayed there we did not see either. Because of the unique setting of the place we did not get disappointed and entertained ourselves by cooking delicious meals, Sabrina providing freshly baked bread from over the fire (we like Germans and their bread!) and Ron treating us with Dutch-Reibekuchen.
In-between we went for game drives but the park seemed fully deserted and we started doubting whether we were at the right place or if we maybe do not have the patience of true game hunters. After two days of only seeing birds and antelope we followed Ron’s passion for fishing and spend quite a few hours at a dam, fishing! The dam had a few crocs and hippos and plenty of fish inside, it might have been our beginner’s luck but we actually caught quite a few fish (some bigger and some smaller ones...) and enjoyed two dinners of fresh fish over the fire.
After driving for about 200km in the park we moved to a different campsite and all the animals seemed to live there. Everything was gathered out of some strange reason within 10 km from the new campsite...
We move further now on the perfect Zimbabwean roads to the first Zimbabwean city, Bulawayo.