Durban - Day 3

We scheduled a half day tour to the Land of 1000 Hills where we were shown the traditional Zulu way of life, highlighted with music and dancing. Our guide, Dick Maare, was an energetic and proud South African Afrikaaner (white with Dutch ancestry) that was very knowledgable and enhanced the tour with his stories.

The Zulu people used to be separate tribes that would fight among themselves, but under the ruling of King Shaka, were brought together as one. The Zulu men are able to have as many wives as they would like, but at the price of 11 cows each. The Zulu women would collect water topless which caused the Zulu men to loiter and attempt to win the heart of a single lady (well, one single lady at a time).

We were told that there were huts for cooking, eating, and sleeping. Nico was brave and tried the Zulu beer.

The tour also included a walk through a reptile park which started with holding an alligator. Alligators aren't native to Africa but since their bigger relatives, crocodiles, are not so friendly, it was a good introduction. The most interesting thing we learned is that the gender could be controlled by the temperature the egg is kept at. If it's kept cooler than 28C, it will be a female. Between 28-31C, it will be male. When it is kept at 32C and above, it will be a female again.

We learned about tortoises and snakes, and held one to finish off the tour.

We had minimal time before we had to make our next sightseeing scheduled departure time at 1pm - the Durban Ricksha Sightseeing Bus. It was a 3 bus ride around Durban that took us to all the main sites. While we were downtown, we had a slight set back from a small fenderbender. The bus driver had to obtain the other driver's information and speak to the police, then we were on our way again. The bus took us atop a hill in Morningside that allowed a great view of Durban.

For dinner, we went to Roma Revolving, "1 of 31 revolving restaurants world wide" - this statement was most likely outdated because a quick google search found more than 31 in the US alone. Nico put his engineering degree to good use to calculate the time it took to rotate 360 degrees by the number of windows and amount of time a landmark took to pass out of sight.Read more