Manicaland

I slept quite well with the cool mountain air blowing through the tent during the night. I woke up very early as usual, packed up my possessions and tent and had some breakfast. I looked out to the white clouds folding over the distant mountains which were lit up by the strong morning sun. I had really enjoyed being in the mountains and would miss this special area so beset by the tragedy of the cyclone.
We boarded the truck and headed out through the tree covered mountains so scarred with orange landslides.
We rose up high into the mountains and looked down over cloud filled valleys stretching out to distant hazy mountains. We passed local villagers outside their mud and thatched roundhouses, looking up and waving to us. As we descended we passed macademia nut tree plantations common in this area. We stopped to buy some of the delicious nuts from roadside sellers. We then passed an area of high cultivation with green fields filled with cows and looking, for all the world, like English countryside. This seemed to have been created by white settler farmers before they were driven out of their farms by local people, often with guns, under the Mugane regime.
The weather grew very hot again and the landscape began to look very dry and dusty because the rains expected over a month ago had not really arrived yet. As we have had so much rain on our trip, we have joked that we are the 'rainmakers, bringing rain wherever we go. We got out of the truck to cross a large suspension bridge on foot with wonderful views over a sandy river bed with people doing various activities such as washing clothes. A large mountain behind completed the view nicely. We had so much rain during the early part of our journey that the countryside had always been lush and green. This was the first time that I'd seen Africa in the yellows and pale greens of the dry season with no grass to be seen anywhere. We passed more mountains with large rounded rock faces and smaller protrusions of rock in the foreground with impossibly balanced boulders on their tops.
We stopped in a busy African town for some lunch and then carried on to the Zimbabwean ruins. True to our aforementioned rainmaking reputation, it started to rain as we arrived and we joked with the guides about this. We had a guided tour around the Great Zimbabwe ruins after which the country of Zimbabwe is named. The original stone city which eventually had a population of 25000 people was active from around 1100 to 1400 AD. It had a patriarchal monarchy with an impressively built large stone complex for the King's first wife and other stone buildings outside for the King's other wives. The stone complex for the first wife had enormous thick walls and a large cylindrical stone tower whose purpose is unknown.. The large complex clearly had a religious and symbolic purpose and would have taken a huge effort by the local community to build. Apparently, the community had a class structure with a priestly cast of 'fortune tellers' or diviners that informed the king and made decisions about building the complex of buildings and the religious rights and rituals conducted in them. Having been impressed by the sheer size of this complex, we then walked up a ritual King's stone path to a high rock outcrop where the king lived. On the way up, we heard evocative drumming and singing from local people in a nearby village which gave a strong sense of climbing this path hundreds of years ago when the King's path was still walked by him He had a large wooden eagle totem that stood on a high pillar of stonework only to be removed when the king died and another eagle totem was then erected for the new king. There were a number of these eagle totems in the museum we visited on the site. There was also a covered round kitchen area with a large clay dish in the centre where the king would entertain guests. Again, the kitchen area would be removed and another kitchen area built on top of it when the king died and a new king, his son, was installed. There were an impressive number of stone buildings in the king's complex and we walked up to the most sacred area of the complex where sacred rituals and rights were performed. I thought the largest of the huge natural boulders in this area appeared to look a bit like the head of an eagle and may have inspired the eagle cult associated with the king. I also had the feeling that this special area high up in the rocky outcrop would also have been a sacred place to local people for thousands of years before the site was developed into a huge stone complex, but this is just conjecture on my part. At the top of the site the views over the surrounding landscape and nearby lake were beautiful in the early evening light with stormy clouds on the horizon. As we left this deeply impressive site we walked past a troop of baboons and vervet monkeys with their infant young playing in the branches of trees. We then had an even closer encounter with some vervet monkeys by our truck - I thought I'd taken a wonderful video of a vervet monkey mother suckling her young and then realised that I'd forgotten to press the record button much to my chagrin.
We left the Great Zimbabwe ruins and headed a short distance down the road to our campsite, Norma Jeane's Lake View Resort, which was in another beautiful situation overlooking the lake. I pitched my tent overlooking the lake, had some dinner with my fellow travellers, did some writing by the camp fire, watched it burn low as I love to do, and then retired to bed with a cooler breeze blowing off the lake, a big moon in the sky, and occasional flashes of lightning from far distant storms illuminating the sky. The ubiquitous crickets filled the air with their chirping calls as I endeavoured to find sleep and dreams in the deep, dark African night. As the night progressed the storms seemed to gather around our campsite with a natural symphony of deep rumbling and close lightning strikes lighting up the tent.Read more