Wednesday, February 3, 2010

On to Swaziland...








Leaving Kruger, heading south, we passed farms and villages which provide vegetables and farm-grown game meats for Kruger lodges. Yes, we ate ostrich (tastes and looks like beef), kudu (very tender beef), and guinea fowl (tastes like chicken) in Kruger. Also passed commercial farm operations - sugar cane, sorghum, etc. All of these large green open spaces make you think about how crowded the city townships are and make you wonder if South African tribal cultures wouldn't have been much better off staying on the land than moving to the city. But, of course, they moved for jobs in the gold and diamond mines, to build the English and Afrikaaner infrastructure, and to work as domestics in the homes of the white folks. Sometimes they were, in fact, forcibly moved. Today there is a "willing buyer, willing seller" approach which is redistributing some of the land because many fear that if this does not start to happen SA will degenerate into a Zimbabwe situation.

Then we walked across the border from SA to Swaziland. Condom dispensers (free) at the border crossings - in fact, everywhere you look in SA - an attempt to combat the 14% HIV rate. Swaziland is a tiny country which has a king with many wives in many houses who drive many fancy cars. Yet, the village and school we visited (a stone's throw from the king's palace) were very poor. The (female) chief of the village (the Umphakatsi) cares for many HIV orphans, the school is minimal (we brought some donations) and the homesteads (collections of huts, sheds, and some stone buildings in which a patrilineal group of relations live) we visited were spare. Our tour company, Overseas Adventure Travel, and its parent organization, Grand Circle Foundation, have - over time - constructed flushable latrines on the school site, replacing the long drop toilets of the past. They have tackled similar projects in all the countries they visit.

As we traveled on, the scenery included terrace farming, wooden roadside stalls, and picturesque homesteads, each containing a rondavel (round hut) for family meetings, etc., among more boulder-strewn green Drakensberg slopes. If there is dissension in these family homesteads - such as among the multiple wives, it may only be discussed in the rondavel, not argued out in the household. Seems like a great way to keep the peace - no bickering allowed! That night, to our surprise, our lodgings at the Mkhaya Game Preserve were stone "cottages", open at waist level to the night air and night critters (no screens). Kind of like an AT shelter, but in the African bush.

During our time at Mkhaya we saw both the black and white African Rhinosceros, dung beetles, and more elephants, giraffes, zebras, etc. No lions here but we did walk out tracking hyenas.

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