out in the bush

Spent the weekend in beautiful Mpumalanga in a little town called Graskop. This part of the country is well and truly a gem and must have an anointing over it for stripping one’s character and unveiling the truth of who one really is. All three times I have been there, I’ve walked away with a broader understanding of myself and have seen sides of my fellow travellers I didn’t know were there. This particular weekend, was no different, which really challenged me in more ways that I would have liked it to.The Mr and I got involved in a car accident on the Saturday.  Thankfully, we walked away with our lives and no significant damage to the vehicle and the car was still driveable afterwards.

This incident forced me to re-live a car accident I was involved in three years ago. It had almost all the same elements, except this time, I re-lived it as a passenger and not a driver (as was my previous experience). It was strange. I kind of outta body experience. Hard to describe. I can count the number of times in my life that I’ve come close to death on one hand and each time has been so different and yet so similar at the same time. Ask me if I’m afraid of dying and I couldn’t actually give you a straight answer.

Aside from that though, the Mpumalanga Escarpment (also known as the Panorama Route) leads you through a circular route from one natural wonder to another and is well worth the visit if you are ever in need of a gettaway from the bustle of Johannesburg. 

The mac-mac pools. A beautiful little picninc area between Sabie and Graskop.

Swimming is in natural rock pools (like the one in the pic).

We stayed here

The quaint town of Graskop has an elephant dung curio shop that sells goodies made from the stuff

the pinnacle rock 

The blyde river canyon

The three rondavels. Apparently these are supposed to look like huts

The shoe - which the owner of the shop adjoining it insisted was the actual home of the lady in the story-book rhyme who had ten kids. I almost believed her.

on the road

Saturday morning saw me and Mr rising at the crack of dawn to go run our first road race for the year, hosted by my old university. It was only 5km and pretty mild overall. It was pouring with rain the night before, so the weather was great for a run.

country roooaad, take me hoooome

post race hustle and bustle

stretch. very important

even doggy got a medal

she's a beauty

Ms Joss Stone.

You fill my ears with joy.

the smell of new books..

now canned for the Kindle and e-book generation

The A - Z of Zanzibar: E & F

E is for Eating

F is for Food

Zanzibar’s main source of income after tourism is fishing. They fish for everything over there and a wide variety of seafood is on offer at any given eatery. What some countries might consider delicacies are everyday staples in Zanzibar – things like octopus, shark, every kind of shellfish (except for oysters…I didn’t see a single oyster while I was there) and the like. The seafood is always fresh (even from the street side vendors) and most is delicious.

In Stonetown, the Forodhani gardens have a nighttime fisherman’s market every day. What this means is that all the local fishermen put their catches of the day on display, everyone in Stonetown goes out there to have a pick, after which the meal is prepared, served on paper plates and everyone sits on the grass to enjoy. This was positively one of the most amazing experiences in Zanzibar and a “must” if you find yourself on the island. On the north and eastern beachside restaurants, be prepared to pay substantially for your meals, and mostly in US dollars too, unless you make your way to the villages and try negotiate your way to a good meal there. Fruit is also in abundant supply on the island. We very easily found ripe yummy fruit to much on in the course of the average day, everywhere on the island.

Having said that though, after the first week there, my stomach started reacting to something and I’m not sure what it was. I am not at all prone to getting sick and have never actually been sickon account of food items before, but something definitely stirred me there. I found myself suddenly repulsed by eggs and dairy products. I was nauseous for most of the day and I couldn’t stand the look and smell of papaya. Strange.  But thankfully, it wasn’t enough to incapacitate me J and the fun continued. Here are some pics..

Absolutely lovely. The prawns were good on any day..

My tummy's nemesis..an omelette

I paid about $10 for this little plate of prawns..food is anything but cheap there

A seafood platter with all the favourites 

Daytime market where you can buy fruit and other goodies

The night time fishermans market at the Forodhani Gardens

The A - Z of Zanzibar: D

D is for Doors

I very quickly found myself totally fascinated by the doors in Zanzibar. They are old with an obviously Arabic influence.  There is actually a coffee-table style book that you can buy at most of the souvenir shops in Zanzibar called “the doors of Zanzibar”. It retailed for $40 so I gave it a miss, but here are some of my memories of the doors I saw there..

The A - Z of Zanzibar: A - C

A is for Azure

B is for Beaches

C is for Coral Reefs

I'm combining these for the obvious reason that the pictures would be similar for all three. As far as beaches go, Zanzibar has a bit of everything. We started our stay on the east of the Island in a little town called Paje. Here the beaches are long and play host to pure white powder sand. The sand is so fine, it sticks to everything (which becomes a bit of an irritation when you wake up in the morning to discover there is sand in your bed, on your hair, on all your clothes and everything else and simply no way to get rid of it). But it is beautiful and mostly quiet (even in the high season of December, which was quite refreshing). The tide goes out about a kilometre and sometimes two so you can walk right into the ocean bed at low tide, and do some shallow snorkelling on the reefs. The reefs here are green and brown with LOTS of urchin beds and generally not too interesting, but if you look carefully, you’re sure to spot a few beauties. I had never before seen starfish as red and as big as what I saw here before. Sadly I didn’t have an underwater camera, so I don’t have photo’s of that to show you L.

If you go to the beaches in the north, then definitely opt for Kendwa and not Nungwi. Nungwi’s beaches are quite dirty in that there are a lot of broken shells and sea weed and other odds and bobs perpetually on the beach. As a result, I didn’t see anyone actually able to lie on the beach sand and relax, they rather opted to walk around looking for shells, then swiftly move on to do some tanning on the hotel hammocks. Kendwa’s beach looked a lot nicer, but smelled terrible. A short enquiry to a local about the smell led me to finding out that sometimes the municipal sewage systems block and the hotels feed the dirty water from the hotels into the ocean. He was quick to highlight though, that it’s only the water and not waste that gets dumped back into the ocean…which sadly didn’t do much to appease me. Not surprisingly, a lot of people were walking on the beach and lying on the sand tanning etc, but nobody swam.

If you find yourself in Stonetown (which I will talk about in a later post) and are looking for a decent beach, Prison Island offered the best beach I went to in Zanzibar. The water was beautifully crystal blue and warm, with clean white sand. You can also do decent snorkelling from there, which I quite enjoyed. The snorkelling is a bit deep on Prison Island (about 4 or 5 meters) and the current can very suddenly get strong, but it was great.

The Paje Beach

More of Paje - The view from our little guesthouse

The Prison Island Beach

The Kendwa Beach

Nungwi Beach

Me snorkelling of Prison Island

Nungwi's dirty beach

on safari - part three

We started the day off with a walking safari led by an odd little man from the village, who gave an introduction into the local fauna and flora and led us through a tour of the nearby bushes for 2 hours or so. After that we packed up and go back on the road to Dar es Salaam. About a third of the way into the journey, we encountered a snag. The little gravel road we were travelling on seemed to be somewhat under construction and there were little pits dug along the one side of it, which meant it became a one lane road. A truck had somehow tipped to an angle while trying to avoid the pits on the one side, and had blocked the only side of the road that was supposed to be functional. A group of men (presumably who had an interest in freeing the truck) were digging furiously and sweating profusely under the 38 degree temperatures of direct midday sun. Our driver got out to investigate…then help…and soon so did all the other male passengers in our party.

They did not manage to free the truck, but did make a clearing for the cars to pass around the truck. Yippee!! Everyone got back in the car, and not a second after we attempted to drive off, did we realise we had a flat tire. Great. Everyone go out again for a tyre change. After that, everything went relatively smoothly, until we stopped for lunch at the same dodgy little restaurant we stopped at on our way to Selous. Same menu. Same pit toilets.

We eventually made it to Dar in the evening, having dropped off a few people along the way, and my party checked into our overnight hotel. It happened to be my birthday too, so the hotel restaurant made a little chocolate mousse and the waitresses sang to me J. Beautiful way to celebrate 25 years of life.

The odd little man (allegedly a hunter) who led our walking safari

The truck stuck on the only operational side of the gravel road

Then our flat tyre needed to be changed

My birthday chocolate mousse at the hotel in Dar

The village(s) we drove through

The shady kitchen that catered for our stop over lunches both ways to and from Selous

on safari - part two

Our full day of game-driving began at 7:00am. We saw quite a few animals. The heat was relentless. Especially in our air-conditionless mean mobile. A full 7 hours of sitting in a car spotting game was quite exhausting and for some reason my feet started swelling.

Dinner was lovely, yet again. Watching the sunset, champagne in hand, a bon fire going and decent company, made it a beautiful evening. An octopus starter was rather unwelcome (at least to me), but the tuna and vege main was pretty decent. After dinner, more wine was served and we all sat around the bon fire chatting for end of time. Then we sailed back to the campsite and one of the boys in the group produced a bottle of native vodka. More needn't be said.

Entrance to the Selous game reserve

Hippos

A heard of elephant

Lanky girraffes

The dinner venue

Octopus. Next time, I'll pass on this one

Tanzania: In short

On Safai - Part One

I spent two weeks of December on vacation in Tanzania. The itinerary was simple: the first 3 days were to be spent on safari, transit overnight in Dar es Salaam, and the rest of the time on the island of Zanzibar. My flight landed in Dar at 1:30am and my first step off the aircraft was met by a gush of thick, hot, stale-ish air. It was 28 degrees celsius with 60% humidity, wind speed of about 5km/h. AT 1:30 IN THE MORNING!  If I say nothing more about the December weather in Tanzania, remember that.

The day began at 7:00am (read: I had about 5 hours available for sleep after landing in Dar, an hour of which was spent getting out of the airport to the hotel, another hour of chatting and “settling in” then a good hour in the morning to shower, eat, etc ..meaning I must have slept about 2 hours).  We were met at the hotel by a driver and chef from a company named Afriroots, together with other travellers who were to join us on Safari. The 8 hour drive to Selous (pronounced “say-loo”) was incredibly difficult. The car was not air-conditioned and the heat was scorching. About 70 percent of the journey compromised of driving through rural villages (literally kilometres and kilometres of mud huts that line the road) and the roads were not only gravel, but in terrible condition too, which made it impossible to catch up on any sleep. We had two stops along the way: one for lunch and another to refuel the mean mobile. The lunch time restaurant fed us on a budget and most of my party had a kind of French-fry omelette, while I settled for grilled green banana. Neither of the two meals were anything to rage about, but they did manage to ward of hunger until we got to our destination. The toilets at both stops were pit toilets. The less said about that the better.

Our base camp for the safari was called Hippo Camp. It is a little camp site located right next to the river where you can watch the Hippos whilst having breakfast. Beautiful. We offloaded our goods from the mean mobile into our tents and got on a boat for a sunset cruise, following which, dinner was served. Much to my surprise the dinner was delicious and a bit elaborate considering we were on a budget camping safari. The starter was soup and bread roll. Chinese-style rice and prawn curry made the main and a banana flambé was the dessert.

The mean mobile being loaded up

Petrol station on the way to Selous

The french-fry omelette that became our first lunch

Wonderful little place

Our tents were right next to the river

The breakfast table

Spot the Hippos behind me