Completing the Set

 Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Yoga on the balcony overlooking the river, with the melodious African birds singing in the new day.  What an incredible way to start the last full day of our Road Scholar adventure! Then it's off to breakfast.  There is a lovely continental array with cereals and yogurt and fruit and such and as we are gathering our selections one of the staff brings a menu and asks for our eggs preference!  Guess I'll put back the yogurt but the cereal already is floating in milk, so that's a keeper!  At least I can ask for a SMALL omelet with all the veggies, so it isn't quite so much food!

 
Love bugs

                                                                                                    Monkeys are everywhere!

Peter, who has lead over 1,000 rafting trips on the Zambeze River.  Some of the rapids
are so "rapid" that you can't take commercial trips across them!

Beautiful grounds at the River Club

The summer house

The gazebo

We all get organized into to mini buses and are off to visit the school and day care, the market, and the old age home.  There is a small park immediately adjacent to all three and there is an African drum and dance group warming up in the park.  We are invited to join in and it's a blast and a half!!  Several people are taking videos and I hope to get one of my foolishness.  But at least I have these for your entertainment! 

The town of Livingstone

Another market

The park

We have just met Holiness (the names here are wonderful!) who is Muta's older sister and assists his wife in running the facilities.  Gradually we figure out that it is all one operation, run on a shoestring with limited government money.  They were able to acquire the land for the park so the children would have a place to play.  They are in school sixteen hours a day, since many have either working parents or no parents or are being raised by their elderly grandparents.  

Sisa has given each pair of us local currency to spend at the market for food for the old age home and at the school and Holiness leads our half of the group, since she knows what they need.  It's an open-air market with everything imaginable for sale from plastic baskets to used clothing to a wide variety of fresh vegetables, dried fish, and staples like cooking oil and sugar. There is a man with a bull horn who is educating the people about how to get business loans - or so we're told.  He sounds like a politician or preacher.

caterpillars

Yay!  Our shopping is complete!

dried fish

used clothing

charcoal, a major product

cement blocks for sale

Mason

We have a blast trying to deal with the local currency and are ever so grateful not to be doing this on our own! Happily we don't have to carry everything back!  One of the staff has a wheel barrow and collects our five huge heads of cabbage, several bottles of oil, washing powder, and sugar.  Pushing it looks like really hard work! 

While we're at the market, Holiness shows us the fabric shop that Sisa had promised us!  Oh my goodness!  The colors! The patterns! The prices! We can use dollars here because Muta, who seems to be the driving force behind the whole enterprise, iss armed with local currency and when we've made our selections we give him our dollars and he changes them in kwacha to pay for our goodies.  I don't think anyone leaves empty handed.  Some pieces will be table clothes, or thrown on a couch or bed, or even actually turned into clothing, as was intended by the manufacturers I'm sure!

We follow Holiness to the Maramba Old People's Home and tour the grounds a just a bit.  We meet their oldest resident, who is one hundred and looks like a mummy. The skin on his face seems to directly touch his bones, with no fat or tissue in between. We're told, though, that he can go to the bathroom by himself, although he might not remember if he has eaten today.  The youngest residents are about sixty and it is unnerving to be older than they.

We see our purchases delivered to the lady in charge of the kitchen and cross the yard back toward the entrance.  There are several people sitting on the ground under the trees and several dogs are wandering around looking for affection. We're told that people wind up here because they don't have children to take care of them, or they moved away from their families decades ago, or simply have no other choice.  The people in their neighborhoods tell the facility about them.

On a brighter note we follow holiness down to the Eliray Rose Pre-School and Day Care.  We laugh at Sisa every time he says it because he always rolls his Rs!  He speaks Spanish and can't fight that influence!  It's really pretty charming! There are three tiny classrooms and the kids are all dressed in clean uniforms, with "bright shiny faces" and enormous smiles.  And they're so well behaved! One of the classes is learning math from a young American, Mason Hollings, who is doing a gap year before starting college.  He'll be here for two weeks before moving on to other African locations.  His kids respond well to him and the experience seems equally valuable to him and them! The last group with visit sings for us!  So, of course, we do the Hokey Pokey for them!  Such a hoot!  They are enough older than the last school kids we visited that they don't swarm us with hugs, but that's all right.  Their huge, happy smiles and waves are just as good.

That train car is being moved by TRUCK!!

Precious is amazing!  Those are real hicuscus!

The daily posting, just like a cruise ship!

This was an eye-opener for me.

Mr. Gift is a hoot - and an extremely knowledgeable guide!

Single file, as directed

We head home for an early lunch so that we have a bit more down time before our rhino walk at four.  There is time to check into our flight from Livingstone Airport back to Joburg.  From there everyone will disperse and Marilyn and I will go on to Cape Town. Our check in is easy;  but we can't check into our flight to Cape Town until after six.

The whole day has been leading up to the rhino walk.  It is optional but ten of the twelve of us have chosen to do it. The rhino is the last of the Big Five and I thought it would be as elusive as the leopard;  but we found a leopard and I have faith that we'll be successful today. We hop into two vans and head to the Kasanka National Park, the second smallest park in Zambia which has twenty parks and thirty four game management areas.  About thirty percent of the country is reserved for wildlife.

We climb into a large 4x4, meet Mr. Gift who will be our guide, and pick up a park ranger who is armed with a rifle to ensure that we all return safely, should there be an unfortunate encounter.  The park doesn't have any cats, but we're after the white rhino.  It turns out that the original name was wide-mouthed rhino, but it got corrupted to white rhino, even though they are gray!  The other species is called the black rhino, just to distinguish them, even though they are the same color gray! Their mouths are more like beaks and so their feeding habits are vastly different. "Our" rhinos are grazers.

Male giraffe poop is pointed at one end.

African basil

Rhino track!  Getting close!

This plant is so strong that you can use it in place of twine.

rhino poop

Oh my god!  Oh my god!  Oh my god!!

We're instructed to stay in a single file, just like our last nature hike, and off on our walk. The theory is that we will appear to be a single large entity which is much safer.  During our walk we observe elephant dung, but this time we actually see if up close and learn that there are tiny harvester termites who are making a living in there and that the locals make a tea from it because the elephants eat so many different kinds of plants and many of them have medicinal value. (You don't want to shake hands with a guide!  They are always handling droppings!)

We learn that male giraffe poop is pointed at one end and that you can tell female from male droppings because the male's poop will be separated from their urine, while the females are quite close together.  Think about anatomy. We see warthog poop and zebra poop and smell African Basil, which is good for repelling mosquitos, and chicken spice which smells delicious. At last we see a rhino footprint!!  

Oh my goodness gracious!  There are seven of them!  Five are grouped together in the shade of a tree, lying comfortably in a huddle. and there there is a mom and baby, slightly apart from the group. They are completely unfazed by our presence although we are extremely careful to be quiet and not make sudden moves.  They are huge and appear ungainly but we're told they are extremely fast and we don't want to find out first hand that we can't outrun them! We move around them and reach a spot where Mr. Gift is pleased to photo graph any and everyone!  As we're watching the baby, Matilda, gets up, so Lucy, her mom, does too and eventually the whole "thrash" (really!  that's the name for a group of rhinos!) ambles off the scene.

Zulu was one of our drivers and our caterer!

They can carry up to 200 pounds on their bicycles.

Lucy and Matilda

Check the bird on Lucy's back!

Have birds, will travel!

Oh, and two hippos in the river!

Are you lookin' at me??

Chicken Basil

Zulu prepares our refreshments

The Zambeze is such a beautiful river and that's Zimbabwe on the other side.

Mr. Gift has had the 4x4 brought closer, so we have just a short walk back to it, and then a short ride back to our original spot, on the river bank.  There are refreshments waiting!  Gin and tonic, other spirits, sodas, and BBQ chips are that quite good! And the view is marvelous.

Once again we're off to freshen up for dinner.  We just have time to check into our next flight and discover that what Marilyn had thought was a 6:05 pm flight is really 6:05 am and now we have a problem.  There's also the little glitch that when she tries to check in it always comes up with my name.  Hmmmm. We decide that this is a Sisa question and head off to dinner.

They're so adorable and they live on the property!

They are Harrington's babies!

soup

This is better than I could see it.  It's lovely!

Once again we're dining by the pool, by candle light.  There is potato and leeks soup, chicken with veggies, and a strawberry roll with chocolate sauce and ice cream for dessert.  During the meal Peter, the owner, regales us with more stories about the wonders of Zambia and its people. He is a white Brit, who adores this country and can make anyone a believer!

After dinner Sisa offers his advice about our dilemma andd we go back to our room, convinced that there will be a solution as the airport in the moring.  We pack and get ready for bed.  Peter had had the staff top off our wine (I had a lovely cab from KWV winery) and all I can do is change and plop into bed!  I'm writing this at 4:30!!

Tomorrow begins part two of our adventure!