Mo and Peter

When Rhodes, one of the richest men in the world acquired his first country (he ended up owning four, and being the Prime Minister of another) in 1890-1893 he considered it a priority to establish two towns, and, in Bulawayo, to set up a gentlemen's club fit to entertain his fellow gold and diamond mining magnates who might invest in his company and develop another Rand in the country known to have gold everywhere and to be the location of the fabled King Soloman's mines. This club is now a hotel.     When his henchman, Leander Star Jameson, declared the town open in 1895 he stood on the steps of the Bulawayo Club and made the following speech: "It is my job to declare this town open, gentlemen. I don't think we want any talk about it now. There is plenty of whisky and soda inside, so come in". The assembled crowd did just that.     A year later Jameson took half the country's police and invaded the Transvaal Republic, hoping to  provoke a ...

One evening, Jes took us on a history walk to see some remains of Bakwena houses and the drystone walls that had surrounded the setting. These Bakwena were Bantu invaders from South Africa who displaced the  Bakgalagadi and Basarwa people who had been living there. They, in turn were displaced by the Tswana. We brought one of the dogs with us: it was very happy, as you can imagine. We all added to the tracks in the sand. The walk began on a wide sandy track. Jes stopped and showed us these leopard tracks. And said with some amusement that one person he'd brought here had immediately wanted to go back to the car when he was shown leopard tracks. We branched off the wide track, as you can see in the first picture, and walked towards the hill. So far, so easy. But then the footpath up the hill was quite a different proposition. You had to know it was there in order to find it.  As you can see from the beginning of it, here at the bottom of the hill. We scrambled...

We'd been helped to find this train by the wonderful website, 'The Man in Seat 61'. (And thank you Jan!) In this blog I've included the email I wrote him to help keep the site updated. What I didn't include was how lovely it was lying in a comfy bunk, with the light off, and hearing the long whistle of the train as it left - so romantic. I also didn't include the information from the man sitting next to me in the waiting room who regularly made the journey to his home near Francistown. He said that the train was often delayed by people committing suicide on it. Oh dear. That didn't happen on the way to Francistown, but we were halted for a while near Bulawayo because a man looked as if he were going to jump and might have done. So the security people got out and walked down the line and concluded he'd changed his mind and run. Phew. ...Or as Peter would have put it, 'A man threw himself under the train, but missed.' We enjoyed the train be...

 We had a convivial lunch as usual with everyone at the house. To everyone else (except, perhaps, Ida) the menu sounded normal but to us it sounded like post-modern pastiche (or perhaps a bricolage) - apologies to our readers who don't share my academic terminologies! Yesterday we ate zebra with macaroni, spinach and grated carrot Botswana-style (yum! I'm not too keen on grated carrot usually, but this was excellent).  Today was gemsbok with dumplings and salad - extra macaroni for those who needed it like Baha Motsi who had been doing lots of physical work. (Mind you, it's only same as a having haggis pakora in Edinburgh.) Bonang is missing from this picture, though she usually does the cooking and is the inventor of the spinach and carrot recipes. These good dumplings were made by Onana (respect!). I don't know why she and Sumakaleng are looking so serious in the first picture. In fact we are all looking pretty serious for some reason. Concentrating on the food...

Coming from the rainy North West corner of Europe as we do, rivers and dams are not as special in the landscape. Yes we love the Water of Leith, and we love the reservoir at Flotterstone, but equally the rest of the landscape. Here we do enjoy the grass, acacia and rocks but when we came across a river unexpectedly it was magical. We set off to see where the footpath from the bus-stop at the road went, not expecting anything in particular. We liked the goats, and the yellow butterflies which were everywhere (but wouldn't stop to be photographed). The path snaked invitingly in the general direction of the far hills. ... Then suddenly, and, to us quite unexpectedly, there was river. As you can see it would have been easy to cross on the flat rocks, but we didn't, stopped in our tracks by how lovely it was. The water was moving downstream very slowly but it had formed the smallest of waterfalls, if you can call it that: a couple of inches wide and a few more deep. Wi...

This is us having breakfast in Molepolole on one of the few days that Kelone did not have to be at the university early. Usually she was gone before we got there. I think here we are eating oat porridge but some mornings we could have sorgum porridge. Both of remember enjoying sorghum porridge as children but that was in the form of maltabella, brown and eaten with butter (at least in my case) as  well as milk. This was white, and tasted different but also very good. We got up about the same time as everyone else - other than Jes who was on the school run.  A whole load of sorghum was made every morning because quite a few people live here. They arrived to eat, mostly in the kitchen (though here we three are in the main room). So at this time in the morning the house was full of light and laughter. Not having work or school to occupy us we went for another stroll round the garden. It was a lovely, peaceful place to be. The hill above it is a kind of captured land...