Last day in Botswana, sadly

 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, perhaps.

We sadly piled all our luggage in the car, waved good-bye and went to Gaberone where we picked Kelone up from the university. Jes thought we would like the garden centre, set up ages ago by some Swedish people who were taking advantage of Gaberone dam which is just nearby. (I was remembering the dam from 50 or so years before when I went walking round it with my parents, it being far in the country then. Indeed I began learning to drive on then deserted road there.)

Jes was right. It was a lovely garden centre. Peter walked round admiring it but the rest of us just sat tiredly and drank coffee. He came back enchanted. While we were sitting there I was told they had avocado trees. Now those are something I haven't seen since I was ten. I used to climb them in the back garden. I got unaccountably excited, and though the centre was about to close the kindly assistant took me round to see it. And again unaccountably, I recognised it at once, but I couldn't say how. It's just a tree with avocados in it after all!
So it was time to say good bye to Kelone who still had work to do. We dropped her off at the impressive university campus and went off to do some shopping at the supermarket.

Jes had a shopping list. We needed money from the ATM and some food, in case we needed them on the train journey north to Zimbabwe. (We thought it was best to be prepared to get stuck in Francistown, the last stop before Zimbabwe and where we had to change trains.)

We also had a lot of time to kill until we could go to the railway station at 8.00 to wait for our 9.30 sleeper. So we enjoyed some of the advertisements and headlines. This advertisement for a competition was posted, a wee bit ghoulishly, above the meat counter.




The headline in the paper was a pleasure... but then again who doesn't lose the plot sometimes?

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