Zimbabwe was hot, without much shade. Mike and I were heading for a place called Hot Springs, south of Mutare. There was a campground there, with showers and a pool. Kind of upscale for us, and a little pricey, but we decided that the showers and pool would be worth it. It was what they called a caravan park, which meant hookups for RV’s, which were owned mostly by the wealthier white Zimbabweans and South Africans. They could afford to travel. The campground management were startled that we just wanted a level place to pitch our tents. Which we did, and took showers, and swam in the pool. The people we met there were friendly enough, and some had even heard of Peace Corps, but I sensed that they did not want to become best friends. We hadn’t been on the road that long, but our t-shirts and shorts showed the signs of hard useage. And we were white guys without jobs.
The next day we hitched back into town to get some food to cook at our campsite. While hitching back to the campsite, we got a ride with a man who was mid-thirties, and well spoken, and who turned into a bottle shop (like a cantina that had a bar, and also sold bottles of booze) every ten minutes, to get out of his truck, and drink a beer. He had been a fighter in Zimbabwe’s War for Independence, and had made himself a name while fighting. His name was something military, like Sargent, or Colonel, or something. He was funny, and bold, and we enjoyed his company and his stories. And the closer to the campground, the drunker we were. I was just drinking one beer, just to be polite, but he stopped 5 times on the way to the campground, and I am usually a two beer total kind of guy. When he dropped us off, he said, “I will come back this evening, and bring some beer and steaks we can cook for dinner.” Um, ok.
True to his word, he showed up about dark, with a case of beer, and a bunch of steaks. And two young women, Chipo and Joyce. We 5 sat by the pool and drank beer, and cooked the steaks, and swam and talked.
Even though there are 3 main languages in Zimbabwe, SiShona, SiNdebele, and ChiTonga, almost everybody we met spoke English. The British, while in control of ZImbabwe, back when it was called Rhodesia, under Cecil Rhodes as dictator… um, excuse me… President, had set up great infrastructure. There were telephones and electric and water lines in most of the more densely populated areas, paved roads, and schools everywhere, even in the remotest locations. There was even a functional postal service. The schools were taught in English, so most people who had been to school spoke it. So did our guests. The girls were city girls, and had been educated there at better schools. They were in their early twenties.
It was a fun evening for us, though the other white guests there stayed away from the pool. And I saw some looks of concern on their faces. I realized that our 3 guests may have been the first black Zimbabweans to have visited there. Black Zimbabweans generally didn’t have the money for RV’s. Or camping or traveling for pleasure. The evening wore down, and Corporal, or whatever his name was, made the motions of leaving. As he stood up, he bent over the table to Mike and I, and said, “I am leaving these girls because they wish to travel with you guys.” And he was gone, heading back towards Mutare. The girls seemed calm about this new development. I had no idea what to do. As women always do in such a situation, they knew what to do, and soon, Joyce and I were in my tent, and Chipo and Mike were in his tent. The whole evening, I had just enjoyed the women’s company and talk. I had not looked at them in terms of sleeping in my tent. I swear! Hahahaha! Really I didn’t. I was traveling, and not forming long term relationships. But Joyce was sweet and peaceful, and we went to sleep and woke up the next morning. She seemed a little embarrassed.
They traveled south with us down through the Chimanimani Highlands, and west toward the bridge over the Save River. Joyce was pleasant company, and a quiet sleeper, and never said anything to me about having sex. I think she expected to, but was ok with not, as well. I can’t speak for Mike and Chipo, but the 4 of us traveled together in good spirits, ate good food cooked by Mike or I, and in a couple days, we came to a place where we could see an enormous suspension bridge in the distance. It was just a two lane dirt road, but the bridge was a monument. As we drew near, there was a dedication plaque on a cement abutment. The bridge was called Birchenough Bridge. Named after Sir Harry Birchenough. I found that funny, as my last name is Birchall. Sir Harry could have had my name, but he only went enough of the way to have a bridge named after him, not all the way. And to have the bridge engraved on the 20 cent coin. As we walked across it, over the Save RIver, I looked down to see lots of Kingfishers diving into the river for small fish, and the air was filled with tiny Carmine Bee Eaters, a tiny but brilliant crimson bird, zipping around catching insects.
It was a tranquil journey heading north to Masvingo, where the Great Zimbabwe Ruins were located. In Masvingo we put the women on a bus back to Mutare with our thanks for their pleasant company,
Mike and I hiked out to the ruins. I had been there before, and enjoyed them. We set up our tents in the shade in the campground there. As we sat there, cutting up veggies for dinner, we gained the attention of the vervet monkeys, the thieves of the campground. They sat around us about 25 feet away, and watched our every move, waiting for the moment they could race in and steal some food, and race away again. We gave them no opportunity. They would leave whenever a car would drive in looking for a spot to camp, and gather near there. People would get out of their car, and the monkeys would streak into the inside while the doors were open, and go into the back, and ravage any food bags that the tourists might have. Which they always had. The people would open the back door of their SUV’s, and try to shoo the monkeys out, and the monkeys, while ripping open loaves of bread, and stuffing fruit and veggies down their throats, would show their teeth and hiss at the people. The people would try poking them with sticks, but the monkeys only left after they had totalled the groceries. It happened to car after car. It was pretty comical, though the people did not think so. Mike and I would shout, “Don’t open your doors!” and the people would open their doors and get out, and say “What?” and by then it was too late, the monkeys were in.
I walked down to the market at the entrance to the park, where earlier I had noticed that the girls and women there seemed to be doing a lot of crocheting. They had, displayed on their tables, crocheted everything. Doilies, antimacassars, tablecloths, blankets, shirts, pants. A wedding dress that must have weighed 50 lbs. At the back of the market, I met a girl named Mary, and she was doing hair wrapping on a friend. Mary had braided the girl’s hair, in little two inch braids all over her head, and then was wrapping each braid in black thread. I stood there watching, and Mary said,
“Do you want me to teach you how to do this?”
“Yes please.” I answered.
So she did, She demonstrated what she was doing, and when she finished explaining, she asked if I wanted to try. Why, yes, I did. I wrapped 3 or 4 braids, with her expert guidance, and they came out ok. I looked around, and every one of the girls had her hair wrapped. I guess that is what they did to take a break from crocheting. I asked Mary,
“Do you know a girl whose hair is not wrapped? I would like to try doing a whole head.”
“Come tomorrow morning, and I will bring a girl.”
Cool. I had an embroidery kit in my pack, that I carried everywhere. It had a hundred colors of thread. I liked to embroider, and when the mood struck me, I would get out my hoop, and kit, and embroider for an hour or three or four. The kit was like a rainbow in a box. It always got attention when I would take it out to do something. Lately I had been using it to repair my clothes, and with the perfect color, since I had thread to match almost everything. I took it with me the next morning. I was gonna make the girls head a masterpiece.
I got to the market, and Mary led me back, and sitting on a chair was a very nervous girl. “This is my cousin Celina. She will let you wrap her hair.” Celina was looking like she wished she wasn’t there, and I wondered how much coercion had been necessary to get her to come. Mary handed me the big spool of black thread, and said she would help me with the braiding. So she and I braided Celina’s hair. It took about an hour. Then Mary asked me if I remembered my lesson from yesterday. “Yes,” I said, “but I brought my own thread to use.” And I took my embroidery kit out of my day pack.
It was as if I had opened a black hole, and it was sucking everything around it in. Someone said, “Look at all those colors!”, and girls from all over the market shot towards us as if magnetized. Soon, every girl in the market was crowded around talking about the colors. I let them calm down, and got to work. We had braided 10 rows of braids going from front to back of her head, and over the next 6 or 7 hours, with a short break for lunch, I wrapped every braid with a different color. Each row started at the forehead with the darkest color, and as the braids went back, the colors got lighter. One row was dark maroon to pink. Another was brown to light yellow. Dark navy blue to sky blue. Dark forest green to light spring green. I used almost every color that I had. The two middle rows were the colors of the rainbow front to back, ROY G BIV, just like I learned in school. It was a masterpiece, if I do say so myself. Mary helped me wrap towards the end, because my fingers were so sore. My back was sore. My butt was sore from sitting all day. The girl, Celina, when somebody finally gave her a mirror, was amazed. I had been concentrating on doing it most of the day. There had seemed to be a lot of tourists in the market all day, but I had not been paying attention. The girls were saying, “I had my best sales day ever!” to each other. Everybody went home happy, even me, though I could barely move my hands, and limped back to camp.
Mike and I ate dinner, without vervet monkey intervention, and as dark fell, he said, “Let’s go over there to the Pub, and have a couple beers.” Sounded good to me. We went in, and ordered a couple beers, and when I took out money to pay the waitress, she refused my money, and pointed to a couple over in the corner, and said, “They already paid. And 5 other people have bought your next 5 beers.” While I had been concentrating on Celina’s hair, the tourists had been watching me as they shopped. I had become a sort of celebrity unbeknownst to me. Word had gotten around the campground, and most of the campers had come to the market out of curiosity. I was famous. Mike and I drank free for the rest of the night, and I answered the same questions over and over. How did I learn hair wrapping? Was I a professional at it? Where was I from? Why was I here? Like that, until we left to go to bed in our tents.
The next night was going to be a full moon. Mike had talked to me about how, if you are up high looking down, at sun up, with the angular light of the rising sun, you could sometimes see things in the terrain that indicated what previous civilizations living there had done. Great ZImbabwe had been a huge central trade exchange center for the early Zimbabweans who had built it. They had disappeared without leaving a written history, and not much was known about them.
We went to bed early, and got up about 3am, and walked over to the entrance to the ruins proper. I chatted up the night guard, and bribed him with a pack of cigarettes to let us in before they opened at 8am. We walked in through the bright moonlight, and climbed to the very top of the highest ruin, and sat there in the gentle breeze, and watched the world wake up around us. As the sun peeked over the edge of the earth, the angle of the light did indeed show where there might have been fields, and other buildings lost in the overgrowth, and we imagined a large culture of early Zimbabweans living their lives as traders.
I took out my little one burner stove, and boiled some water for a couple cups of coffee. Mike and I relaxed there drinking it. Our height was even with the tops of the trees growing on the lower slopes, and as we sat there, a troop of baboons came leaping along the branches across from us, with the moms gathering the fruits of the tree and eating them, and the baby baboons were chattering and playing and leaping from branch to branch, and the big bull baboon, master of the troop, sat across from us, and stared us down. He had some big teeth, and looked ferocious. We sat perfectly still except for the occasional gulp from our coffee cups, and watched them play and eat for half an hour, until they moved off through the foliage.
After enjoying the ruins, one day Mike said, “Hey, Maseko, let’s head up to Bulawayo. I have a friend, Thabi, that I met while traveling last year, and she invited me to visit her in the township where she lives.” Ok, so we did that. Thabi was a pretty and quiet young woman. Her house in the township was made of mixed media, so to speak. Some walls were cement block. Some were brick. Some were plywood. The township was densely populated, and noisy all day and night. We visited Thabi for a couple days, and when we were ready to move on, Thabi decided to travel with us for a while. We wanted to see nearby Matopos National Park, which was a park full of balancing rocks. We hopped a bus that went by the park, and got there about mid day. Where we got off, on one side of the road, a small sign said Campground, with an arrow. I looked across the road, and there was a small concession from which they rented horseback rides. There was a large sign out front telling the prices, and underneath the prices, in smaller letters, it said that there were lower prices for non-tourist citizens. I wanted to check it out. I had a horse when I was a teenager on the farm where I lived, and liked horseback riding. We went and chatted up the man behind the desk. When he found out that we were Peace Corps volunteers, he told us that he had had a “Peacecorps” (pronounced as one word, and pronouncing the s), as people called us, when he was in high school, and remembered him fondly, and told us that he would only charge us the citizen rate, which was cheap. We decided to go for an afternoon ride, and went with the man, and saddled up 4 horses. As it turned out, we were going to ride through the game preserve part of the park. Off we went, across the bush. As with most rent-a-horse operations, the horses just wanted to follow the lead horse, and it took me about half an hour to convince my horse that I was in charge. He would walk for a bit, then trot to catch up to Mike’s horse ahead of me, then walk for a while, then trot again. It was annoying. He eventually accepted my control of him. We went down through a small creek, and on the other side, came out into a large grassy field. I assumed that it was large, though, since the grass was taller than me, on top of a horse, I couldn’t see how big. We just walked into a wall of grass. The guide, then Thabi, then Mike, disappeared into the grass ahead of me. I gave my horse his head, and trusted that he would follow the others. I could hear the horses ahead of me, but never saw them. After about half an hour, we popped out of the grass, and were crossing a large plains of bushveldt. Ahead of us, was a mixed herd of Giraffes and Zebras. The guide signed for us to be very quiet, and we walked directly through the middle of the herd. Since we were on horses, the herd just saw us as some other animals, and kept grazing as we walked among them. Giraffes are very tall. My head, atop my horse, was at their shoulder level. As we came out of the herd, I looked across the way, and about 1/4 mile away was a road, with a tourist Range Rover, with people using their binoculars to look at the herd we had just walked through. I imagined them poking each other and saying, “Look! Centaurs!” A while later we came upon a clump of bushes, and the guide signaled us to stop, and remain still on our horses. On the other side of the bushes, about 5 feet away, was a mama rhinoceros with her baby. The mama was nervous about us. Rhinos have poor eyesight, and poor olfactory senses, but good hearing. We sat there as she fidgeted. Again, since we were on horseback, we looked similar to zebras, and although she was nervous, she stood there grazing. Rhinos are large. Like the size of a large sedan car. Her baby was having a good time. It was the size of a small Volkswagen. It was galumphing around merrily, and nursing the mama, and galumphing around again. We sat there taking pictures, and watching the baby play. Then we headed back to the barn. I had been to several game preserves during my stay in Africa, but never had been so close to the animals.
It was getting dark as we struck off walking down the trail to the campground. By the time we got to the campground, it was pitch black. It was the new moon. The only light was from a few small campfires of the campers. As we walked down the dim trail between the campsites, I heard two voices that I recognized. There had been two guys from Switzerland that we had run into a couple other times while traveling. We called them Hans and Franz, the Swiss guys. I called out, “Hey! Is that Hans and Franz, the Swiss Guys?” They laughed and called back, “Is that Mike and Ike, the American Guys?” We stopped in and had a beer with them. Then we went and set up our tents at a nearby campsite. You never camp with food in your tent. Wild animals will just come right in and sniff out the food. We had a loaf of bread and some apples, which we put in a bag, and tied it to a rope, and threw the rope over a tree branch about 10 feet up, and pulled the bag up, and tied it there. We were tired, so we went right to bed. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a loud grunting with the sound of something large slamming on the ground. I laid there, and tried to figure out what wild animal would be making sounds like that. My curiosity got the best of me, and I stuck my head out of the tent, and turned on my flashlight, and there were three Zebras, leaping up to try and get our bread and apples. They would grunt as they leapt, and then slam back down on their hoofs, shaking the ground. They weren’t coming very close to the bag of food, so I went back to sleep. The next day we walked around and looked at all the balancing rocks, and wondered how they had come to be like that. The grave of Cecil Rhodes, the last white dictator before independence, was also in the park. He had been a paranoid man, and very unpopular, and had arranged to have a crypt cut into the heart of an enormous rock, where he was buried, and a cement plug set above his coffin, so that the native Zimbabweans could not dig him up and despoil his remains.
The following day, Mike and I headed north, to Binga, where there was a high school, with a volunteer Mike had met on his earlier travels. When we got to the high school, the volunteer introduced us to his top student, Newart, who said he was inviting us to come and visit his homestead out where the Baobab trees grew. His father was a doctor, an herbal healer in fact, who was famous all over Zimbabwe and Zambia. People came from far away to be treated by him. Heck yeah! And we walked about two hours across the bush to get there. The doctor had 3 wives, and a plentitude of children, and a bunch of huts beside a large field growing millet, the staple grain of the Tonga people. We pitched our tents off to one side of the homestead. The doctor’s family were great. So was he, though a solemn man, and he made us feel welcome.
In the evenings, the women served dinner to the Doctor, Mike and I, and the 3 oldest boys of the family at a small table. The porridge made from the milet was prison gray in color, and tasted, if possible, even blander than the corn porridge that I ate in Swaziland. The second night there, I was eating with the men, and I kept hearing a shhhk shhhk shhhk sound from somewhere. It went on for 10 minutes. Nobody seemed to notice it but me. Mike got up after finishing his meal, and turned to walk across to the fires where the mothers and kids were eating, to thank them for the food, and as he turned, everybody started shouting. Mike, in a feat of superhuman agility, changed his first step into a huge leap, and then another one, and then bent down brushing at his ankles. I looked at him, and saw a 5 foot wide river of army ants marching across the homestead from the Baobabs toward the millet field. They went as far as I could see in either direction. A flowing river of ants, going shhhk, shhhk, shhhk. The sound of their carapaces brushing against each other. If Mike had stepped into the river, he would have been covered with ants in 30 seconds. The mothers were checking him to be sure he was ok.
The third day there, the Doctor invited me to sit quietly in the corner of his consultory, and observe him at work. He treated various patients with herbal decoctions after examining them. One patient needed something stronger. The doctor examined her, and talked with her. Then he took out a pair of Gemsbok horns, and he went into a trance, and was singing and moving the horns up and down over her prostrate body. After 15 minutes, he came out of his trance, and gave the woman a decoction that I had seen him make out of aloe and some herbs, and she drank it, and paid him, and left with a smile on her face.
I had been wondering where the mothers were getting the water that they and we were using, and when I saw them heading out early the next morning, with jugs on their heads, I grabbed our canteens, and followed them. We walked for about an hour, and came to a dry river bed. The mothers walked out into the middle, and took out soup cans, and dug through the dry sand. At about 12 inches, the sand became moist. They dug to about 18 inches, and sat back. Slowly, water seeped into the hole they had dug, and as it filled up with cloudy water, they used the same soup cans to scoop it out, and dump it into their jugs. It took about an hour and a half to get enough water to fill a 25 liter jug. I borrowed somebody’s soup can while they were waiting for the water to seep into their dug hole, and dug my own hole, eventually scooping enough water to fill our canteens. Then we walked the hour back to the homestead. The women did this every other morning, they told me.
On the mornings in between, they would spend the morning stripping millet seeds from the stalks, and putting them into a butter-churn-looking hunk of log on end, with a hollow center, and pounding them with heavy poles. Millet seeds, like those sprays of millet that you put in your parakeet cage. Tiny black seeds. Teeny tiny. Then, after they pounded them enough, they would winnow them, to get rid of the tiny husks, and take the tiny gray seed meats, and grind them with stone grinders into a powder that they would hydrate with water and make porridge. They did this twice a day. In their “free” hours, they would clean the houses, wash clothes, hang them to dry, wash the small babies, cook, and work in the community garden. 7 days a week. A hard life.
The next day, I walked into Binga, to cruise the market and see what I could bring back for the community pot. There wasn’t much, it was a small market, and I bought everything. 6 wizened potatoes. 4 nice ripe tomatoes. A bunch of chard. 6 eggs. 2 small wrinkly green peppers. A small sack of rice. I paid asking price without bargaining, and let the mothers think me a fool, because they looked like they really needed the money. As I sat talking to them, the morning bus arrived and disgorged a dozen passengers. One in particular, looked out of place. She had a new backpack, new shoes, and was a black woman, maybe 25 years old, and obviously not a native. She walked directly up to people, and asked them questions. She walked erect and proud. It turned people off, and they would mumble something, and walk away. I could see she was frustrated. She saw my white face in the market shade, and came striding over.
“What is up with these people?” she said, with a northern plains american accent. “They are so rude, walking away from me.”
“You are frightening them with your forward ways and talking without greeting them first.” I answered.
“But I don’t even know them.” She said.
“Yes,exactly, that is the problem. I am Sam.”
“I’m Sharon.”
We sat in the shade of the market, and talked. Sharon was from Detroit, and had decided to save her money, and come to Africa, and find her roots. She had flown in yesterday, and taken the first bus out of the airport, and wound up in Binga after a 15 hour bus ride. I had to give her credit. She knew nothing about Africa, or Zimbabwe, and spoke only English. She chose Zimbabwe because she had read that they speak English here. And yet, here she was. In Binga.
It reminded me of a conversation I had had with a grandmother in the south of the country a couple weeks earlier. She was selling tomatoes at the market there, and I bought some, and she chatted me up.
“Where are you going from here, Maseko?”
“I am going north, to Binga, where the Tonga people live, Grandmother”
“Why on earth would you go up there? They are dark.”
“I am interested in learning about their culture, Grandmother.”
“Oh, no, no, Maseko. You should not go there. They are all thieves. They are dark. In fact, we call them Imfeni”
Imfeni was the Ndebele word for baboon.
“If you go there,” she said, “you will not see them. They live in the trees, and still have their tails, and will run away when they see you. And they will come in the night, and steal all your things. They are dark.”
She touched her arm when she said “dark”, and I realized that she meant that they were darker black then she was.
“I will be cautious, Grandmother. Enjoy your afternoon.” And I took my leave. I hadn’t expected to encounter racism in Africa.
I looked at Sharon, and asked her if she had any concrete plans. No, she said, I was just going to travel around and see if I can find my roots. So I told her that if she came with me, I could guarantee her the vacation of a lifetime. She said, ok, and we left Binga and walked back to the doctors homestead. When we got there, I introduced her to the mothers, and they took her right under their wing. When Mike and I left, a couple days later, she was fetching water and grinding millet, and talking with the young women who spoke English, and seemingly having a great time. They treated her just like a sister. She would have some good stories when she got back to Detroit.
Mike looked at me one afternoon, and said, “I am ready to head onward.”
“Me too. Shall we leave tonight? Newart said that the bus to Harare comes by the market at 4am. Let’s get on it.”
“Ok,” he said, and we went and packed our stuff up, and went to bed after saying our goodbyes to Newarts family. We headed out to Binga in the moonlight about 2am. I worried about running into an Elephant, or a Leopard in the darkness, but we arrived safe, and the bus came at 4am, and we got on board.
The conductor was a young girl about college age. It was early, and she was sleepy. But she smiled at us as we boarded, and made a joke about please get on my luxurious limousine to Harare. I laughed and she laughed. We rolled on through the darkness. When the sun came up, the bus was about half full. I was bored, Mike was bored, the conductor girl was bored. She kept looking back at me and smiling. I took out a piece of paper, and wrote on it.
“You are the most beautiful girl that I have ever seen. My name is Sam, and you must let me convince you to marry me.”
And I left it unfolded, and tapped the man ahead of me, and handed the letter to him, and indicated I wished him to pass it forward to the conductor. Up the bus it went, and most of the people read it before passing it on. The person in front gave it to her, and she read it. When she looked back the bus, I smiled at her. She smiled back at me, and took her pen, and wrote below my writing, and passed it back toward me. Everybody again read it, and they were sneaking looks at me.
“I feel like a lucky girl. My prince Charming is riding on this very bus! And you are so handsome. I might think about marrying you. What will be your lobola?” (Lobola is the brides dowry.)
“I would pay a million ZImbabwe dollars, if you would consent to be my wife. Plus, 20 cows, and one cow for the Grandmother.”
I had participated in a couple dowry discussions while teaching, back in Swaziland. It was all about the cows.
“My father wants 30 cows for me. I am his oldest and best daughter. But you look like the man of my dreams, so maybe I can convince him to accept 25 cows.” She was laughing when she wrote it.
The love note went up and back the aisle, and the passengers were chuckling at each note as we increased the proclamations of our undying love.
“I will buy you a house as big as the Presidential mansion, and stock the 3 refrigerators with ice cream.”
“But will you love me if I get fat? I could be the size of a hippo.”
“I would love you if you grew to be the size of this bus.”
Everybody was less bored. I was laughing. The conductor came back to where Mike and I were seated. She bent over and whispered, “We are coming to the lunch stop in half an hour. When we stop, go around behind the restaurant, and eat with the driver and I.” So we did, and had a nice meal under a tree in back, and she was animated and intelligent. We exchanged who we really were.
We continued the letter romance after lunch on a new sheet of paper. Talking about how many children we would have, and what kind of cars we would drive. The passengers literally could not wait for the paper to reverse direction, so they could read our declarations. Not a word was spoken. It was all written. Before we knew it, we hove into Harare, where she hugged me, and said that was fun. Mike and I walked out to a hitchhikers hostel that I had been seeing signs for over the last two years of traveling in southern Africa. They were in every city. When in Harare, come to McMurphys hostel. So we went there and checked in.
I had noticed about a week ago, that our visas were expired. They had originally been for 4 weeks, and we had overstayed them while out at the Doctors homestead. The next morning we went to the visa office to extend them. We waited in a long interminable line, and when we got to the counter and presented our expired visas, the guy hit the roof. He started yelling at us about how we could go to jail for overstaying a visa. When we asked for an extension, he gave us 24 hours to get out of the country. Ba dah bum. So the next day we hopped the bus crossing the neck of Mozambique and into Lilongwe, Malawi.
We had stayed at McMurphys hostel two nights. And I came away with a gift from them. But I didn’t notice it until we had been in Malawi for a couple days. That will have to be in chapter 3. Sorry this was so long.
Zimbabwe Rocks 
Be of good heart, and the world will lie at your feet