DURBAN AND BALLITO BAY, SOUTH AFRICA--March 14 and 15, 2014

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Durban, Friday, March 14^th

At 8:30 we walked up to the campground’s reception area and caught the tour bus for an all day tour of the City of Durban. The tour guide gave us some information about what we would see and do as we made our way back onto the toll-way in the reverse direction and on the same roads we had traveled the day before.

She filled us in a bit about the City. It is a rapidly growing urban area and is the busiest port in Africa and is currently ongoing expansion. Sugar refining is Durban's main industry. Sheep, cattle, dairy, citrus fruits, corn, sorghum, cotton, bananas, and pineapples are also raised. Vehicle assembly, tanneries, and oil refineries are also found here.

Before driving as far north as Pietermaritzburg, the bus turned to the right and climbed into the hills that were once all owned by the Zulu people. I am not clear as to ownership of the area now. Government?? Reservation type?? Trust or what?? Anyway, we pulled into a Zulu village and sat ourselves down on hard, concrete seats with no back, in a semi-circle, for a dance program. The seating on the hillside was such that you had a great view toward the east, into the valley below that we understood was all filled with homes of the Zulu people.

Unfortunately, at this time of day, that meant that you were also looking directly into the sun and the dancers were only back-lit by a sunny sky. Not good at all for photo taking, but Valerie tried.

After the dance program was over, the Zulu guide showed us into the round huts of the village. There he explained the function of the various huts. In the community hut, women were seated on the right facing the opening and men seated on the left, to protect the women on the right. There were women’s huts and cooking huts etc.

This arrangement rang similar to the description given by the Athabascan guide at their cultural village outside Anchorage Alaska. Valerie and I discussed some of similarities and differences in construction of these Zulu huts vs the others we have toured inside, like the Navajo hogans. For instance, both the Athabascan and Navajo cut smoke holes in the center of the roofs of their huts. The Zulu seemed to use the smoke to ward off insects. We opted out of the tour of the reptile and crocodile pens.

After this tour, we boarded the bus and were driven down into the city of Durban to the city market. There everyone got off and walked among all the craft and spice stalls. I enjoyed looking at the array of different sacks of spices and thinking that we would never use that much spice or that many kinds of spices (even if we knew what they were used for/in) in our lifetime. Valerie took the opportunity to walk over to the meat market and took pictures of some of the churches and other buildings in the area.

For lunch, we drove down to the wharf area that is being cleaned up and upgraded and now has restaurants and other attractions around it. We had an excellent lunch at The Cargo Hold at uShaka Marine World. This restaurant is in an old ship hull that had one whole wall as a salt water aquarium with several sharks swimming around.

Piled back on bus to tour the Phansi Museum that opened in 2000 and is housed in Robert’s House, a former Victorian home of an Anthropology professor. This former private collection of artifacts of the Zulu culture and other tribes as well is fabulous. The museum guide is quite a character and she made the tour extremely enjoyable. Costumes were hung on life-size “puppets-like forms” so that the guide could turn them around to show all sides of the outfit as she talked about it.

Outstanding examples of bead work on everything, water jugs, huge beer pottery bowls, wooden pipes, etc. are all displayed. Unfortunately, almost none of the articles were labelled, the group was too large at one time for the small rooms, especially, in the basement, and we didn’t have enough time to really look and enjoy the artifacts.

Waited for the bus to pick us up and then headed back to the suburbs of Durban at Ballito Bay (built mainly after the fall of apartheid by white flight from the City) and the campground.



Ballito Bay, Saturday, March 15^th. Sunny and hot.

Spent the day relaxing until it was time for dinner. We then walked over to the nearby Mozambique Restaurant and had a very nice dinner with the group. Wanted another piece of strudel but the bakery was closed bythe time we finished dinner. Sigh! No dessert!

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