hiking in the dark

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So, maybe a little more detail about the project I’m working on. We’re in a village called Mlandazwe which takes about 30 mins to get to on a good day, hours on a bad one; it all depends on the khombis, the private minibuses all the locals use. The last couple of days, there have been very few khombis so its taken hours. We’re making bricks by pressing earth in a contraption consisting of a steel box with a lid and a lever attached. We have to dig the earth out, make it the right consistency, load it into the press, heave on the lever to compress the earth, heave on the lever again to get it out, then put the brick in the sun to dry. With a few people, it’s quite a laugh. With only 2, as was the case today, it’s very hard work. The heat really didn’t help either - 90deg at lunch time. We’re doing 4-7 hours a day with breaks, from 8 or 9 in the morning. The bricks will be used to build a house for a swazi woman who looks after her numerous (I think about 4 or 5) grandchildren and whose current house is falling down. Her situation is typical of grandparents in this country who look after their orphaned grandchildren. There are several men, the woman’s adult relatives, who live within the same compound, but none are willing to help despite being unemployed. This was explained to me as being to do with hierarchy within the group: the woman is getting a new house and the men resent this as they feel they should have the better dwellings within the clan. As in the west, your home is seen as a status symbol. The grandmother still cooks for all the men, though, on top of caring for all the children.
Missed out on the 40th anniversary of independence celebration ceremony on Sunday. The king was there, and I think Mugabe had been invited to attend, but snubbed them over swazilands involvement in talks concerning at power-sharing agreement between zanu-pf and the opposition. I wasn’t up in time as I’d thought everyone was just going to church, and the actual significance of the day wasn’t explained to me until it was too late. So I explored the beautiful garden here at Lidwala (saw 2 types of lizard, butterflies and lots of birds amongst the boulders and flower beds), meditated, cooked, wrote, and recovered from my first week of manual labour. Tried the local internet café to get photos off camera but no joy.
I’ve found out I could have booked directly through All Out Africa rather than through I-to-I and saved several hundred pounds. I would definitely recommend that anyone thinking of coming here does that. I-to-I provide v little benefit, especially in such a stable country.
On the subject of security, something I didn’t realise before getting here is the risk of muggings. No one goes out walking after dark, you have to get a taxi. There have been muggings quite close-by within the last month. There was even a break in at Lidwala a few weeks ago involving guards being tied up by men with machetes. Sefiso woke up with people in his tent and was punched a couple of times. Security has since been beefed up and we lock the doors of our dorm at night.
On Monday a backpacker called Hareish (sorry for spelling!) from singapore arrived at the lodge, planning on staying for a couple of nights. He said he’d like to climb the peak behind the lodge to watch the sunset and seeing as I’d been planning on hiking up there at some point, I thought I’d join him. One of the girls set off with us too, but dropped out after ½ hour. Just as well given what happened later. Found our way to the top ok, watched a beautiful sunset over a stunning mountainous panorama then headed back down. We were ¾ of the way home, making good time as dusk fell. Then it went dark and we were lost. We lost the path we’d been following and had to hack our way through head-high brambles to the closest light we could see. Once or twice, when it seemed there was no way back or forwards, I thought we might have to spend the night up there. We inched forward through the brush, getting shredded over every inch of our legs and arms. We were almost across a ravine to reach the light when we were confronted by a final trial: a thick, dense vine covered in inch long vicious spikes. The relief on reaching the compound the light was coming from was immense, and from there, with a little help from a very kind and slightly amused security guard, we found our way back to the main road and got home. The risk of mugging on the walk back to the lodge paled beside what we had been through. A couple of days later, and the general rash has now gone down, leaving the pink scars all over my arms showing-up in contrast against the white skin.

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