The Great Zimbabwe

Before departing from Bulawayo, we visited the Natural History Museum which was open again and got a very thorough history of Zimbabwe as well as the native wildlife. Although very informative, it was sad to see the state of the museum which was generally run down. As with most things in Zim, you could tell that there had been better days. We then drove on to Masvingo and the Great Zimbabwe. The Great Zimbabwe ruins are the remains of an ancient Southern African city whose name means “the great or big house built of stone boulders”. Zimbabwe derived it’s name as a country after independence as well as adopted it’s national bird, the fish eagle, from the Great Zimbabwe. Today was also a day where we began to see more clearly the impacts of the economic crisis in Zimbabwe. As we passed through different towns, we went into grocery stores where entire shelves were empty and saw long queues to get into banks. It was not uncommon to see women walking along the side of the road with large bags of mealie meal balanced on their heads with “US Aid” written across the bags, a sign of foreign aid which is common but not consistently distributed to the people in rural areas. But alas, a blog entry is too short to really fully explain the challenges in Zimbabwe. We stayed outside the Great Zimbabwe for an evening in a traditional rondoval at what used to be a very nice resort. Unfortunately, a lack of tourists had resulted in a lack of upkeep, although we learned early to have little to no expectations while traveling. In the middle of watching an Africa Cup game, the power went out, so we enjoyed the rest of the evening playing cards by candle light. We learned a new game from Archie and Blessing called crazy fours, which may be good for Scott as he is losing terribly at our on-going game of gin rummy! We play in each country and have a winner...so far Scott has only tied with Christine in Botswana and she has swept every other country on the continent! See more photos.