Phase 1 – Joburg and the Grandparents
Living close to what I like to think is the heart of South African Australia meant that I had plenty of South African friends reply to my request for someone to fooding and lodging me in Johannesburg for a night.
Phase 1 – Joburg and the Grandparents
Living close to what I like to think is the heart of South African Australia meant that I had plenty of South African friends reply to my request for someone to fooding and lodging me in Johannesburg for a night.

For the first time in my life I was able to (legitimately) walk up to someone holding a piece of paper with a name on it at arrivals at an airport and be driven off to my luxury bed and breakfast accommodation.

My friend's grandparents were kind enough to pick me up from the airport, give me a hot shower and a nice cosy bed for my short stop here. It seemed like Granny slaved away all day in the kitchen to feed me full bacon and eggs breakfasts and a dose of some traditional SA foods including boerewors, sadza, melba pudding (I think that is what it was called), and a very salty beef steak. Opa and I had a few good chuckles and I especially enjoyed when he came into my room in the morning: “You know what you're sleeping next to here?” he asked as he opened the cupboard door to reveal a tall lock-up safe. “This whole thing's full of guns” he says with a glint in his eye. Like a little boy I eagerly ask to see them and am very excited when he pulls out an unsuspecting looking walking stick... which comes apart to reveal a long dagger inside.

Phase 2 – “14 hour” bus ride to Harare takes 22 hours including 4.5 hours to get through the Beitbridge border crossing

but I jump ship 180km south of Harare where I meet Dion and his family who offer me a lift which is more comfortable than the bus.

Phase 3 – Harare.

12 nights in Harare makes it the place I have stayed the longest during my whole trip. Here I stay with friends Richie and Steve and their relatives. We live in a lively house with 5 children between 4-13 years old and plenty of other cousins coming and going. I enjoy being a part of the family, picking kids up from school, dropping them off at ballet, listening to the little ones do their reading for school, etc.

After being on the road for 5 months it's refreshing to be a part of a family and to love and be loved and to just wake up in the morning and read in the sunshine on the porch rather than packing up my bag and jumping on a bus or a bike every day! Or maybe to take a few pot shots at a coke can

or a Richie at the family's farm.

I find it hard to describe Zimbabwe and Harare, especially since my time here is spent with a family rather than out on the streets meeting locals as I usually do. With the reign of Bob Mugabe, the hyper-inflation of the mid-late 2000's, and the forced removal of whites from their farms in recent times, it seems that the world's view of Zimbabwe is as a country of violence, racial segregation and dire food shortages.

On my first day driving through Harare two motorbikes race into the middle of an intersection, the riders dismount and force back any vehicles that are blocking the way, a minute later a convoy of vehicles carrying the man himself pass through. There's one way to avoid traffic jams.

Towards the end of my time in Harare I open a briefcase filled with wads of cash and carefully select half a dozen notes, totaling a few hundred million Zimbabwe dollars, to take as souvenirs. Now that the country has moved to US dollars as their legal currency touts pedal the old notes to tourists for US$5 each, significantly more than they were worth when they were taken out of circulation (2008ish?).

I'm enthralled by how a country could get to the point where they were printing 100 trillion dollar notes and these were devaluing so quickly that people were paying for goods with sacks of notes! I spend a bit of time listening to stories; of how wives were told to spend every dollar as soon as it was earned, before the cash became worthless; of truckloads of fuel being brought in from Sth Africa, paid for with a ute-load of cash which was quickly used to buy gold from small time prospectors (who had no choice but to sell for Zim dollars), and in turn the gold could purchase another load of fuel from South Africa; of queuing for 5 hours for petrol but only being allowed to take 10 or 20 litres; of how supermarkets were forced to stay open and keep staff on though they only had a few lines of stock to spread out across their shelves; and of people bringing basic supplies from South Africa and selling them out of their houses on the “black market” as US dollars were not legal currency.

Without these conversations it might be hard to know that the problems ever existed as life in the capital appears to have returned to some semblance of 'normal'.

Phase 3 – Gonerizhou and Mana Pools National Parks
My first day in Gonerizhou is spent at a beautiful private prospecting camp where we appear to be the only people on the planet.

Here the wildlife don't see too many humans and appear to be quite skitty, so my first encounter with elephants in the wild has Dion flooring the car to get us away from a heard that put on a healthy mock chase. I wonder what it would have been like if I'd have come by motorbike – would I have been allowed into the park, would I have been thrown into the sky by a raging bull elephant?

The top of the Chilojo cliffs offers a beautiful panorama of the park.

At Mana Pools the elephants seemed almost tame to me, especially one friendly bull who looked like he would just walk straight up to us, have a sniff, remember that he's not a carnivore, and keep on moving.

Our time here was with Richie's godfather, the Doc, who ran a clinic for the 40 or so families that work in the park and the boys and I cleaned up and painted the run down clinic. Through this we met the warden who, incidentally, goes by the name of Marvelous, and he was good enough to let us know when a lion had been spotted nearby so that we could go and have a look at the old sheila.

This was lucky, because our attempts at tracking led us nowhere, despite the spoor being fresh

And our game drive got us a bit stuck

but KJ was happy to get in it up to his knees

The Zambian hills across the Zambezi river give a tranquil backdrop for a sundowner.

Though prices have apparently gone up since the US dollar came in, at least you can still pick up some things at a bargain price.

So I'm sad to say that the motorbike part of my journey is over and it's back to planes, trains and buses for me, or the back of trucks