Zimbabwe: The Midwest of Southern Africa

Picking up where we left off:

Dec 23: took a 14.5 hour overnight train ride from Victoria Falls to Bulawayo, through a national park. Well over 100 people before us in line waiting to purchase tickets. We stopped by earlier and got our tickets reserved, fortunately. Met some cool Zim people.

Dec 24: after a nice rest we got up at 4:45am to get to the bus station (a 40 min walk with our full packs) only to see the same insanity we viewed the day before. Just imagine it as a scene from any Indy Jones movie. Some people had been sleeping outside at the station since Friday in the hopes of getting a ticket! Chose to hike and lucked out - a guy we'd been talking to at the hike point had an "uncle" going through Masvingo (on the doorstep of Great Zimbabwe) and we were able to grab a hike with him.

In Masvingo we grabbed a cab but, to our dismay, all the hostel and hotel rooms in the town were taken due to a church conference. No room in the inn for us... Decided to deal with sleeping later. Great Zimbabwe was ... great! The taxi driver offered us his place to stay the evening and then we met a person from town who told us a place we could stay. Spent Christmas Eve thinking of people back home, watching the full moon rise and putting together some reindeer a friend sent me.

Dec 25: Masvingo to Harare. The owner of the place gave us a ride to the hiking/bus place in town. We got there just in the nick of time to catch the nearly packed bus leave ... to drive around town to pick up more and more people (a rusty dilapidated, black cloud exhaust spewing bus) and somehow we kept packing the people in. After a safe seven hour ride we got to Harare. We'll be leaving for Zambia tomorrow morning (Dec 28th).



I call Zimbabwe the Midwest of Southern Africa because the people here have been Minnesota Nice to us. The work ethic and attitude fits in so well with the midwest. Imagine walking around in a city of one million people, saying "good morning" to everyone you pass and almost everyone responding? That was Bulawayo, second largest city in Zimbabwe. Imagine that in a US city?



One last Minnesota Connection:

Walking around Harare today I walked past a guy wearing a Hooter's t-shirt from the Mall of America in Bloomington, MN