Zimbabwean Dollar

As you might have heard, Zimbabwe is in big trouble. President Robert Mugabe spends outlandish amounts of money on excess while the majority of the citizens are in poverty. The Zimbabwean Dollar has spiraled out of control over the past four years and has become the most inflated currency in the world. Up until a couple of weeks ago, the Bank of Zimbabwe would issue new notes almost weekley and these notes would loose their value in a couple of weeks. The US Dollar was adopted very recently. The final note printed by Zimbabwe was a note of 100 Trillion dollars. I aquired one through my friend Simon whos from Zim. Heres a pic...

SASSU Regatta- Vanderkloof Dam

The weekend after the Klein Karoo, I went with the Rhodes University Rowing team to Vanderkloof Dam in the Free State which is the province in the middle of the country. Its very dry and hot and full of people descended from the original Dutch-Afrikaaners. It was cool to experience South African university level rowing but it was incredibly unorganized and out of control. We raced in a bunch of events which you can do here and did ok. I haven't exercised since December so it was a bit of a shock. The town is a small resort town situated on a giant reservoir. Its empty most of the year as it was when we were there. Because South Africa only has about ten universities with rowing programs, the entire rowing community of the country was there. The last night they throw a giant party that I had been hearing was ridiculous. So everyone gets ready to go out and because this is a holiday resort there is a giant water slide. Kids told me before that every year it gets broken into and put into use. This year the committee who runs the regatta told us it would be open from 8pm-10pm and that was it. Well as everyone heads down towards the slide we see that is has been broken into and there are hundreds of drunken rowers (men and women) running around completely naked. The police show up, two officers get out of the car and observe what is going on and they to strip down and begin to use the water slide...I'm NOT kidding. Later in the evening the party moves down to a pavilion where there is a DJ. Things got out of hand as they always do. Ive had my share of South African rowing for now. Attached are some pics of the damn and our V8 loading the boat in the water.

Klein Karoo- Valley of Desolation/Owl House

Sorry for the long delay in postings. I just got back from our two week easter break and havnt had a chance to post on here. This post is the last bit from our trip to the Klein Karoo a couple of weeks ago. We stopped at a place called the Valley of Desolation, its a valley thats very desolate. Its close to a town called Nieu Bethesda where we stopped to see a strange place called the Owl House. This woman Helen Martins moved back to the very small town to take care of her aging parents. After they died she became more and more separated from society eventually becoming a recluse and commiting suicide in 1976. She left behind a vast amount of sculptures done in concrete in here backyard, many of which were of owls. It was a really creepy place. The other picture is a picture of some rock paintings that were on the farm we stayed on. They have been dated to over 7,000 years old and were painted by the original inhabitants of the Cape, the Koi-San people who have since disapeared because of intermixing of the different people on the Cape.

Rock Painting
Owl House

Owl House

Valley of Desolation!!!!!!!!

Klein Karoo- Canyon Walk Pics

Some Pictures of the canyon...

Klein Karoo-Genora Pt. 1

Two weekends ago the Washington College students went on our third trip with the fearless Ashwin. We traveled about 3 hours into the interior of the country to an area called the Klein Karoo or Little Karoo. Its similar to New Mexico back in the states, a semi-arid desert. This was the land of many Boer settlers in the 19th century and is heavily Afrkaaner. We stayed on a working sheep farm called Genora. The first day Ashwin led us on a canyon walk that was a little more than a walk but it was really cool. We followed a river that carved through the canyon. At one point we heard these loud barking noises echoing through the canyon and we look up on the cliffs and ten or so baboons were barking at us and running along the cliffs. The river was high and we had to wade through it at most parts. After 4 hours we emerged dusty and tired and we headed for the small town of Nieu-Bethesda and stopped at a small brewery for lunch. We had some great dried Kudu sausage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudu) with local cheeses and bread and of course the home made beer.

The Farm

Amakhala Game Reserve

So I went on Safari this past weeked...it was awesome. We stayed at Amakhala which was about 45 minutes from campus. Our visit included a afternoon game drive, a morning river cruise and a morning game drive. We stayed at Leeuwenbosch Lodge which used to be a farm and was straight out of "Out of Africa". We saw all kinds of animals including giraffe, zebra, antelope, impala, springbok, elephant, white rhino, black rhino (one of only three thousand in the world), cheetah, ostrich, gazelle and others. The whole experience was unreal. We had a guide named Heinrik who took us around the whole weekend in this giant Land Rover. Everyone had a great time, some pictures will be up now. Ill add more in the future. One of the girls in my group, Valerie, has a photo site up and here is the link with more photos from the weekend... http://www.flickr.com/photos/herebelions/ ... CYAA

(l to r) Valerie, Nouria, Josh, our guide Heinrik, Katie, me, Alice

Elephant

The valley

herd of Giraffe

Port Alfred

Yo Yo Yo... over the weekend we all rented a car and drove to Port Alfred for a night. It was my first experience driving on the left-hand side of the road. It was also the longest time that I had driven a manual car...only stalled 3 times the whole weekend. Anyways, we drove there, met up with a friend of a friend at this culinary school in Port Alfred. Beach was nice, the town was pretty deserted as its no longer high season. We didnt have a place to stay so we looked around town for a hotel with vacancy and found the shadiest/scariest hotel ever...the Ferryman's Inn. The place was 100 years old and pretty run down...it made for an interesting night of night terrors. We hit up a bar called the "Snorting Grunter"...enough said about that. On our drive home we stopped to visit the giant Pineapple. More to come soon.

The Giant Pineapple


The haunted hotel




Our sweet ride