Cultural Excursion

Sooo... this past weekend we went on our first 'cultural' excursion, to see some of Botswanas history. We left Saturday morning at around 8 am, and went to the village of Mochudi. This village is very old, and has been able to hang on to a lot of its traditional culture. Here we went to a museum of the history of Mochudi from which we had amazing views of the village itself. We went into the center of the village to get a quick lunch from one of the supermarkets (there wasn't a lot else in the village), and got back onto our bus. We attracted a lot of attention walking around this village though, people were honking and waving.. though I'm not sure everyone was so psyched to have 35 students wandering around.

After Mochudi we went to Matsieng. At this site there is a small pool set into rocks on the ground. At one point the pool is almost nine feet deep. Surrounding the rock are large and small foot prints, wider and more massive than the average footprint. This is where Setswana legend says Matsieng the original human/giant came out of the earth when the rocks were still soft and led the humans and animals with him. He has left footprints at a few other spots in Botswana as well.

After looking at the footprints we continued on to Manyana. At this village we were able to look at rock paintings created over 2000 years ago. My favorite were yellow giraffes that fit in with the color of the rock so beautifully. These were said to have been created when that spot was used for religious rituals. While we were there a 2-year old boy came marching up to our group and continued to follow us for the rest of our time there. He didn't speak english yet, but with our combined efforts we were able to get his name and his age. A short ride down the road we also visited the Livingstone tree. This is where David Livingstone briefly lived, and later ran his medical practice from while he was a missionary in Botswana. The tree is a huge fig tree and its branches completely shelter the space near the trunk from the outside. Perfect shady area in the heat.

For the night we stayed in a cultural village. We were greeted by 4 older women in traditional dress singing, clapping and dancing for us. They were really funny and we had a great time with them. I slept in a hut with 7 other girls on mats, but we did have pillows! The "grandmothers" showed us some more traditional dances and we learned how to do other traditional chores such as grinding maize into flour etc... The dinner was really good, as was our breakfast the next morning. Hopefully (if the internet cooperates) I'll have photos up soon.

The next morning we left early to head to Mokolodi game reserve where we went on our first game drive. It was a great experience, before the drive we all had some champagne (to make us brave enough to go out into the bush) and then we loaded onto the trucks. I snagged a seat in the front row so I could see out as well as in front of the truck and enjoyed the breeze. We were able to see a few of the big five, giraffe, elephant.. and we saw khudos (like deer) and impala, we also saw warthogs, ostrich, countless birds, cheetahs and zebra. We drove for about two hours, and then stopped next to a lake for a catered lunch and some drinks. We walked down to the water in hopes of seeing some hippos or crocodiles but we could only hear the hippos in the distance.. and thankfully no crocodiles turned up.

After spending the day in the sun we finished our weekend at the Lion Park Resort, which is a tiny water/adventure park. It was amazing though after being so hot all the time! We spent almost the entire time in the wave pool, only leaving to use the water slide. We then went back to campus and took a taxe to my new favorite restaurant (Primi) for some amazing spaghetti bolognaise.

All in all I'd say it was a very good weekend... annnd now we're back to classes