July 9: We’re adventurers

There’s a rat in the office. He ran in on Friday and hasn’t been seen since, but there are bite marks all along the bottom of the door where he tried to get out. This office is only about 3m x 7m and it’s stacked to the ceiling with binders and boxes – the perfect place for something to hide or nest. If the rat is dead, it will start smelling very soon (gets really hot in here) and if he’s alive, I really hope he’s not in the boxes that are piled under the desk at which I’m sitting and doesn’t find my yogurt and cereal in the fridge. If we hear screaming, we’ll know one of the ladies found him.

We packed quite a bit into this weekend, since we'll have to move out of Acacia this upcoming weekend (more later...).

On Saturday morning my roommate and I went down the road to the markets, the same place we had so much trouble a couple weekends ago. This time I brought pepper spray and a knife, but we had no problems at all besides a couple teenage boys wearing pink jackets checking us out and saying "my sisters" very suggestively. We probably walked three or four miles in total, all the way to the edge of the market, back through a mall, past the mini-bus storage lot that smelled like urine, and then to a couple grocery stores before walking back to Acacia.

I would have liked to spend more time in the markets, but we were expected at a braai in honour of our advisor’s husband’s birthday around 2. She was late coming to get us so I took a nap and woke up just before a very old drunk man walked into the cabin. He’s been talking to my roommate on the porch until she decided he needed to go and went to another cabin, hoping he’d leave. He didn’t. Instead he thought she went into our cabin, even though he saw her walk somewhere else, and came in too, but was very apologetic when he saw that I was the only one there. I’d been awake long enough to hear him tell her he was friends with all the Indians in South Africa, that he wanted to convert to Islam, and that he thought her very beautiful but he already had a woman of his own.  The groundskeeper and the gate guard both ran over to make him leave and explained that he’s been a frequent guest there for a long time and that he’s a “drunken master” but harmless.

The braai wasn’t extraordinarily exciting. It was mostly men who were eating up huge piles of meat as soon as they were cooked. My advisor invited some women to sit inside away from the fires with us and we watched “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” while eating vegetarian braai-flavoured sausages. After everyone’d left, my advisor’s 10 year old son sang to us a few times (a precocious performer and scientist) and we watched a documentary on the Virungas and the wildlife around them and then something on Scottish Folds.

On Sunday three of us decided to go exploring, since everyone else wanted to chill around the park. We drove to a scenic road that was supposed to have a lot of attractions on it. The first place we found was a museum and a set of ruins around Dzata, supposedly the old seat of the Venda royalty. The place gets few visitors, so everything had to be unlocked by a guard as we went through. It was hard to follow a lot of the history because the names of the people involved are long and Venda and I’m not quite able to read them or remember them yet. I did gather that the Venda people originated in Zimbabwe and made it down here to settle in the valley in Dzata as a number of different clans after a turbulent past. Thohoyandou was a great warrior and king who united all of the clans into on nation before disappearing. Apparently, some Dutch missionaries came to the area in the early 1900s and developed the written Tshivenda that exists today. They also started the first churches, which were the first schools in the early 20^th century. It’s astounding how far Christianity and the Western cultures have permeated the area in a little less than 100 years.

We viewed the ruins, which were only some very well-made rock walls. The rocks had been carried on people’s heads from Zimbabwe because the king at the time deemed all the local rocks unsuitable.

After this we found a sign pointing us off the main road towards Lake Fundudzi, which is the only natural lake in South Africa and is held sacred to many people here. It is, according to legend, the home of the spirits of past royalty. We’d heard from a number of people and the guide book that we weren’t allowed there, but we’d also heard from people, including the guard at Dzata, that we could go there, so we decided to try it. There was also supposed to be a sacred forest in the area that we would visit if the lake were off limits. 

We followed signs to a dirt road and chose a random fork on it in the absence of any other direction. We abused our car down some very steep, rocky roads and stopped to ask someone if we were going the right direction, which was good because the road split right after that. After a while on very poor roads, we ran across a bakkie (this is the correct spelling of the word for pickup truck) full of wood and people who told us we were almost there. Then the road ended in a pond.

We decided to leave our car on one side of the pond and try to get across on foot. It took maybe 15 minutes of wandering through brush in random directions to find a way over and then we followed a little road to its end in a huge field of shoulder-high grass. We kept saying that it was the craziest thing we’d ever done – just go wandering in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country, hoping we’d find the lake and make it back to our car before sundown. I’ve noticed that my sense of direction has been a lot more reliable since we got here and I had a mental picture of where we were in relation to our car and the closest houses the entire time, which made me feel comfortable enough to just walk.

We could see the lake, but couldn’t find a way to get there through the grass and I was scared of stepping on a snake since there are quite a few poisonous species around here. Just as we were turning back to try to make it off the dirt roads by dark, a bakkie pulled up. We were apprehensive at meeting people and were glad that two of us had knives and I’d put some rocks in my pocket just in case we ran across some crazies (the lake had been a place of virgin sacrifice until the early 1990s).

It turned out to be a man and three children. And then we really did the craziest thing any of us had ever done. The man told us to follow him, saying they were adventurers and would find the lake and he started marching away. So we followed him. We had to run to keep up with the guy. He would periodically point at something and say something in Venda while the children made noises of awe and understanding. It seemed like he was a learned man taking some children out on a field trip.

After 10 minutes of jogging after the man, we made it to the lake. It was surrounded by high, foggy mountains (though it smelled like cows and fish) and was very clear and beautiful, stretching far past what we could see. Some young men were fishing for little fish using their hands and one fishing line. We asked them what the man was doing, since he’d continued marching to a far bank of the lake, and they said “research.”

Everything meshed so perfectly and I can understand why people consider it a spiritual place. I've also heard tell of an unknown force that will destroy any structure that people try to build nearby.

We had to turn back rather soon since the sun was going down. Instead of venturing out into the brush to find a place to cross the river again, we hopped some unstable stones in a very nasty dam to get back to our car. I felt like a real adventurer.

We had some trouble getting up the first hill and then we ran into a herd of cows that didn’t want to move, but aside from a dog biting our tires and a drunk man running after us to try to get a ride, we made it back to the tar road without problem. The man with the children made good time getting up there too and we followed him halfway back to Thohoyandou.

It was a very exciting afternoon, for sure. I don't condone random wandering and people following, but it worked out well for us and now we have another "experience of a lifetime" to add to the list.