My weekend of hippies, rocket showers and eco-toilets.

Molweni!!
Hope you are all ok!!
So much has happend since last time I wrote, I think I might forget a lot of it tho!

Had a fun weekend at Bulungula Backpackers, it was such a funny experience! It took 6-7 hours to drive there from Buccaneers, it was well and truly in the middle of no-where!! I thought I was in the middle of no where when I did the Vervet monkey Rehab placement but that was nothing compared to Bulungula!!!! We drove down bumpy dirt tracks for 2 hours and over hills for another hour, every so often we would pass a mud hut and children would come running out to wave at us. It was a bit of a scary ride with sheer drops at either side of the 4x4, (I later found out the man who was driving was 70 and had cateracts!).

Eventually we arrived at a big shack (it was pitch black by this time) there were people all over! Some community children came to help us with our bags which was nice (yep, mine was heavy as normal). In the main shack was the 'reception', 'bar' and 'lounge', it was filled with hippies, backpackers and the local community. (Bulungula is 40% owned by the community).

Next were were shown the toilets and showers, both an experience!!!! The toilets were eco-friendly, so were split into 2 parts, one for wee and one for everything else and each were painted different but all very bright and jazzy! (In one UV lit toilet a hen was laying eggs in a cardboard box).
The showers are called rocket showers because it's made of a pipe with a shower head on one end, parrafin is put in the bottom and lit to heat the water. The lit parrafin then makes a noise like a rocket whilst heating the water - I was a bit scared to have a shower at first and had to get help to light it, but when I did have one it was surprisingly nice except there was a window right in front of me so everyone can see you in the shower and there was only a curtain as a door! (I suppose hippies aren't big on privacy!)

Our room was a mud hut, but it was nice, it was lit but candle light only and painted brightly. We sat in the main lounge in the evening whilst having a strange stew for tea and talking to some local people and hippies!!

On Saturday we (me and Katie) got up and could really see where we were staying was so beautiful! It was a 2 minute walk to the beach and the sun was shining so we decided to go fishing!
A local fisherman turned up (he was so cute!) he spoke very little english and had an un-pronouncable name! He led us on to the beach and cast our lines for us, Katie was lucky and caught a fish immediately, but then we caught noithing for the rest of the time - Boo Hoo! Really enjoyed fishing tho, it was so nice to be on a gorgeous beach with hardly anyone around too!! We gave the fisherman the fish to eat and he seemed to really appreciate it, he said he would feed his family with it. Bulungula really helps the community because usually you would pay the backpackers to do an activity, but at Bulungula you pay the activity leader directly, so the fisher man also went home with money in his pocket.

In the afternoon we decided to go on a village tour, the villages are nothing like villages in England. There are small mud huts spread out over vast areas of land which makes up a village. the tour was really good, we saw shebeen (pub), shop, family home and old lady smoking 'Xhosa' cigarettes (dried up leaves). It was really interesting and I learn't loads about the Xhosa culture.




Sorry guys - I'll have to continue this next time - running out of internet time as normal!

xxxxxxx