We left the park by 8am and followed the sat nav route to avoid the centre of Bulawayo not realising that it was set to avoid toll roads so ended up on a back road past a horse riding centre and eventually had to take a dirt track to get ourselves back onto the main road. The road to Masvingo was always going to be long but our next mistake resulted in a 20km detour as we completely missed a turn and had to retrace our steps - luckily we realised when we did! We finally managed to clear the vehicle of the ever increasing bags of rubbish in a little town on route - the premise of the National Parks that you should take your rubbish home is fine when you live in Zimbabwe but slightly more problematic when you don't but hopefully the bin we used would have a proper rubbish collection and it wouldn't just be left to fester. We passed through two toll booths on route but this time it was easy as we had managed to get Zim$27 as change at the supermarket but we were now down to Zim$7 so the next toll would be more problematic.
Arrived at Great Zimbabwe at 2.30pm as all the schools were heading home. Zimbabweans schools have been massively impressive - all children appear to be going to school from early primary age through to older secondary pupils which is certainly not the case in some of the other countries we have visited. Great Zimbabwe was as impressive as we had imagined with its huge walls in the main enclosure and amazing use of the natural rocks in the hill fort. The walk up to the hill fort through a narrow gap in the rock was particularly memorable. The height of the doors did however catch me out as I cracked my head and saw stars at the entrance to the hill fort and had a headache for the next hour. We felt obliged to have a quick look into the museum but was pleasantly surprised as it was really interesting and we got the see the ancient bird sculptures which we would have completely missed otherwise.
Left at 4ish and did the short drive to Norma Jeans. At reception we asked if they had any other campers and when he said yes, we jokingly asked if they were Spanish. Highly amused to find they were so we were reunited with the Basque couple from the previous two nights. They greeted us like long lost friends and it then transpired that they hadn't been able to go to Great Zim as they only had credit cards which of course are not accepted. Hard to believe that anyone would embark on such a trip without understanding the financial situation of the country they are visiting but in the end we decided the right thing to do would be to offer to lend them US$100 so they had a better chance of getting fuel and could visit Great Zim having travelled all that way.
After setting up camp and watching the sunset we decided to take advantage of the restaurant. Drinks on the veranda were lovely as the garden is beautiful. The atmosphere in the restaurant was very old fashioned though and the quantity of food completely floored me (4 courses - quiche, chicken soup, chicken or beef main (essentially a whole chicken!), apple crumble) and Ian had to act as a human vacuum.
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