So our agenda today consisted of a visit to Piggs Peak and a journey to Bulembu where Jenny lived just after she was born. So we took turns showering and using the Internet before heading down the road. Reception snagged us on our way out and informed us that they only had us booked in through today. Jenny was sure she had told them the right date but they brought up our email, and sure enough we had mistaken the days we would be staying. The lodge staff were less than understanding and after a few minutes of tense discussion they told us we could stay in our room for the next night.
We set the sat nav for Piggs Peak and once again chose the route with unpaved roads because we thought it would be fun. But once we got past Mbabane the roads turned fairly rough and we realised that we would likely be home a little bit later than we thought. So far on this trip Jenny has told me never to stop and pick up any hitch hikers under any circumstances, although I had to draw the line about 15 km down the first dirt road. There we encountered two ten year old kids carrying a U.N. food ration bag of rice and a live chicken; they were clearly not trying to hijack us haha. So I pulled over and we loaded the kids and their goods into the car and resumed our trip. We had only made it about 1km down the road when we saw a woman with a baby trying to get a lift. Figuring we might as well we stopped and helped her into the car. She spoke very little English and when Jenny opened the boot to load the woman's bag in the woman tried to climb in! We showed her that we intended to let her sit in one of the seats in the back haha. We gave all of our passengers droerwors and continued towards Piggs Peak.
We dropped off the kids and their chicken a few km down the road. We the encountered a stretch of road that was downhill quite steeply for 10km. Near the bottom of this decline we spotted a man and an old woman trying to get lifts so we stopped and picked them up as well. When I got out of the car to help them in I noticed that our brakes were overheating slightly. We decided to carry on driving because we were done with the decent and about to start another ascent, as such we would not be using the brakes for the next 10 km or so. Turns out that the old woman only wanted a lift about 2km down the road and when we dropped her off she was thanking us profusely with two full hands of biltong! We the proceeded into Piggs Peak where we dropped off the other occupants of our car and proceeded down the road to Bulembu.
Once again our trip to Bulembu was down a dirt road. We had encountered terrible unpaved roads before and thought this should be no worse. Regrettably we were wrong. Lesley had even warned us about this road before we set off on our trip today saying that it sometimes takes hours to navigate, she was right. The road was 17 km and due to the recent rain was sooooo bad in places that we had to get out of the car and pile rocks and logs into channels cut by rain in order to proceed. The road took us the better part of an hour to travel and when we finally arrived in Bulembu we were both in for a surprise.
Jenny's family lived here in 1989-1990 and Jenny was anxious to see the town, however we found a very different town than we expected. The town had been home to a booming asbestos mine since the early 20th century, but the mine shut down in 2001 and the town slowly died afterwards. Bulembu today seems like a town that shouldn't be there. The people have very little to do because it's existence was entirely dependent on the mine. The population of the town went from 10,000 in 2001 to around 50 in 2002! In recent years the population has recovered to around 2,000 and the town is desperately trying to reinvent and rebuild itself after its catastrophic collapse. In short it simply is not the same town today as it was in 1989.
We were curious about the particulars of the towns development and so we stopped by the old processing plant for the mine which has been converted into a museum. The museum (which cost R20 each) was one of the best I have been to in recent memory and gave us an amazing insight not only into the history of the town but also the history of Swazi interactions with colonising nations. We spent about an hour and a half wandering around reading the signs and admiring the vast array of artefacts from the mines days of former glory. Jenny rode in one of the inspection cars for 100 metres or so and we even found a Jenny-dubbed "death box" that was used to transport bodies along the cable way from the mine to the processing plant should someone die in the mine.
Once we had our fill of the museum we drove up the hill to the Bulembu Lodge for lunch. The lodge was even more quiet and unassuming than the town but had a lovely garden attached to it where you could sit in the sun and listen to the birds. It was for that reason that we were not terribly disappointed when we were told that our food (pizzas) may take half an hour to prepare and serve, as they were still in the process of cleaning the oven. Jenny and I used the time sitting in the garden chatting, writing posts, and enjoying the peaceful atmosphere. When our food came it was nothing short of amazing. Jenny had a BBQ chicken pizza and I had a tropical pizza with bacon, banana and pineapple. The pizzas were quite large so we took nearly a whole one away with us for breakfast the next day.
We were both getting very tired at this point and made the decision to drive back to our lodge. On our way out of town we spotted a very well dressed man hitch hiking along the devilish dirt road I mentioned and stopped to pick him up. Turns out he is a school teacher in Bulembu and needed a lift to Piggs Peak so he could pick up his car from the mechanics. Good thing we stopped to give him a lift because he told us that the public transport to and from Piggs Peak was not running due to the condition of the roads. We dropped him off at friends house who would help him from then on and proceeded to a casino located about 10km outside Piggs Peak. We thought we would try our luck at roulette again and were surprised to find a computerised roulette table when we entered the casino.
The table looked exactly like a normal table except to place a bet you placed your finger on a small electronic pad in front of you and with the other hand you touched the sections of the board you wished to bet. The system worked on electrical circuits which allowed multiple people to play at the same time on the same computerised table display while not mixing their bets. Quite amazing actually. We put down R200 and spent the next hour paying more attention to the amazing table than our winnings. This time we weren't so lucky and left minus our R200. We were exceedingly tired by now, so we drove straight back to our lodge and spent a good deal of time on the Internet sending relevant communications before heading to bed, ready to wake up very early for our departure.
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