traveling...

After five days and nights in Dongwe, we left for the wild coast of the eastern cape. on the way we stopped at a paper making cooperative in a townshiop near East London. the cooperative produces envelopes, little pads, and that kinds of thing. they make the paper from recycled paper products, bananna tree fiber and and some kind of reed mashed and cooked. it was pretty cool development program although i doubt how successful the "business" really is. it appears to me tho be labor intensive and the product was poor and very inexpensive. they also didn't really have a network to reach markets except for the funding partner, a national ngo. 

We are staying now, at a place called buccaneers. the place is sort of a resort on the backpackers scale and had unbelievable access to the beach and indian ocean and the rough scrubby--at times almost jungly--land that is largely undeveloped around here, hence the name "wild coast." also when we were driving we spotted zebras, antelope, ostriches and impalas. it is pretty cool to see these animals while driving along the highway, not in a park or zoo. the "resort"/backpackers is super plush and an extreme roundabout from Dongwe and the rural village home-stay. sand and sea replace dust. zebras instead of goats, cows, chickens and geese. white european backpackers instead of only-Xhosa speaking farmers and old mamas and throngs of young kids begging for attention. Everywhere in Dongwe and Chabo young boys and girls search for eye contact as we walked on the dusty roads or sat in the church pews. Mostly because we were white and very obviously not from round there, kids gravitated to us. many times we would be playing with several kids, our bhutis and sisis, and in fifteen minutes,15 to 20 neighborhood kids would be around and eager to play cards, sing and dance, play running games, anything really. 

last night ten of us played football on the beach. nate correctly summarized the event saying it was one of those events we'll remember when we're fifty. as the sun went down and we were all ecstatic to have conveyances of flush toilets, showers, etc and we laughed and ran around like little kids. After some relaxing and quite a bit of surfing (i actually got up a bunch of time and had so much, way more than i expected) we left for durban. the drive was long--several hundred km--and hot and a beautiful mix of scenery. from the eastern cape to kwazulu-natal the lands scape changes and the population slowly transition from Xhosas to Zulus. In durban, where we just arrived, we are studying Indian identity and the this unique area because of its enormous indian population.