July 24

Sunday here in a very Christian nation so not much is open. I used the day to wander the streets and read the local press. Surprisingly Zimbabwe has one of the most vibrant presses in the world if my eyes don't deceive me. I'm especially impressed with the Zimbabwe Independent, a mouthpiece of the opposition but also one of the best newspapers I've ever encountered. Zimbabwean politics is fascinating. Mugabe has been president since 1980, another guy who stayed too long. (Insert praise for the redoubtable Nelson Mandela, who just passed his 93rd birthday). In 2000 Mugabe, for understandable reasons, decided to seize all the major farms from their white owners (who got the land under the apartheid-like regimes of the previous century). He abandoned a previous system of buying the land that was funded by Great Britain. The pace was, apparently, glacial. The result of the seizures, however, was chaotic, and self-aggrandizing for those close to Mugabe. They got rich, the country went down the tubes, now listed as the second poorest on the planet. Civil war ensued. It was mostly black against black with tribal loyalties involved. In 2008 a sort of truce was put in place that gave some power to the opposition. That compromise is still in place though this week's newspapers say that Mugabe has rigged up an alternate financing system using money from mining to skirt the regular government finance system.
Bulawayo is a hotbed of opposition and the local press is full of anti-Mugabe rhetoric. All you see on the streets is the end result, an impoverished population hanging on by a thread. Hyper inflation killed most people's savings in the 2000's. The country abandoned their devalued currency and replaced it with US dollars and South African rand. A big issue locally is the scarcity of US coins. This forces businesses to substitute barter for small amounts. Groceries routinely give candy as 'change', which gives opponents a ready source of outrage. About every third business in Bulawayo sells 'air time' for cell phones. Another big chunk sells cell phones and accessories. There are few restaurants in town and nothing that could be called an upscale hotel. Trash pickups are rare, I gather, and residents simply push it into alleys or available out of the way spots. The telltale smell of raw sewage hit me randomly as I walked the streets.
But what really stands out for me is the friendliness of everyone I've met. Waiters, minivan drivers, newspaper vendors, they all give me a big smile and go out of their way to help me. The guy who drove our bus from Vic Falls chased me down the street for two blocks to try to steer me to a good place to stay.
One of the places where European influence really shows itself here is in sports. The papers are full of news from the Premier League in England, and local athletes excel at rugby and cricket.

Yesterday, through the fog of fatigue, I forgot to relate the excitement of our drive from Vic Falls. The land from Vic Falls to Bulawayo is virtually uninhabited. All I ever saw were a few gatherings of thatched roof huts, mostly fewer than five in a cluster. And the roads were almost devoid of personal automobiles. Traffic was mostly buses and semi's hauling freight. It was not a stretch of highway to liven the heart of a hitchhiker.
So when, about 100k. out of Vic Falls, I heard the telltale noise of a muffler dragging under our minibus (a large one, holding about 30 passengers) my heart stopped. The van came to a slow stop in the middle of nowhere. When the driver turned off the engine I began calculating my chances of survival. Thirty people abandoned on the highway. Who would get the few rides available? Certainly not me. The next settlement was probably forty or fifty miles ahead, and even those places probably didn't have hotels or places for me to sleep. And what of the growling teams of baboons I'd seen crossing the road ten minutes ago? Sleeping beside the road was not an option.
There's no drama, here, of course, because I made it to Bulawayo. The driver snarled, then pulled out a rope. In a few minutes he was thrusting his coat on the ground under the chassis. Somehow he managed to tie up the muffler well enough to get us 300k. further down the road.

I plan to stay here a day or two more before heading out to the Great Zimbabwe.