Day 99: Fishing at Dawn — Visiting a Local Village
Morning came fast: We had a 5:45 am wake up knock because Willa and James wanted to go fishing. By 6:20 am we were out on the water as the sun was coming up.
There was coffee for the grownups and fishing rods for the kids. Moses didn’t seem to think we’d catch anything but that didn’t stop our two from trying.
We were trying for a tiger fish again — that carnivorous terrifying creature James caught in Lake Kariba — and we used lures and a casting/trawling technique.
Teddy took James’s rod when James lost interest and almost snagged a Tiger — but it got away. By 7:45 am we called it a day and headed back for breakfast at the lodge.
Willa really loves fishing for some reason.
At 9:30 am we got back in a boat for a different kind of excursion. We went about 5 km downstream to visit a local village. Local resident and grandmother Edith greeted us at the shore and gave us a tour of her garden, her farm land, her house and showed us other communal spaces.
Because of the village’s proximity to the river it has strong irrigation and supplies most of the Royal Chundu’s meat and veggies. Edith was growing sweet potatoes, carrots, spinach, and more.
It’s Palm Sunday, and she was in a nice long dress because she’d been at her Roman Catholic church earlier that morning.
Her house was surrounded by a bamboo fence and included a separate kitchen building and a small house where one of her sons lives. It was immaculate.
Her house had an adorable chalk drawing of a helicopter on the side, put there by one of her grandsons, who we noticed was busy drawing lots of stuff in the sand on the ground.
Three of the grandsons followed us the whole tour, and we weren’t surprised that by the end of the tour they were playing pickup soccer with James. The game went on and on. James had an absolute blast.
When we were leaving, we noticed a funny-looking bird among the pecking chickens. Edith told us it was a baby guinea fowl. She said occasionally she finds abandoned guinea fowl eggs in the grass and puts them in the chicken coop. When they hatch they get raised by the chickens. For some reason this was very amusing to us.
The rest of the afternoon was very relaxing because we had the entire lodge to ourselves. The manager Hessah’s 8-year-old son King David was back again today and played with the kids for a few hours:
– Collecting purple water pears and throwing them into the Zambezi
– Collecting crickets, water bugs and other bugs out of the pool
– Swinging on the hammock
– Playing the “animal guessing game”
We also had a video chat with Izzy back home which mostly consisted of making funny faces at each other.
Our sunset river cruise was beautiful. It was just us and King David. The kids watched for birds and hippos and drank Sprite.
Dinner was delicious once again. We will really miss this place. Perhaps a top three!
