Eric’s Blog

Gasa Tribe and Jelly Fish

Feeling settled in at Durban now.  I’ve gotten to know all the other medical students well, and we’ve managed to get into a fair amount of trouble by now. 

First weekend update:

Friday: Billy the Bum - Pictures pending.  Fun local bar for Durbanites featuring several bums on the wall.  Finished out the evening at Origin - a techno happy dance club.  I was cool enough to wear shorts and tennis shoes, as I thought might be appropriate in South Africa when it’s 90 degrees and 95% humidity.  The only reason I made it in was because I was with a possy of beautiful female medical students who they didn’t want to leave.  And I pulled the foreigner excuse. 

Saturday: uShaka beach on the southern end of the Golden Mile.  Jelly fish were everywhere!  They come around a couple weeks per year and they were in full force much to my legs’ dismay.  Beautiful beach and a sunburn to match.  Sea World uShaka was great too.

Sunday: a trip out to the Valley of a 1000 Hills and pheZulu.  The Valley of a 1000 Hills is fairly self-descriptive.  1000’s of flat-topped African hills that had been eroded as the seas slowly receded leaving tropical large game inhabited Savanna behind.  At the top of one of the hills (pheZulu means ‘on top’ in Zulu), was a Zulu tribe that has started offering public access to their huts.  The tribe, called Gasa tribe(’blood tribe’) had about 10-15 reed huts which housed their sleeping quarters, kitchens, performance/ritual halls, storage, etc.  They showed us how they prepared their food, beer, socialized, celebrated weddings(a festive occurrence amongst the polygamous peoples), consulted their fortune tellers prior to weddings, their clothing, and how they slept on wooden pillows.  They performed tribal dances for us as well.  I got a picture with a girl training to be a fortune teller; simply amazing.  Then we took a safari through an adjacent game park and saw giraffe, zebra, impala, wildebeast, crocodile, and snakes.  Our tour guide was a veterinarian-in-training so he had plenty of interesting factoids to share about the animals. 

Already getting excited for Cape Town next weekend!