Weekend in Kwa Zulu Natal: Friday and Saturday

The weekend in the Drakensberg Mountains was excellent…apart from the weather! We arrived in the tiny village of Winterton on Friday evening and went for a quick walk…well, there was only one street, really, so it didn’t take long. We saw a woman by the side of the road and her shopping consisted of a bag of meal and… a live chicken, feet tied together with string, looking quite unhappy! We had just settled with a drink on the stoep (porch) of the hotel when the rain started. The rooms were thatched cottages, so we had the soft sound of rainfall on thatch all night, not at all unpleasant.
On Saturday morning, we set off in torrential rain for Ladysmith, home to Ladysmith Black Mambaza. Quite disappointing; the cultural centre, which houses the township musical history, is only open Mon – Fri, 10.00 – 4.00pm. So instead we visited the siege museum which was very good. Then it was on to Rorke’s Drift, scene of a horrific battle in the Zulu war . (Remember “Zulu”?) Well, Michael Caine had it easy, let me tell you! The route was a dirt track, or shall we say a mud track, full of rain filled potholes and it went for miles and miles in the middle of nowhere! Eventually we arrived at Rorke’s Drift. It was very atmospheric. The museum was excellent and we visited both the Zulu and British cemeteries. It looked only a little way on the map but it took three hours! The Garmin lady gave up, at one point she showed us driving through fields (we almost were, actually!) and was busy “recalculating” so we turned her off and relied on the printed map instead! Several more miles of dirt track took us back onto a “proper” road and back to the hotel for an excellent dinner. We came back through Glencoe and Dundee! The piped muzak in the dining room was awful ancient schmalz on a loop, “Lady in Red” and “Its only just begun” over and over again, interspersed with woeful stuff about dead babies and love lorn useless war veterans and cowboys, you know the kind of thing! The clientele was of the white farmer type, mostly Afrikaans speaking. I asked the black waitress if she could put on any local music and she said, “No, Ma’am, they have chased it all away”.