Hiking and Starry nights

There is not much to do while in Manyana so today when our field trip to the rock paintings fell apart in typical “Botswana Time” fashion, my classmates and I decide that we would do a little exploring of our own. In the distance we spotted a nice pyramid rock formations and planed that we would head over and try to reach the peak by 4 ish and if we couldn’t we should head back to town because we all have been warned about going out at night. This hike lead us through what would have been “lands” but were now full of tonki, kgomo and podi shit and carcasses and a few live ones every now and then. We when reached the top, which I did more successfully than when climbing Kgale Hill. At the peak you could out over the whole village and we all took a moment to take in that we are in Africa, although it still hasn’t seemed to hit us. The setting of Manyana is very much similar to the flat desert of Arizona or Utah part of me wishes that I had traveled to a more jungle rich area but I know that when winter lifts it will become even more beautiful. While on top of the Legoka rock which we took the liberty of naming we agreed that we would meet up later to check out the stars since its warming up and beautiful at night. Upon return to our home we got very strange looks when we said we went hiking. Although there is great exploring to do all around the people of Manyana rather spend their free time watching South African soaps or drinking both which I will discuss in a different post. If the idea of hiking, which there is no word for in Setswana, seemed crazy to our families’ the request to go stargazing was mind blowing. Many of our parents out right said that no it was not safe to be out and others didn’t understand why we would want to do such a thing. Three of us made it out and we shocked by how lively the village of Manyana is at night both local bars were very busy and there were many people on the streets. Sitting under the stars allowed for us to talk about how we are noticing more each day that Manyana is a place that is on a very different time and value schedule than what we are used to, but before we could dive too deep into the conversions we all had parents calling asking when we were returning home since it was already ten!