Leopard Rock

Last weekend, we drove a few hours east to the city of Mutare which is right on the Mozambique border in the Eastern Highlands. The first night we stayed at the Leopard Rock hotel with some of David’s colleagues. (Mercy Corps has a field office in Mutare.) The hotel is famous for two things: having the most beautiful golf course in Africa and housing the Queen of England when she visited in the 50s and it was still Rhodesia. Talk about a musty old bit of colonialism! I got David golf lessons for his birthday, and now he’s hooked. While he played with Chuck, I took the kids on a short horseback riding trip through their small game park. Miles insisted on being on the biggest horse all by himself (a guide held a lead).
We saw zebra, various antelope, wildebeest, and giraffe. In the highlands, the view of the mountains was gorgeous and the sky stretches up so high. The vegetation is a mix of evergreens and tropical bush, and the golf greens were perfect. The cliff rock face jutting out high behind the hotel is where the leopards used to perch to watch for game before they were killed off. It makes a nice backdrop to the golf course now.

We hired a baby sitter for the night and went to dinner (nothing to write about) and the casino. David’s finance manager, Olga, loves to gamble, and she coaxed us on to the roulette table. She would spread her chips out to increase her odds of winning, and she did have a lot of high and low exciting moments. I weakly put a few out on the obvious birthdays and lost every time. I’m not any good at gambling. It always feels like throwing money away. I just can’t enjoy it. But put a nanny, a boutique grocery store or little dress shop in front of me and watch that money flow!

The next day we did a bit more horseback riding ($10 only!) and golfing ($10 for 9 holes!) and then went to Tony’s coffee shop which is one of those little gems that is literally is known across the country and only has 3 tables. In fact, the three tables were in a room just off his bedroom in a tiny stone and thatch roof cottage built on the side of a hillside next to a lovely B&B called the Genaina Lodge. Tony brings all things exquisite and delicate and beautiful to the African bush. When he describes his homemade cakes to you it’s like a drama unfolding. And the drinks: the hot chocolates with fresh cream and a hint of ginger served in 100-year-old china. It was all so decadent.

That night we stayed in La Rochelle, an estate of the Rayon Barons (as in they invented rayon), that was donated to the Zimbabwean people and is now another ghostly, if slightly less musty, remnant of colonial days. That said, the family only left in 1972. The house is like a glorified 50s rancher with an ambitious garden. Crisscrossing paved paths take you to dark still fountains, wildly overgrown trellises, a frightening hedge maze deteriorated by parasitic moss, and an engraved monument to a dead pet. The representation looks like a cross between a squirrel, a fox and a monkey, and it says: “Companion in our travels over many lands and seas,” and “Much loved member of our family for 15 years.”



The manager of the hotel had some of Zim's old bills. When the exchange rate reached the billions to the US$, they knocked off 7 zeros and after a year or so it had gone back up to one hundred trillion or so. (Don't quote me on the exact numbers, but it was all pretty crazy before we got here. Now they use US$.)

Lunch break on the road...

The rain clouds on our drive back to Harare.The rainbow that looked like it was coming down on our neighborhood as we drove into Harare.