On our way to Great Zimbabwe ruins we stopped at a stone market. Seems Malawi is all about the wood and Zimbabwe is all about the stone. The carvings are amazing and really detailed. Small problem is the weight - but I am not thinking about transporting things to Australia until South Africa so some Rhino bookends, a giraffe head carving and hippo carving I was done - surely can't be more than 6 more kilos to my overall luggage of about 100kg so far J

We got to Great Zimbabwe in time to go on a tour this afternoon. This is a site that I had never heard of, but is a listed heritate site and number 4 in the world!! The ruins are really well preserved and really rather amazing. The whole site is dry built meaning that all stones are just balancing on each other with no mortar or cement in between. The site was built in the 13th century and considering that it is still in amazing condition. We visited the hill where the king lived and got to go in the cave that someone would go in to call the name of one of his one hundred odd wives to summon them to the hill for sex. It was said that he took ancient drugs to make him strong and up to ten wives could visit each day. Seems Viagra has been around through the ages! His first wife had an amazing structure which is a circular structure of an 11m high wall which is 6m thick around it's base, his other wives had walls around their huts but they were lucky to be about 2m tall and definitely not as thick. The first wife 'queen' had all the children of the king come into the royal enclosure (her grounds) for pre-marital lesson's as school did not exist, as we know it now. We came up with some very funny things that they may have learnt - I will spare you the details as I am sure that your own imagination is already running wild with possibilities. To guide your imagination, girls and boys were taught separately and they found models of humans that they believe were used in the teachings.