Friday 5th January

On our way to Bulawayo we stopped off at the Great Zimbabwe ruins. Zimbabwe was named after this place. Zi means Great. Mba means Old. Bwe means House. This was the site of their oldest known city in their history and it's the 2nd largest ruins in Africa after the Pyramids.

The King lived here with his 200 wives and around 25,000 people. They built the walls out of the granite by heating the walls with fire, then cooling it down with water which would make great square slabs of the rock fall away from the cliff face.

They used to believe that they could not communicate directly with the gods so they would pray to the birds that became their national symbol, then the birds would fly away and take their messages to the gods.

Saturday 6th January

We spent a lovely day in Bulawayo - Kate and I wandered off to the railway museum to take photo's for her Dad. Cecil Rhodes who established Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was known) was the master mind behind the entire rail network here and his own private carriage was on display with silver tea set and everything - how very english! Pass the scones Kate!

We then went to the National Gallery which is the only gallery in the world probably where you could meet the artists and actually afford to buy the works of art on the wall. They started at around 10 US dollars and upwards.