Sunday
December 7, 1980 - Salisbury
We slept
well and only woke up when the coffee and the Sunday paper arrived at 06.30. it
was overcast and we thought it might rain, but the weather cleared up and it
was quite hot later.
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| Cecil Square from our room in Meikles |
We went for
a stroll in Cecil Square
after breakfast and Deirdre Padbury picked us up at about 10.30. she took us
out to Ruwa Country Club where Eric was playing golf. It was a pleasant drive
and the countryside was very green although Rab said she missed her Cape mountains. There are massive boulders alongside the
road, but no mountains. The boulders in the picture featured on the Zimbabean $100 trillion note. The highest point around here is the Salisbury Kopje
which is only a couple of hundred feet. The city itself is at an altitude of about
5,000 feet.
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| There are many formation like this |
After a
couple of drinks at the bar, where I met a lot of old codgers who knew Dad from
when we lived here before and then went hurtling back to Salisbury. The speed limit here is 100 kph on
the open road but no one seems to pay any attention to that. Our destination
was the office children’s Christmas braai (barbecue)
across town in a suburb – Belvedere – where we had lived when we first came to Rhodesia in the
50s. it had started at 11.30 and we only got there at about 13.00. the food was
appalling – the salads looked ghastly (the rice salad was bright green for
example) and the meat was either burned or raw. I don’t mind raw steak, but raw
chicken is something else. Rab wasn’t too impressed with the people at the
party, referring to them as a real mixed grill. Everyone was friendly though.
Father Xmas arrived on a clapped out old motor bike to distribute the presents.
We left at
about 15.30 and went back to the Padbury’s for tea where we got a very warm
welcome from Major. Eric showed us some pictures of the boat which the company
has on Lake Kariba which looks very nice indeed.
Apparently all the islands in the Lake have
accommodation on them and you merely decide what kind you want. Some are proper
hotels, others are guesthouses and others merely have camping sites. (Eric wasn’t strictly correct in his
information. The hotel accommodation was in and around the town of Kariba: the accommodation
on the islands and up the river, whilst comfortable was fashioned after the
huts that the ‘locals ’lived in.)
The fishing
is said to be very good and everyone swims in the Lake
– Rab felt she wouldn’t be too keen since there are a few flat dogs (crocodiles) about. Apparently there is
still an enormous amount of game in the reserve on the southern side of the Lake. Unfortunately we couldn’t use the boat this week
because the Government had recently sanctioned the use of locally produced
ethanol (from the sugar cane) to supplement the diminishing supply of petrol.
The ethanol dissolved the joins in the fibre glass fuel tanks which now have to
be replaced with stainless steel ones.
After tea we
went to a Greek restaurant – Acropolis Taverna – where Rab and I each had a
huge plate of spare ribs. The tables were on the pavement and we had a jolly
good time. There were some quite fancy cars there, including a Lotus and a
fairly new Volvo sports model.
We got back
to the hotel fairly early and with nothing to watch on television, had an early
night.
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