As many of you may have noticed, my blog has been awfully quiet for the last 10 days. I don’t have any grand excuse for this other than the fact that I have been too busy to write. Obviously that begs the question – what was keeping me so busy? Unfortunately, the answer is not that exciting – mostly school work and volunteering at Philani. The reason I was so busy with all of this work is because: 1. It is nearing the end of the quarter, and 2. I was preparing for my two weekend trips, one of which was this past weekend!
Our entire Stanford group was in the Cederberg Mountains this weekend on our Bing trip (the Bings are major donors for the program and fund a weekend excursion for cultural enhancement). For those who aren’t familiar with this particular mountain range – it is home to thousands of ancient rock paintings. Some of these sites have paintings that are up to 15,000 years old! I have posted a few pictures from this weekend on Picasa so you can get an idea of the trip. It was really fun and it complemented my archeology class really nicely. The professor for that class was actually on the trip and served as our guide. He is one of the leading experts on these rock paintings and has written a book about them. I was talking to some other people in our program and they were commenting on how he is just so passionate about his work that he really makes ancient history come alive.
I think my favorite part of the weekend was some of the hiking that was necessary to reach these cave painting sites. We hiked, scrambled, and bouldered to the sites, often getting quite dirty in the process. Because of all that was required to get there, the sites often had spectacular views around them. In fact, even the views from our guest houses were spectacular. The sunset and sunrise were incredible. At night, there were more stars visible than I have seen in quite a long time. I tried taking some pictures, but they definitely don’t do it justice..
That was basically my weekend. I have another trip coming up next weekend. On Thursday afternoon, a small group of us will be flying to Durban and renting cars to drive up to the Drakensburg Mountains on the Lesotho border. The mountain range is a World Heritage Site and is supposed to be spectacular. I can’t wait to see it!
Nice to hear from you again! The pictures are cool--the sort of thing you see in National Geographic magazine, not in real life. Nice that you got to see them in real life.
ReplyDeleteI did a Google maps search on Drakensberg Mountains and saw some of the pictures people have posted. Looks like that should be a pretty cool trip.