8th September-10th September - Days 343-345 – Bulungula, South Africa
Coming from Coffee Bay to Bulungula was like arriving at a harbour of tranquility, and like T insinuated in the previous post, this was exactly what doctor had ordered for us. Bulungula is not really a village in itself (even if we think one of the villages close by might be called something similar) but a patch of land right on the Wild Coast that is remote from the surrounding bigger habitation centres and acts as some kind of a “resort”. It's mainly of interest to those who like to spend some slow hours in a natural setting observing the local, simple way of life.
Our hosts welcomed us warmly and immediately took us on a tour of the essentials of the place: the compost toilets and what they call 'rocket showers'. Bulungula runs on the principle of sustainability, and these two elements were at the core of their operations. Compost toilets I believe everyone is more or less familiar with, but as for the rocket showers, I'll tell you that they are showers that work on liquid paraffin which you place at the bottom of the water pipe and set on fire in order to heat the pipe which then provides you with hot water for a full eight minutes. So not only do you use little energy but also minimise the consumption of water while showering. The quick tour ended with the introduction of the campsite right next to the ocean and the main lounging area where a delicious home-made dinner was served a bit later. We were very appreciative of all the amenities and started our two days of ultimate chilling there and then.
We spent our days at Bulungula catching up on our newly-bought novels and getting to know the other inhabitants: an American girl who was studying in Cape Town, an English traveller guy, a Swiss pair of siblings and a small group of Germans who we'd already seen in Coffee Bay but hadn't exchanged many words with so far. We also booked ourselves on one of the community based tours, namely the herbalist trail, which included a meeting with the local medicine man, tasting some of his potions (some black powder made of extracts from sharks, snakes and some roots) and familiarising ourselves with the plants that he collects from the local woods. The tour ended at a local “restaurant” where we were served very nice pancakes.
The scenery here was much of the same as around Coffee Bay: traditional Xhosa huts scattered on rolling hills and a few schools to keep the kids of the area busy with the experience of learning. The bushy forest lining parts of the coast provided us and the other guests with relaxed surroundings for sitting around and conversing about the multitude of stars above us on the clear night sky, among other things. To write here about what we actually did or talked about during our time at Bulungula would be both uninteresting and pointless, as you just have to be there to share the uneventful moments in order to appreciate them.
We would have liked to stay at Bulungula for longer but had also planned to make our way to Port Alfred for the annual boat race between all the universities' rowing teams. According to Bast, the one who had invited us along, things were going to get “Hectic!” so I was glad we'd stopped here to charge the batteries before that.
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