May 21

Two men were booked to stay with us.  They had written us long messages via AirBnb, explaining that they were cousins who had been planning on doing a long road trip through Zimbabwe for some years and had decided to bite the bullet and go for it.  One of them had grown up in Bulawayo and now lived near Pietermaritzburg; the other was from Ireland and had never been to Africa before.

They arrived at a very bad time for me personally as my mother had died two days previously.  However, they were out most of the time, visiting the museum and Matopos and John dealt with them when they up to the house.  On their second night, they went out for dinner at a restaurant where you have to cross a little bridge that goes over a water feature.  The South African man could not see where he was going in the dark and walked off the bridge into the pond.  He ended up being taken to A&E by the restaurant owners.

A couple of days later, they left for Victoria Falls.  They had booked to return after a trip around the country - but only one of them came back.  Sadly, the man from Ireland had died in Mana Pools.  He wasn't attacked by a wild animal or anything like that.  His health had deteriorated on leaving Bulawayo.  He had seen a doctor in Victoria Falls, but his condition had not improved.  At Mana Pools, they had stayed in a chalet and the man had stayed in bed the whole time.  When he began to feel a bit better, they decided to drive to Harare to try and get him to a doctor, but he had died before they had even reached the main road.

The South African man had then had a very difficult time dealing with all the formalities.  The body was taken to Chinhoyi where the morgue was out of action.  It was then transferred to Harare and the Embassy had helped arrange for it to be flown back to Ireland.  The man's son had daughter had to be informed by telephone that their father had died on his dream holiday.  He had only recently lost his wife to cancer.

The remaining man then decided to complete the holiday that he and his cousin had planned.  He went on to the Eastern Highlands, down to Great Zimbabwe and back to Bulawayo.  It must have been quite a sad journey and I wonder if he imagined his cousin was there with him and that he was showing him the country of his birth, the thing he had wanted to do for so many years. He was a very nice man and even invited us to stay with him in South Africa.  I tried to write a story about the two cousins once, but I couldn't even find the first sentence.  It has remained on my to-write list though.