I heart Harare

This week I took a very, very short work trip to Africa, spending two days in Zimbabwe and one in South Africa.  It was my first trip to the continent this year after having spent a lot of time there in 2014, hopping between South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and even Djibouti, and I had really missed it.

Completely contrary to my expectations, I fell in love with Harare, Zimbabwe's capital city, the moment I first arrived there over a year ago.  From what I understood of the country's recent history and current economic situation, I had prepared myself for a dirty sprawl of tin-roofed shacks ensnarled in a knot of dusty, noisy, traffic jams.  So I was hugely surprised to find Harare stunning: immaculately clean, manicured, secure, and apparently prosperous.

Harare is a strangely and uniquely beautiful city.  Investment in the city dried up some time ago, meaning that there are very few new buildings in the city centre, and no modern skyscrapers.  Instead, the centre of the city is full of (mostly) immaculately preserved examples of 1970s and 1980s architecture, and walking around it you have the strange feeling of being transported back in time.

It also has a wonderful climate and is full of jacaranda trees which on my first visit were covered in beautiful purple blooms.

I was incredibly lucky on this trip that my only scheduled meeting went fantastically well and I was out the door with a bag full of signed documents long before lunchtime, which gave me plenty of time to take advantage of another reason I love to travel to Harare, which is (of course!) to shop.  As you would imagine, it's not exactly Bond Street, but what I was after was not shoes and handbags (for once), but African wax printed fabrics.  It's a super-fun experience, although the agony of choice can be a little overwhelming, as you can probably tell from the below!

The top quality fabrics come with all sorts of stickers of authenticity and certificates, about which I am of course entirely ignorant but which appeals to the lawyer in me:

On my first trip to Harare I scoped out all the fabric shops and now only visit my favourite, where the owner, an Algerian guy, recognised me and this time asked what I actually did with these fabrics.  "Ummm...", I said... because the shameful truth is that I now have a collection of about a dozen different prints (which represents, ahem, 66 metres of fabric, oops) collected over a period of more than a year, and notwithstanding having a head full of ideas, I have done precisely nothing with any of them.   I think this is largely down to fear of screwing up and wasting something irreplaceable, but they're not doing anyone any good sitting in a cupboard so I think it's time I manned up and got my scissors out.  Well, that's what I promised the Algerian, anyway.  Watch this space... but for the time being, this is what I brought back.

The unexpectedly speedy success of our meetings also meant that I had the opportunity to visit the fabulous Wild is Life animal sanctuary, which is located just next to the airport but which feels like it is a thousand miles from anywhere, with its beautiful whitewashed farmhouse overlooking a manicured lawn which sweeps into an expanse of bush stretching as far as the eye can see.  Wild is Life was set up to rescue orphaned animals and is now home to a menagerie of lions, giraffes, ostriches, cheetahs, antelope, monkeys, and even a lone sheep.

The star of the sanctuary though is Moyo, a baby elephant who was abandoned by his mother, rescued by park rangers, and nursed back to health by Wild is Life, who intend eventually to release him back into the wild.  Moyo is now 18 months old and lives on baby formula (yes, you read that correctly, baby formula).  He is one expensive infant to maintain, requiring six tins of formula a day and round-the clock supervision from his four full-time handlers.

For me, the highlight was not "little" Moyo but the opportunity to see a pangolin, an incredibly rare type of anteater which is covered in keratin scales.  The pangolin is the most trafficked mammal in the world and has been hunted almost to extinction.

Oh, and bottle feeding a baby giraffe was quite cool...

...and did I mention I got to pet a cheetah?

It was a pretty awesome day.

Of course, the other advantage of all that travelling was that I had lots and lots of time to crochet.  Clearly my colleagues think I am insane - and maybe I am, since I am long past caring about the sideways glances that are inevitably attracted when I pull out a hook in a public place.  This time those incredulous looks may have been more justified than usual though, since I was working on a blanket that now measures over four feet square, which even I will admit is probably an unusual sight in the South African Airways lounge.  It's a good thing I have a large handbag.

This is my Around the Bases afghan, which I have the huge privilege of being a tester for and which I am loving more and more as it grows.  If you are a crocheter and you are not on the ATB train yet, then (a) I assume you must have been living under a rock for the last six weeks; and (b) get yourself to ChiChi's blog and join the (literally) hundreds (if not thousands) of others who are crocheting along simultaneously.  Week four is released today so there is plenty of time to catch up!  Mine seems already to have had a flag stuck in it by Smaller Child, so perhaps I will have to make another...