KalahariLog

Last weekend we went to Molepolole. This is the 4th largest town in Botswana and is about 60km west of Gaborone. In this part of the country grows one of the largest aloe plants in the world. And this time of year they are in bloom. The aloes grow to over 3m (10ft) and there is a local legend that during the Boer wars of the 19th century an army was on its way to attack the town but were scared off by a forest of aloes, who they, in the falling light of dusk, confused with an army of soldiers. We wondered around town for over an hour trying to find the forrest but nobody we asked knew anything about it. We found out that the local word for that particular plant is mokapa, and some of people were happy to point us to them growing on the side of the main road but they didn't know anything about no forrest... Eventually, we drove off on a dirt road in the direction where the forest was marked in our guidebook and we did run across several groups of them but these would not have scared an army of Boers, regardless the time of day or the way the sun light was hitting them.

Other than uninformed townspeople, Molepolole has a museum, located inside the police station which, conveniently for visitors who work during the week, is closed on weekends. There were many wonderful rondavels and a few donkey-driven carts. The rondavels are the the traditional round mud huts with thatched roofs. They are mostly to be found in the villages but we have seen them everywhere except in the capital Gaborone. We were traveling with another Fulbright fellow who's originally from Ethiopia and he was telling us that his grandmother lived in a roundavel and he still remembers visiting in the summers and how cool it was inside. I imagine the thick walls offer good insulation, similar to the adobe structures of the American southwest.


There is one hotel in the entire town and that hotel has the only restaurant. And at the restaurant they weren't serving lunch... One of the favorite activity of Gaborone residents is to complain about how boring Gaborone is -- what they need to do is go out of town and put things in perspective.