Lesotho Infinity And Beyond: 24 December 2016: Zimbabwe- Bulawayo

From Francistown, I got on this bus to the Ramokgwebana/Plumtree border between Botswana and Zimbabwe. To get out of Botswana, it was slowish, but organized. The bus picked everyone up after we’d all stamped out and took us to the Zimbabwe side, and there it took insanely longer and was much more chaotic, with people butting in, crowding around the counters, etc. It costs $30 for an American to get a single-entry visa to Zim. I had the option to pay with USD, Rand, Pula, Pounds, or Euros.

Let me elaborate on the money situation here, oh readers, because it is an interesting one indeed. Seriously- I went down the internet wormhole just reading so far into this. Here’s the Wikipedia link if you’re interested in reading more.

The gist of the situation is that in the 1980s, Zimbabwe was doing pretty well economically. In the late 90s, though, Mugabe’s government instituted land reforms that put the land owned by white people into the hands of black people. This included a lot of farmland, which the white farmers had been growing lots of successful crops on. Once the whities were forced out and the new black “farmers” took over, it was soon evident that they didn’t have any experience with farming, and the country fell into a food shortage situation. The fact that banks were also failing didn’t help, and Zimbabwe turned from an exporter into an importer, effectively accruing lots of foreign debt. So how do you get out of debt? You need more money. What’s the easiest thing you can do to get more money in a bunk economy? Print it, of course. What could possibly go wrong? Answer: everything.

Printing vast quantities of money, as you probably learned in some economics class, causes inflation, as there is more money for the same amount of goods, so the money loses its value. The money becomes more and more worthless, so you have to print more and more bills of higher denominations to keep up. What results is a horrific vicious cycle of hyperinflation. It was so bad that at the end of 2008, the money was inflating at a rate of about 80 billion percent…per month! You’ve probably heard about Germans taking wheelbarrows of money to the store to buy a loaf of bread in the 1920s. Yep, same story here in Zim. The highest denomination that the government printed, right before the currency was abandoned in 2009, was 100 trillion dollars. Yep, that’s trillion with a capital T, which rhymes with P, which stands for pandemonium. But it wasn’t even really 100 trillion; the number value should have actually been 10²⁵ times more than that, because of various droppings of zeroes in the process of successive printings. If you checked the price of, say, eggs at a shop in the morning, went home to get wads and wads of cash to pay for said eggs, and returned in the afternoon, whoops, the price skyrocketed and you don’t have even close to enough money anymore. Even before the Zim dollar was discontinued, the country informally, and then formally, switched to a multi-currency economy. Bartering was also very common. The USD was the currency of choice, as it was the strongest currency, but you could also use a whole host of other global currencies. I’ll go into the current currency situation a little more in the next post, but this just gives you a good idea about how chaotic things got, and how uncertain anything concerning money was/continues to be in this country.

So yes, back to the journey at hand. But before I continue, loyal readers, my mom in the next room would like to add that she was in Zimbabwe in the 70s when it was still called Rhodesia. Wild. Anyway, overall, from border to border to freedom, it was three hours, mostly spent waiting in lines. I walked to the taxi rank on the Zim side and got the last spot (read, the taxi was full but I got squeezed in there anyway) on a minibus taxi to Bulawayo for $5, plus another $2 for my bag in the back trailer. Not wanting to use my dollars, I paid 80 Botswanan Pula instead, which they happily accepted.

After getting off the taxi in Bulawayo, I immediately went to the Pick and Pay grocery store where, guess what, I waited in more interminable lines for both the parcel counter to drop my bags and for the registers. I forgot that it was super close to Christmas, so that was probably why the store was so crowded. Then I wandered through the outdoor market to find my way back to the taxi rank. Everyone was very friendly directing me to the local taxi going to Burnside, the neighborhood my hostel was in. It was a short 50 cent ride. Here they only took USD. They laughed when I tried to pay with Pula again. But the cool thing about that ride is that I paid with a $10 bill, and in my change, among the super gross and floppy dollar bills I received (they never go out of circulation since they can’t afford to have less currency going around), I also got some new Zimbabwe Bond Notes, which are the government’s answer to the currency shortage. The thing about the Bond Notes is that they are only good within Zimbabwe, so they can’t be used to pay for foreign goods, so they’re pretty worthless in the grand scheme of things. They were only introduced a month before I got to Zimbabwe, and they're made in the form of coins and $2 notes (they have since started making $5 notes), tied to the USD.

I got out and walked to Burke’s Backpackers. It’s a beautiful and green property with the Burke family home, a pool, a pond, lots of trees, and some rooms and space for camping. That night, the family was having lots of people over to (badly) sing Christmas songs on the porch. Their out-of-tune voices lulled me to sleep as I lay in my tent that I set up next to the pool.

The next day, the owners put me in touch with two other guests, a Swiss German and French Canadian who were traveling between semesters studying in Stellenosch, which is the wine country right outside of Cape Town. I recognized their car from several other places in Botswana, where we both had been staying, but somehow we had never talked to each other. I distinctly remembered them at Planet Baobab in Gweta, where they had quite a loud girl with them who never stopped singing and talking. She had since left the trip to go see family or something, and the two guys seemed relieved to have dropped her off a few days earlier.

Making friends with people with cars is great. The three of us drove around Matopos National Park ($15 entry fee each person, $10 for the car). This park has lots of rock formations and balancing boulders, which feature on one side of each Zimbabwe Dollar note and the new Bond Notes (see picture above). We drove around the park, admiring the rocks, and did a little hiking including up to some cave paintings, then to the top of this small mountain. At one point, there was the option to pay $10 more to see Cecil Rhodes’s grave, but we enthusiastically declined. Why should we pay our respects (and our money) to a guy who took over and exploited Southern Africa for its diamonds and other natural resources? He is highly vilified by most people around here, so we passed.

Push!

Cave drawings

Hiking

A view of the park

The next afternoon, after paying for my camping spot at Burke's in both Pula and USD, I got all my stuff and walked to the road to wait for a taxi to pass by. Without even trying to flag down anyone, a guy just stopped for me and took me straight to the train station. On the way, he stopped at the Spar grocery store to see if his friend had cash for him. No cash today. This country is so strapped for cash and there isn’t any in most banks. And if there is, you can only take out $50 per day. This means that a lot of company owners effectively can’t take out enough money to pay their workers. One method of getting cash is at the grocery stores, because they seem to be the biggest source of it. You pay with a card, then get some cash back.

So after the obligatory asking me to marry him and bring him to the US and me subsequently shutting down the conversation by truthfully saying that I literally did not have a sim card on which he could call me, the guy dropped me off at the train station. It’s so weird- even when I so vehemently shut down someone like that, they’re still super friendly, and he still said that it was nice to speak English with me and get to know what I was doing in this part of the world.

In the next post, your hero takes an overnight train to Victoria Falls!