Great Zimbabwe, work meetings, monkeys and caterpillars!

This past week I went to an offsite planning meeting through work. It was held at a hotel near the town of Masvingo - about a 3.5-hour drive from Harare. It was great to participate in this as I got to meet NAC leaders from all 10 provincial offices and hear about some of their challenges and plans for 2011.

Climbing up to Great Zimbabwe

This meeting came at a good time for my project too. I've wanted to get thoughts and suggestions for the website from current NAC employees and this was a perfect opportunity. I developed a brief questionnaire and was able to get some very useful info.

The hotel where we stayed was less than a mile away from Great Zimbabwe - the oldest and most important monument in the country. Some of the ruins date back to the 11th century! It was really interesting to see. What impressed me the most is that all of the stones were laid on top of one another with no mortar! Some of the walls are pretty high and they seem structurally sound (they have been there for centuries) and it's incredible that there is just stones and nothing to keep them together. Great Zimbabwe was declared a World Heritage site in 1986 making Zimbabwe the only country in the world to be named after a World Heritage site.

The caterpillar I ate!

The Great Zimbabwe Hotel is about 20 minutes from Masvingo and there were tons of little monkeys all around :) you can see them everywhere, especially during lunch time... and speaking of lunch, one of the days I tried an interesting Zimbabwean delicacy - caterpillar ("madora" in Shona)! You may recognize it from what I called "worms" in my post about the Mbare market in Harare (caterpillar just sounds way better). It was not too bad - a little crunchy and spicy :)

You can see more pictures from the trip to Masvingo here.