Today was a “cultural” day on our safari excursion. Our tour company, Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT), calls this day, “a day in the life”. We do things that bring us into interaction with the local community. It’s commonly one of our favorite days on our OAT trips. Today was a good day.

We started our day in the town of Hwange. Hwange has a population of about 100,000 people. We saw many churches and a large nearby coal mine which uses pit mining. Our guides said that lots of locals farm but I only saw a few cows and goats and pigs and some small scale gardening, so I’m not sure what kind of farming or where the farms were located.

Our first stop in Hwange was the Hwange Open Market. We love visiting open markets on our trips but this one was not a great open market. The pickings were pretty slim and I would say that the economy of this area is not doing very well right now. We stayed here for thirty minutes and walked through most of the market.

Our tour guide surprised the ladies with “chatengas” which were wraps to wear like skirts. This was what all the local women were wearing. The locals were all smiling and laughing at the site of our ladies wearing chatengas. The funniest part was that many of the local women would stop our women and retie their chatenga. They indicated that it had been tied wrong. But then, a short time later, another local woman would stop the same lady in our group and retie it again, also indicating that it had been tied wrong. There is obviously more than one correct way to tie a chatenga.

The open market was also a transportation center. Here you see a taxi dropping off a customer to catch the bus. Loading cargo on top of the bus kept at least three guys very busy. It seemed like most of the bus customers that we saw had quite a bit of cargo with them.

This dying Baobab tree had a ring of vendors around it. It was right next to the road and got a lot of traffic. The vendors were mostly selling drinks and snacks.

Produce was the largest part of the open market. Most produce places offered limited choices and many of the crops did not look particularly good. Of course, this is the dry season, so I’m not sure but that may have accounted for the produce not looking its best.

The rest of the market was more like an industrial / agricultural / hardware market. They had lots of chains and tools and rope and so on. We saw few people shopping at this area of the market.