You Come Here to Cleanse Your Eyes in the Beauty

That's what our new friend Patrick said when he was giving us a tour of the tea estate he works on... man was he right.
{The posting extravaganza plan is still on... we just had a slight hiccup yesterday when the electricity was out from 10-3:30. Man, was it hot. The sun usually does all its good baking right around then. So, I didn't get to put up posts (Crispin, the ol Apple, has a dead battery and must be plugged in in order to run}
After leaving the all you can eat breakfast we drove West towards the Soutpansberg Mountains and Makhado (Louis Trichardt) where we were staying the night. Beautiful winding roads, red, red dirt, and just a feeling of being a little more rural and remote than in other places I've traveled to. We turned on to the wrong road in town and ended up seeing a good section of said road, repeatedly, while we tried to find which dirt road off to the side would connect us to the other tar road to the north that we wanted to use. After driving through a village and hoping we wouldn't run out of petrol, we made it to the tar road, and just around the corner, to a petrol station as well. Because we were on an adventure, after filling up, we turned up a tar road by the station that seemed to lead right into a huge tea estate. We thought maybe we could get a tour, at the very least, an amazing view from up high, of the valley below. So we drove. We had only gone 2km before we passed a man, a woman, and a small girl walking up the hill with grocery bags, a big jug of cooking oil, and huge bags of flour (that the woman was carrying on her head). We offered them a ride up to the top.
Meet Patrick, his wife Koni, and their daughter, Winfrey. This is a true story of how you're never quite sure what you will see and what will happen in your day. How some people are truly kind.
It turns out that they were a family living and working on the tea estate. Patrick used to pick out in the fields, but was promoted to an office/administrative position, Winfrey goes to creche on site, and Koni wakes up every morning at 3 to start cooking fat cakes (fried dough, like a funnel cake or beignet) to sell to people as they head to work in the fields. They were just coming back from buying fat cake supplies for the coming week. We drove them to the top of the mountain and then back into the staff area so they could drop off their stuff. After snapping a family photo, Patrick offered to take us around and show us some of the local sites. We spent the next couple of hours driving through the estate hearing all about the tea production process and all about his life. In one breath he would talk about what leaves are to be picked off of a tea plant and then shift into stories about his childhood, growing up half coloured and half Venda, never feeling like he was accepted anywhere. He hasn't seen his mother since he was very young and Koni's family always treated him as a son. His hope is to save enough money to one day build a house for Koni and Winfrey and have a place for his mother to come stay when she decides to come back to him. He also kept mentioning that we were the first white people Winfrey didn't seem to be scared of. She was fascinated by our hair and spent a good amount of the time we were with them taking us all in.
We drove down the tar road to Phiphidi Falls and took Winfrey on her first tour of the waterfall. There was a "bridge" made of several smallish logs that you had to cross in order to get a good view. Patrick told Winfrey to sit on a rock and wait for us while we, shakily, crossed over the river to get to another piece of land. After we had taken photos and soaked up the view, I started waving at Winfrey... jumped up and down a few times.. and yelled "Hi Winfrey! We're coming!". She started to cry. "In our culture, Mmapula, when you wave in such a way, it means you are saying goodbye, you are leaving." Oh, Winfrey, Winfrey, we're coming! I'm sorry! And she cried and howled until we crossed, shakily, over the "bridge" once again and her dad was able to pick her up. (in the photo, all the way to the left, is a pink dot otherwise known as Winfrey)
In all the guidebooks two things are mentioned as must sees.. Lake Fundudzi and the Sacred/Holy/Enchanted Forest (it has a few names). So we went. We, of course, passed the turn off the first time, but found it when we back tracked (which really has now just become a rule for me when driving in SA). The road up to the lake view and to drive through the forest was about 30km long, one way, potholey, covered in ruts because of recent rains, and lined with huge patches of clearcut forest... cause all the land seems to be owned by logging and paper companies. (The only people we saw on the road were workers heading back to work after the weekend).
The Sacred Forest is a little bit of land that has been preserved in the area.. nothing can be cut or tampered with, it is protected. So after many kilometers of driving through ravaged land, all the sudden (but not really, cause you take a few wrong turns along the way and it's one big maze) you find yourself at the entrance of a jungley looking forest that has been saved from all this clear cutting because of its importance to the ancestors and spirits of a local tribe. From one side to the other the drive through takes less than 10 minutes. It was a nice break before we were plunged back into the sun and fairly barren landscape.
Then it was off to the view of Lake Fundudzi. The lake is considered a sacred site, as it is believed that its water came from the great sea that once covered the earth before land was created. It's also one of the only natural, freshwater lakes in South Africa. Since guests aren't allowed to visit the lake without permission from the Netshiavha tribe, we figured it was best to just see it from above. According to tradition, when seeing the lake you must view it with proper respect... which means turning your back to it, bending over, and viewing it from between your legs. So throwing all feelings of looking silly out the window, that's what we did.

On our way back down to the main road to Makhado we met a couple obstacles along the way... cows standing in the middle of the road and getting our car stuck, going downhill, in two ruts. Luckily, things were on our side... right after we got stuck, a man in his truck came around the corner. Within 15 minutes, after we had been pulled out, we were back on our way... heading to our cottage at the Buzzard Mountain Retreat.