Bulungula

We decided to walk the remaining 4 kilometres since the road was tremendously bad and bumpy. The first thing that hit me during that walk was that the countryside smells the same everywhere, cowshit is cowshit wherever you are, both in Bulungula and Äijäla. Green hills, small huts and the scent of butternut and smiling people are some of the memories from that walk.

The Ecovillage of Bulungula was "found" by Dave during a two week hike along the Wild Coast in 2004. The moment he arrived to Bulungula he realized it was the place he wanted to create the Ecovillage he had dreat of starting. So he did. Today Bulungula is , by 40%, owned by the Xhosa community living the land between two rivers that forms the village. All employees are local, and they work in one week shifts so that the lodge is able to employ the double amount of people, besides them Bulungula has a charmy Lizl who takes vare of the confuesed visitors and lovely Penny who teaches english to the villagers. Paraffin showers, solar power, compost toilets, candle lights, psycadellic paintings and free cattle. At Bulungula everybody was on the beach, the cows, the donkeys, the crabs, the goats, the local kids and the dogs, no sun chairs, no ice-cream stands. All the huts were made of the cow shit that my mother was terribly afraid to step on but that she happily agreed to sleep in. The main house is a big house with a kitchen (the second hardest word on earth to spell), sofas and pillows and there was always a mix of hippies reading Tom Robbins novels, Xhosa men smoking pipes or playing cards, Xhosa women chatting, kids playing, and kittens discovering the world in the house. All trips in Bulungula were organized by the locals and they have their own companies and therefore get all profit from their business, which does not seem that common. We chose to do a riding trip along the hills with a lunch stop at the local restaurant; a place that totally changed our concept about what a restaurant can be: the menu had 2 choices of main course and the table was a little mattress on the hill with baby pigs and ducks running all around, the stowe thw kind chef lady used locked like a small version of the fireplaces homeless people in Philadelphia use to warm themselfes.

The second trip was organized by a young man with a torn overall. he took us on a canoe trip along a river with bright yellow birds and transparent fishes playing by the surface. In Bulungula the most memorable time was the time just being; listening to the click sounds of the Xhosa language, playing crocodile chasing games with the children and sitting by the fire with an undetermined look.