In my early career, my rotation was ten-weeks on, four-weeks off. For my first two years in Libya I never chose to vacation there. While the individuals I met there were generally friendly, my lack of Arabic and the overall tone of the country at the time never attracted me to spend uncompensated time there.
south africa was a different matter. a version of English was spoken everywhere and they also drove on the left. So I took numerous vacations in-country while I was there. (Here's an interesting web site purporting to summarize who drives on the left and who on the right and why.) I'd usually rent a VW Golf ‘Citi', drive for a day then disconnect the speedometer cable. I could no longer tell how fast I was driving but I also wasn't clocking up any miles which meant the rental was much cheaper. Looking back I'm not proud of that but at the time is seemed rather clever.
On one of these vacations I determined to drive to Rorke's Drift which lies broadly between Johannesburg and Durban. Like driving in New England, the names of the cities are familiar but there in the wrong order. So on this trip I passed through Newcastle, skirted Glencoe and then drove through Dundee.
The approach road to the former mission and crossing place of the Buffalo river is a lonely dirt road. Back in the day, the Buffalo river formed the border between the Colony of Natal on the west and Zululand on the east.
The current buildings at the site are not those from the time of the battle on January 22, 1879. And of course, the current mission and school building (at least when I visited in the mid-eighties) was fully staffed by Zulu's.
The locations of the buildings and defenses of the battle were all marked and, probably because visitors are few and far between, there was no restriction that I could discern to my wandering around.
In this photo, the mission is off to the right, the drift across the Buffalo off to my left. The drift consists of exposed rock you can just walk across when the river isn't in flood. A bend in the Buffalo River can be seen in the lower left corner. In the center on the horizon, about 6 miles (10 km) away is Isandlwana.
About 30 minutes before the Zulu forces overwhelmed the British camp at Isandlwana, a solar eclipse passed across the battlefield. Further north across Namibia, Botswana, zambia and Tanzania, that eclipse would have been an annular eclipse like the one this past Sunday evening (us, Monday in Asia). Having experienced a total eclipse while living in France at the turn of the last century, I can only say that the combatants in the battle probably saw the event as portentous in the least (or in the last for many).
Like many former battlefields, today the area is calm and peaceful. There's not much to see or do but if you're driving from Jo'burg to Durban, it might be worth taking the indirect route and stopping by.
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