Trotters are trotting it up

The Liesbeeck Saturday Trotters are trotting further and longer.

After travelling far and wide across Cape Town and visiting popular tourist destinations in the larger Western Cape, the students from the Liesbeeck Gardens Residence extended their journeys further into the country and into neighbouring nations over the December vacation.

Their 6 000km-drive began in Cape Town, before venturing into the "treeless" provinces of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, and then turning inland to Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique, before ending back at the Mother City.

The group was started by master's student Hope Gangata. The aim is to broaden students' minds, foster close bonds at Liesbeeck and, above all, have fun, says Gangata.

The Trotters' latest trip involved six students; two each from Namibia and Zimbabwe, a Malawian and another from Botswana.

Gangata said the visit was an eye opener.

"It was amazing how the architecture of the houses changed across the land, from the modern houses of Western Cape to the simpler houses of Eastern Cape, the stone houses of Lesotho to the beehive huts of KwaZulu-Natal and Swaziland, to the grass huts of Mozambique."

The diversity of the group helped them to communicate in the different areas they visited. And the Trotters are not done yet.

This year they plan a "Cape Point -to-Equator-visit", a journey that may see them travelling to the Great Lakes in the region, such as Lake Malawi, Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria.

Gangata said the journey would pass through Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.

"Who knows, Cape-to-Cairo might not be a dream after all in 2009," he says.