We left at 930pm on Wednesday and I only really knew about 3 of the 29 guys on the bus well enough, like they had been over to our house and had greeted me at practice, etc.

There is a group of senior guys who have been playing for 5years+ on the top team called the 'Knights of the Round Table' and essentially they function as a committee to make recommendations to the coach and supervise everyone else. This system was really amazing and worked really well in keeping order the entire time we were away, the younger guys always deferred to them and the coach always took the decisions they made seriously. I have been on other rugby tours, let me tell you- usually men or women, they are usually poorly behaved. Not these guys, I wanted to make a documentary about it was so shockingly out of the norm. For example, there is no drinking allowed- one guy showed up drunk when the bus was leaving on Wednesday, the Knights met and weighed the options. They could've sent him home at that point but instead decided to make him responsible for keeping the bus clean the entire 12 hr trip to Queenstown and after and come up with a formal apology for letting everyone down by the time we got there, the coach agreed. Anyway, Mbuy is one of the Knights and this is why I was invited to come along as part of the "management" of the team, it was a great opportunity to see some of the country.

So with a few gas station stops we eventually got to Queenstown at 8am and stopped for practice! It is chilly in Eastern Cape this time of year, I did some yoga while the guys attempted a practice with almost no sleep between the singing the guys did (Zulu war songs- not lullabies) and the (aggressive) gospel music the bus driver played at top volume- it was tough to do anything. From there we headed up to the highest elevation, through some sheep farms and to the coach's parent's house- their coach, Kaya, used to play for the Springboks, and comes from this rural place where everybody knows him, so his homecoming is (rare as it is) a big deal.

The guys we were with are all from Soweto, most of them had never left Johannesburg in their lives or if they had it had been to go to another city, for those that were Xhosa it was their cultural homeland and it was a big opportunity for them to see what traditional life was like. We were greeted warmly in the cold wind by Kaya's sister and mother, father and various helpers, almost at once I was singled out as a wife (Amakote) and brought into the house away from the men and their activities (slaughtering a sheep) to be dressed in traditional skirts and head wrap and help with preparing a 5 course breakfast for the guys, which I also helped serve before I tasted any of it! The guys thought it was great, I thought it was nice at first and I tried to be a good sport but I was really hungry and exhausted and Mbuy could tell my patience was running out especially when I started to get snappy when the guys would make comments. So he suggested he would talk to Kaya's mom about it, cultural diplomatically. Anyway it worked out, she was cool with it, they were all very sweet- I ate some sour millet porridge and went straight to bed as I was starting to feel wobbly.

When I did wake up the guys were gone to practice, I donned my Amakote gear and went back into the main house which was empty- the women had started various dinner tasks around the property which is a pretty huge undertaking  when you are serving  dinner for 30 and have no running water inside the house and use a fire for the main dish. Soon a 12 year old girl with a Canadian accent (English influences and Radio?) came in, Kaya's niece and 'we' (she) chatted non-stop until dinner time,  I was ready for serving duty by then which was assembly line style and I was tough, in terms of serving sizes on anyone who had any gender unfriendly remarks ...after dinner we all squashed into the living room while Kaya's dad gave us a formal welcome complete with homemade Xhosa beer,not bad, made by Kaya's mom at 4am that same day, she told me earlier.

The place was cold- it even snows there, in the morning I had planned to meet my new friend at 630 so she could show me where to bathe, but it just so happened that the water pipe had frozen! While we waited I grated tomatoes and peeled potatoes while fighting with a couple of the guys (namely Rana's best friend Sika,) tried to steal the water that was being heated for my bath! The guys showered after practice but this was my first bath since we left Jozi, and it was a bucket in a room between two pots of boiling offal's but I had to fight for every drop so it the best bath I'd had in a long time!  After that it was back to serving breakfast and heartfelt goodbyes to Kaya's family who had really opened their home to 29 new sons (and one daughter).

So now we were off to Grahamstown, which was lower in elevation and a bit warmer. We were in a B n' B, two houses side by side (in the 'black' side of town) - the guys nicknamed them the Whitehouse and the Mansion. The family members we stayed with were crammed into one bedroom and shared the bathroom with us while we stayed for 3 nights but they didn't seem to mind and were very friendly, always asking questions and very happy to see that the 'young men were having a good time.'  Again the Knights made sure that everyone was fed equally and timely - example 2 cooked chickens and 2 loaves of bread divided equally between 15 rugby players following a game, impossible? I thought so. but now I've seen it. The next 3 days consisted of practices, games, lots of chatting and fooling around and one -2 hour pass to go out to a bar and mingle with the locals.

All the guys were allowed a max of 3 drinks in 2 hours to relax and dance before the next 2 days of the tournament after the first day which was an earth-shattering defeat for all of them. Some of them got carried away but everyone had a good time, considering how much people like to fight here (that happened on the way home when the guys nearly fought the bus driver)...there were no situations and some people recognized them and complimented them on their impressive Zulu version of the Hakka.

By the end of the tournament they took third but were by far the most entertaining team because of that Hakka and just because of their presence. In a pretty rural place like Grahamstown, these guys had some pretty boy swagger and by the second game they had fans (mostly girls but some guys) all over the place, kids were carrying their kit bags, fetching them water  and quite a few loud hecklers. I didn't realize this until the guys pointed it out but for rugby to be that popular in a black community it was a really big deal. It was something to see, and by the end, maybe rugby was just a little more popular and the unattainable seemed a little more possible.