Travels with Justine, Part 2

In Search of Chipoko… and scones …

For part 1 of this three part series, please see this link.

In Search of Chipoko… and scones …

By Justine Isernhinke, Fellow and Head of Geopolitics and UAP Research, The Malone Institute

The Lost Art of Scones

And so it was on Tuesday that, laden with the most expensive food I’ve ever bought (and I live in NYC), we made our way to the Eastern Highlands and to a small cottage in the mountains surrounding Connemara lake.

The area we stayed in is known for its trout fishing but we were fishing for chipokos, mystery… and scones.

Nick had regaled me with tales of the best scones in Zimbabwe… nay, the entire globe, that were only to be found at Troutbeck, a trout-fishing resort in the valley down the mountain from Connemara. It was there that we found ourselves on our first afternoon, hoping to get some wifi which was sorely missing at the cottage, which increasingly had less and less electricity as the days went on, nevermind no wifi.

But Troutbeck, despite its pristine appearance, succumbed to decades of a failed state. Mugabe’s mismanagement and destabilization of the economy for decades annihilated the tourist industry, drove away every citizen with a brain, and significantly, drove away most farmers. With the lack of people, standards had slipped and Troutbeck was the “canary-in-the-coalmine”.

Standards had fallen to the point where they no longer baked fresh scones or made their own cream, but had opted to rather buy mass-produced scones and resorted to canned whipped cream. Such a paltry affair was laden before us. Nick fumed. Disappointed. Clearly, an icon of Western Civilization had fallen yet again in his homeland. But Nick rallied with the belief that we could still find good scones… this was, after all, THE place for them.

I found myself skeptical but I understood. In South Africa, certain dishes and desserts are tied intimately with a locale. One cannot think of the place, without the food, Durban with its bunny chow (no bunnies are hurt in the preparation), Cape Town with its fresh fish… the Lowveld with biltong (South African beef jerky but better)… a place and a food belong together.

Mount Nyangani - “the Mountain that swallows people”

The next day we drove down to the Nyanga National Forest. Filled with mysterious ruins from a bygone era (which I kept telling Nick looked like slave pits and not sheep pens), the place has a notorious reputation for disappearances.

In local tradition, Mount Nyangani is inhabited by powerful ancestral spirits and is a sacred place. It is also said to be the haunt of evil or vindictive spirits and all manner of supernatural entities and creatures. The mountain has long been feared by the people of the region, a place to be approached with caution, and there are numerous rules that according to lore must be followed when venturing there. One is not to approach or enter sacred locations upon the mountain, for it is said to do so will result in becoming hopelessly lost and unable to leave, doomed to aimlessly wander the mountain unless the angered spirits responsible are appeased somehow. It is also said that if one comes across a colorful snake, a pot with no fire, or a brick of gold it is the spirits tricking you, and that you had better ignore them and quickly move on.

“In 1981, the two young teenage daughters of a former government official named Tichaendepi Masaya vanished without a trace on the mountain, and a massive air and ground search turned up not a single shred of evidence of what had become of them. Their disappearance remains a complete mystery. A few years later there was the mysterious vanishing of a 12-year-old schoolboy named Robert Ackhurst, who wandered off from a group on a school field trip and seems to have completely stepped of the face of the earth.”

Quote from “Unpacking Mt Nyangani mysteries from a foreign perspective (Myth vs Reality)”, Tinotenda Canaan Samukange, Marketing Officer @ Webdev Zimbabwe

The prosaic explanation is that there is quick sand in the mountains. I’m no geologist but I always thought quick sand was found in swamps and in every good adventure movie. A few days later in Bvumba, the owner of the cottage in which we stayed overnight, was himself involved in the search for the two girls. They never found the girls. He was the one that gave us the prosaic explanation.  However, the cases keep occurring.

In 2014, a 31yr old Zimbabwean of Indian descent called Zayd Dada, went on a hike up the mountain with his wife and another couple in the early morning hours. When the group got about halfway up the mountain Dada wandered off for a moment to see the scenery as the others rested. He never returned. An extensive search was launched involving the Zimbabwe National Army, the Air Force and the police, as well as numerous mountain climbers, professional trackers, and volunteers, who swept the landscape using advanced technology such as 3D satellite maps and infrared scanners. Every possible route up the mountain was painstakingly searched to no avail. So desperate were the friends and family of Dada to find him that they even sought council from local tribal chieftains, who arranged traditional rituals to appease the spirits of the mountain, but this too proved to be futile.

"Perhaps even stranger than those who have vanished without a trace on the mysterious Mount Nyangani are those who have disappeared only to reappear later with decidedly bizarre stories to tell. One such account concerns a senior government official who went missing on the mountain in the early 1980s while out on an excursion with two companions. The group was missing for a total of 4 days, during which time search operations were unable to find any trace of them. During this time, the group later claimed that they had wandered aimlessly in a confused state, and that they did not feel tired, dehydrated or hungry at all the entire time. They also reported that they had seen searchers looking for them but that they themselves had seemed to be invisible, neither seen nor heard when they called out to their would be rescuers.”

See this youtube link for more

Interestingly, these are only a handful of the many sudden and inexplicable disappearances in the Eastern Highlands, going all the way from Nyanga in the north to Chimanimani in the south. It cannot all be quick sand.

British tourist survives Nyanga Mountain ordeal

“I prayed and slept there for 10 hours. Several scary snakes approached me. I never disturbed them. They came in numbers, but I stood still. Various animals frequented the place and I could see shining red eyes of several animals staring at me. My character was tested. I remained steadfast. I woke up the following morning after the fog had cleared.” he said.

Alien Bases?

During the height of the Cold War, a report was found in 1972 by Lt. F. Holmes 'Skip' Atwater in his new office at Fort Meade, Maryland, that claimed that the KGB was funding parapsychology research at over 20 separate institutions with an annual operating budget of over $21million. Another document described Soviet investigation into “bioinformation” such as telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance and bioenergetics, such as psychokinesis and telekinesis. Atwater thought this all sounded like remote-viewing. Similar to the Manhattan Project, this sparked a different kind of arms race as Soviet remote-viewing was now a potential security threat. Accordingly, the US Army under Skip Atwater launched Project Stargate to use remote-viewing program as another intelligence-gathering tool.

 “Remote Viewing is the acquisition and description, by mental means, of information blocked by ordinary perception by distance, shielding or time. It is a way of perceiving something with mental powers alone using a scientifically designed, protocol-driving structured process for acquiring information. Typically, a view and interviewer are isolated with a target, which may be a picture or randomly generated numbers, in a sealed envelope. Neither person knows what the target is and both are blind to the target. This is know as working “double blind” so the interviewer cannot feed information to the viewer. The interviewer might ask “Describe the location inside the envelope?” The viewer might then make sketches or jot down brief word descriptions.”

[https://rense.com/general68/remm.htm]

For more than 20 years, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI, now SRI International) and the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), ran programs to determine if certain individuals, under conditions of perceptual isolation, could access information about places, buildings, items from a distance using “putative psi” rather than conventional sensory channels. The initial intention was to explore whether remote viewing had enough consistency and stability to be used in military espionage. However, it proved to be highly accurate relatively to other intelligence-gathering methods.

Joe McMoneagle, (photo above) in a recent interview with Shawn Ryan, said that you could compare the success of remote viewing to a restaurant. You open a new restaurant, and 15 food critics come the first night. And if those same food critics keep coming back every night, it’s a pretty good assumption that the food must be good. Joe worked at Stargate for 20 years. The CIA and other three-letter agencies kept coming back to Joe, even after Stargate was shut down. Interestingly, Joe said that the generals he worked with and the high-level politicians at the top were very supportive. It was the bureaucrats in the middle that did everything they could to undermine the program and deride remote-viewing, as the success of the program made them look bad. I’m reminded that these “permanent employees” are precisely the same group that seek to circumvent elected politicians to maintain control and power.

Stargate was classified in the interests of national security but was declassified in 1995.

You may be wondering what remote-viewing has to do with Zimbabwe. 

In 2009, ex-Stargate head Skip Atwater declassified additional information at an International Remote Viewing Association conference. In 1973, CIA analyst Pat Price gave a folder titled “UFO Bases” he claimed to have remote-viewed to Hal Puthof. Puthof then gave this to Skip Atwater. Project 8200, run in the 80s, sought to verify the claims and locations of these subterranean extraterrestrial bases where UFO activity seemed to circulate around:

Mt. Hayes, Alaska

Mt. Perdido, Spain

Mt. Ziel, Australia

Mt. Nyangani, Zimbabwe

Atwater had Joe, the best remote viewer at Stargate, check it out. What he claimed to have found is truly bizarre and was never reported to higher ups over fear that they would lose their funding. He confirmed that a “network” of underground bases exist across the world for the purpose of “relaying” something into space. As Joe and Atwater discuss in the tapes played on the video below, Project 8200 data suggests that the locations relay information to a “deep space” platform of unknown origin, sitting on a sort of tether to earth. The deep space platform is described as ancient but with new technology. Other viewers describe the bases as a strange mix of natural and artificial formations.

Shawn Ryan raised the subject with Joe on his podcast I referred to above and this is what they discussed:

In the excerpt on Mount Nyangani, Joe refers to the Zulus, which is not necessarily inaccurate but the Zulus are the original Bantu people that migrated south and ended up colonizing several southern African countries. They were the forebears of the Zulu nation which settled in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. 

Waterfalls, roadblocks and the Infamous Hondee Valley

From Nyanga National Park, we visited the Mtarazii Waterfall which is a very tall fall and the walk gives you a stunning view of the valley below. There is a very high skywalk across the valley which in my ever-present lack of self-preservation, I braved and lived to tell the tale.

The area around the falls was spectacular. See a quick video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LSEwW8MsUDM3ihIRQI0jts2bCSouNnfo/view?usp=sharing

We hit some unexpected roadblocks on the way out of the Falls!

The plan was to head straight to Chimanimani much further to the south. I made the assumption (and not the first time) that a local knew the route and when Nick headed down one road with much enthusiasm, I relaxed and took in the breath-taking view.

After 45 mins of navigating school kids heading home in their brightly colored uniforms (each school was a different color), we decided to check in with Googlemaps to see how much further. The longer we kept going down the road, the more time Google was adding to our destination! This made no sense I said to Nick… After some deep consideration, we both realized we might be lost!

It transpired that we ended up taking the full scenic tour of the Hondee Valley, only to have to turn around before we hit the Mozambican border and drive all the way back! But like the sages say, the path less traveled is the path worth taking. This drive was the most stunning one we took the entire trip and possibly the most beautiful drives I’ve ever been on in the whole world. The valley is an agricultural paradise. We picked up 10 bananas for a dollar and 2 pineapples that were out of this world. Naturally organic! Once we reorientated ourselves, and The Lady on Googlemaps was now guiding us, it was 4pm. We could not make it to Chimanimani. We had to look for accommodation in Bvumba, which, as much closer as it was, was still  another 2.5 hours further down the mountain range!

By the time we got to a cosy, slightly moldy, cottage in the mountains, dinner was whatever we could heat up. Neither of us had the where-with-all to cook from scratch.

The next morning we woke and decided to embark on a scone-scouting run in the Bvumba mountains.

First, we tried Leopard Rock Hotel. In its hey-day, Queen Elizabeth stayed here. Looking at the chipped paint and cracked walls, that must have been a long time ago. Leopoard Rock could barely provide us with coffee… scones were definitely out of the question. But as we left, we passed a Simanga monkey eating off a tree. The hotel was at least providing food for one of its guests!

At a last ditch effort, we stopped at a “Cafe” along the road. Our hopes were not high. But lo’ and behold, sometimes the least expected places give you the best surprises. We found home-made fresh scones, fresh cream to which we added the homemade jam we bought at the Bvumba cottage we stayed at the night before. It was absolutely heavenly!

We met a couple from Northern Europe who had driven all the way through Africa. They said that they paid bribes at 200 roadblocks in Nigeria alone! It takes a special kind of person to travel through Africa to unknown places.

We made our way south to Chimanmani and arrived to a lovely cottage called the Frog & Fern. We ended up arriving much later than we anticipated and following our standard operating procedure to go to the nearest hotel and hook up to wifi, we headed for the Chimanimani Hotel.

Suffice to say, that if you were making a film in Zimbabwe, and you needed a hotel location where your guerrilla army would meet your mercenaries, THIS would be your hotel. It truly looked like it was a discarded prop set from Blood Diamonds!  

Later that night, Nick made us an excellent braai (BBQ) and fulfilled his obligations as my defender when he rescued me from a man-eating spider that had taken refuge in my bathtub.

Nick created a video of our Mt Nyangani Chipoko search:

To be continued in Part 3.

Disclaimer: All opinions in this article are my own (Justine Isernhinke) and all errors in judgment (of which there are many) are mine alone. I do not represent any organization or company (neither human nor non-human or chipoko) and my views are my own.

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