Swinging through Swaziland--December 2016

Thunder Bay, March 24

I'm sitting in the comfort of my boyhood bedroom in Thunder Bay, looking out at snow melting on a the morning after a spring snowfall.  It's hard to believe that I've fallen three entire months behind on my blog, so now that I'm going to be stationary for a while, there's no excuse for not catching up rapidly by covering the past three months of travels in Stanley.

The nyala who gored the boy at Mlilwane

I last left you, dear readers, as we flew out of Madagascar on Wednesday, December 21st.  It was a bleary-eyed small-hours-of-the-morning flight to Nairobi, a long wait there and then a flight back south towards Johannesburg.  It is one of the enduring mysteries of airline pricing that it cost us around 500 euros to fly Johannesburg-Nairobi-Antananarivo return, and yet to do half of that trip (Nairobi-Antananarivo return) would cost not half as much, but more than twice as much (about 1100 euros).  Weird.  At any rate we got back to Johannesburg airport, stocked up on cash and phone credit, had a celebratory sushi meal and then called an Uber driver to take us out to Delmas and the Blinkgat workshop.  It was quick and easy, although pricey (about 900 rand, or 60 US dollars), and our driver was clearly doing well off the Uber gig, as he drove a new BMW which he had bought since starting driving for Uber a few years ago.

It was great to get back to Stanley after the rigours of travel in Madagascar, and we were keen to see what improvements Sarel and his Blinkgat Products workers had done since we dropped Stanley off in October.  The key new elements (a slider drawer for the fridge, another big pantry door, a new awning) were all in place and we went to sleep early in familiar, comfortable surroundings.

Unconventional but delicious:  barbecued chicken dinner on Christmas Eve

We spent the entire day on the 22nd getting Stanley sorted out, paying for our repairs (and for a tune-up by one of Sarel's sons) and then repacking our luggage from Sarel's storage into Stanley, ready for a morning departure for Swaziland.  We had a good look at the smaller jobs that Sarel's crew had done, from a new, safer ladder for the back door and a fishing-rod holder tube to new clothes and condiment holders sewed by Sarel's wife Elise.  It all looked good for making Stanley even more liveable and functional. We had decided that we wanted to spend the busy Christmas season somewhere that was not insanely full of holidaying South African families, and Swaziland seemed like a good choice:  a new country for both of us, off the beaten track and with some interesting-looking nature to explore.  

The striking colours of the southern red bishop, Mlilwane

We swung into downtown Delmas mid-morning of the 23rd, filled our fridge full of food and wine (happy at how easy it was to access the fridge using the new slider), bought supplies to bake a gingerbread house, put 147 litres of diesel into the tank and drove off to the east along the main highway.  It was fairly busy, and near a key junction east of Middelburg we ran into heavy traffic that slowed progress to a crawl for half an hour before we passed through the junction and the road opened up again.  Eventually we took a smaller road south to catch a parallel main road that led straight to the Swazi border crossing at Oshoek.  There was a long lineup of people at the immigration counters, as Swazis working in South Africa headed home for Christmas.  We got to talking to a young South African man whose father worked in Swaziland and learned, to our horror, that we weren't supposed to import either meat or liquor into the country.  Our fridge and larder were crammed with festive supplies and the thought of having to lose them at the border horrified us.  We watched glumly as vehicles in front of us were searched thoroughly, but when we got to the customs gate the officer had us open the back door, peeked in cursorily (right at a 5-litre cardboard cask of wine sitting on the floor in full view!) and waved us through.  We had dodged a border-crossing bullet!

As always happened, this blesbok bolted as soon as I took out my camera

The road towards the capital Mbabane was pretty as it dropped down off the highveld plateau.  We drove around Mbabane but what little we saw of it looked modern and prosperous.  The good road continued for a while until our GPS bade us turn right onto a secondary road.  We were headed towards Mlilwane Nature Reserve and the GPS sent us in the right general direction, but unfortunately the selected route headed straight through one of the Swazi king's royal palaces, and we were turned back by the palace guards who pointed us towards a dirt track.  The track started off fine, but quite rapidly narrowed and started to be cut by huge gullies.  The track obviously wasn't used any more and only 100 metres from a junction with the true road to Mlilwane it became completely impassable.  A 23-point turn through the muck and gullies got us headed back the way we came and we took the longer, paved path around to the proper entrance to Mlilwane.  We put up our tent in the well-maintained campground, cooked dinner and went to bed tired.

We spent four nights at Mlilwane and it was an inspired choice.  The campground had good views out towards the game reserve and was well situated for hiking and biking, while being rich in birdlife. The only drawback was that we had chosen it in part because of having electricity, and when we arrived we found that a huge thunderstorm had knocked out the power supply, which stayed off for the next two days, playing havoc with our plans to bake gingerbread and have a roast chicken dinner for Christmas.

Christmas ornaments on our new awning at Mlilwane

Mlilwane is the product of 50 years of effort by Ted Reilly, who as a young man in the 1960s was horrified by the complete disappearance of wild animals in Swaziland and turned his family commercial farm into a wildlife sanctuary which he re-stocked with animals from South Africa.  From small beginnings Mlilwane has expanded to be full of ungulates of all sizes, while Reilly's energy and efforts have seen two other national parks, Hlane and Mkhaya, established with predators and rhinos in residence.  Without potential man-eaters around, though, Mlilwane allows visitors to walk and bicycle around freely, and this freedom of human-powered movement was exactly what both Terri and I were craving after too much control over us in Madagascar.  We went for a hike that morning along the Hippo Trail, a 2-hour loop that we loved as much for its prolific birdlife as for its blesboks and zebras and impalas.  We almost didn't get started on the trail, as we saw so many birds on the first few hundred metres of the trail that we spent a good half hour just watching them and looking them up in our bird guides.  It had been raining since we were last in Southern Africa, and the massive multi-year drought was in the process of breaking.  The countryside was almost painfully green, a huge contrast to the parched, withered vegetation we had seen in Kruger seven months before. 

After returning to Stanley for lunch under the shade of our huge new canvas awning, I went off on my folding bike for a brief exploration of the cycling possibilities.  There were jeep roads everywhere and although I wished I was on a mountain bike, my Giant Expressway bike was up to the job, and I even overtook a couple of guys on mountain bikes on one of the little climbs, much to their surprise. Terri had planned to bake our chicken in our electric oven that evening, but with the power still out, we improvised, cutting it in half and braaing it over charcoal, with appropriately delicious results.  We had bought a few Christmas decorations and we adorned Stanley and the awning with them while donning floppy Christmas hats.  It felt very Christmassy, despite the humid heat, and we were glad that we were spending Christmas together for the very first time in our 6 years together.  We went to bed content and full of South African champagne.

Very pleased with our Christmas lunch at Mlilwane

We had decided to be decadent on Christmas Day and go to Christmas lunch at the fancy Hippo Hole restaurant at the lodge next to the campsite.  It proved to be an inspired choice.  After a brisk morning walk and birdwatching jaunt, we put on our fanciest clothes and strolled over to the restaurant.  An all-you-can-eat Christmas buffet lunch set us back about US$ 17 a head, and it was a tremendous bargain.  We got the best seats in the house due to Terri's eagle eye, in the corner of the restaurant overlooking a waterhole that teemed with turtles, fish and sacred ibis, and set about gorging ourselves silly on roast turkey with stuffing and too many other great dishes too numerous to recall, let alone name.  We struck up conversation with a South African couple and their twenty-something daughter at the next table.  They had moved to Swaziland in the 1990s, where they had all taken out citizenship.  They thought it was a better place for white Afrikaners to build a future than in South Africa itself, and talked about how much Swaziland had changed during their time.  

Nice Christmas table decoration at Mlilwane

Cycling on Boxing Day

By about 2:30, we could barely move and there was no way we could stuff another delectable morsel into our mouths, so we staggered back to the campsite and put on hiking gear for a post-prandial stroll.  We walked all the way to Sondzela Backpackers, another of the accommodation options in the reserve, and then back, passing small herds of nyala and the beautiful blesbok (a type of hartebeest with a real aversion to being photographed face-on).  When we got back Terri coaxed a fire out of some not-so-dry firewood and we sat beside the fire sipping whisky and eating Christmas cake (one of Terri's Christmas traditions) with slatherings of fresh cream.  It had been a wonderful Christmas Day.

Partway up the path to the summit

Boxing Day was devoted to trying to work off some of the lavish Christmas lunch.  We got up and cycled off along jeep tracks towards the start of the Peak hiking trail.  It was steep going as we got closer to the trailhead, and eventually we had to lock the bikes and hide them behind some bushes and continue on foot.  It was further to the peak than it appeared, but it was a perfect day for hiking and the views (and profusion of butterflies) at the top repaid our sweat.  We looked down into the broad plains of the valley and into the royal palace enclosure where we had been turned back a few days earlier; some sort of traditional warriors' dance was going on there and we watched in fascination through our binoculars.  We were alone atop the peak for a long time, gazing out contentedly until it was time to return and start working on the gingerbread.

Relaxing at the top of our hike at Mlilwane

The power had come back on in the night, and so the plan was to bake gingerbread before it went out again.  If Christmas cake and Christmas pudding are Terri's family holiday traditions, baking gingerbread structures is the Hazenberg way.  Over the years it has morphed from making traditional houses to making castles, parliament buildings, pyramids and even the Taj Mahal.  The plan this year was to construct a replica of Stanley.  I did the designs and then mixed up some gingerbread dough.  We were somewhat impaired by not having real molasses or the type of brown sugar that I was used to, and the resulting gingerbread was a little too soft for real structural integrity, but we were making do with what we had available.

One of the hundreds of butterflies we encountered on our hike

As I was mixing up gingerbread Terri was chatting to an Australian family who were camped next to us.  One of the nyala bucks that always wandered around the campsite came nearby and Terri patted him on the nose.  The Australian's ten-year-old boy followed suit and, without any warning, the nyala changed from friendliness to aggression and gored the boy in the abdomen.  We spent a good while helping the family deal with the traumatized boy who was in shock.  He didn't seem to be losing much blood, but he was definitely in pain.  Terri felt terrible since the boy had just imitated her.  The manager came over to see the family and called an ambulance, but it never turned up; the family ended up driving into Mbabane after dark that evening to take the boy to the hospital.  We never heard how it all turned out; I hope the boy was all right in the end.  It was a timely reminder not to take wild animals at all for granted!

We fired up a charcoal braai and grilled some delicious steaks before baking the gingerbread pieces.  Our little electric oven was a bit uneven in its heat distribution, but it produced surprisingly good results.  We let the pieces cool and dry overnight, getting them ready for construction the next day.  That night it was hard to sleep, not just for us but for all the other campers, as a group of very loud Swazi yahoos set up camp not far from us and kept the noise going almost until dawn.  It was the one real blot on our time at Mlilwane, and the next morning the manager was apologetic and took statements from the other campers so that the offenders could be banned from the campground in the future.  It was a nice gesture, but it would have been much more effective if the night security guard had simply shut down the noise before it got too loud or too late.

Tuesday, December 27th found us packing up, making complaints to the manager about our inconsiderate neighbours and then driving out of Mlilwane.  We had considered going hiking in another nature reserve slightly to the north, Malolotja, but the weather forecast looked dismal and we didn't fancy hiking in the rain.  Instead we turned east, towards the Mozambique border and Hlane National Park.  Swaziland is a tiny country with the main roads well paved, so it took less than two hours to get to our destination.  We drove past the country's second city, Manzini, which looked prosperous and modern and a better ratio of decent houses to slum shacks than you would see in many South African cities.  Like Kruger, Hlane is nestled between the edge of the highveld and the rounded Lebombo hills that mark the frontier with Mozambique, and like Kruger it's full of big animals, both rhinos and big predator cats.  We drove into the park just as a huge rainstorm whose progress we had been tracking along the horizon caught up with us, and for fifteen minutes we sheltered while Niagara Falls thundered down out of the sky on us.  When we got to the campground we found it half-flooded, but we found a slightly higher chunk of ground to put Stanley on.  

A weaver quickly building a replacement nest after a storm

Once the skies had cleared, we walked out to the camp waterhole to see if there were any rhinos around (there weren't) and whether there were any interesting birds (there most certainly were).  We found hundreds of weaver nests on the ground where the rain and wind had knocked them out of the trees, and looking up we saw the industrious weavers hard at work rebuilding in a frenzy of activity that was fascinating to watch.  We cooked up dinner, set up our awning against further rain and then went to bed.

In the morning I opened the fridge to take out breakfast supplies and found that it wasn't on.  A quick bout of trouble-shooting revealed that the new slider drawer had run over the power cord and it had shorted out and melted the cord; luckily we hadn't caused a fire!  There was only one thing to do:  drive into Manzini and get it fixed.  It proved to be fairly easy, as the fridge itself proved to be still working fine (we were worried that we had fried the motor) and we were able to find both an electric supply store and a refrigerator store.  We had the fridge re-gassed (it had seemed to be labouring to keep stuff cool even before the short-circuit) and had a new DC power cord made, while a truly Biblical downpour turned the town's streets into rivers.  Eventually the rain passed and we drove back to Hlane with our repaired fridge.  I mixed up some thick icing to use as glue and put the various bits of Gingerbread Stanley together.  The icing needed to set overnight to harden, so we hid Stanley away so as not to step on him inadvertently and waited for the last step in the process.  That evening we had dinner with one of the few other couples in the soggy campground, Neil and Elise.  Neil, an architect, had spent much of his life camping in beautiful spots in southern Africa and was full of great stories and advice for us.  We also admired the design and workmanship on his camper, a converted Toyota Land Cruiser that made Stanley look decidedly shabby in comparison.  Another camper, Colin, wandered over to join us bringing some wine, and in the process lent us some elastic cord to wrap around both our refrigerator power cables (AC and DC) to avoid a repeat of the previous day's mishap.  We wobbled to bed a little tipsy and full of good food and ideas for our trip.

It proved to be a serious mistake to leave our awning up overnight.  After midnight the skies opened again in torrents, accompanied by heavy wind, and the awning was subjected to the twin stresses of heavy wind and the pooling of water in low points on the waterproof canvas.  In the night both Terri and I were awoken by a very violent jolt that felt like something other than wind.  In the morning we discovered what had occurred:  the awning had come down, bending two of its three poles in half.  It was weeks later that we realized that more than that had occurred:  the violence of the sideways force had actually moved the camper sideways inside the loadbed of the pickup truck.  It didn't move very far (maybe 1.5 cm), but it was enough to make it drop downwards a bit and twist, putting huge strain on the four retaining screws that hold it in place and causing damage to the camper itself.  

Gingerbread Stanley in front of the real item, Hlane

But that was all in the future.  That morning of December 29th as we looked at the wreckage we didn't know what to do, but Terri quickly came up with the idea of finding the handymen from the campsite to see if they could do anything to repair the poles.  Amazingly within a couple of hours they had straightened the poles and reinforced them with bits of copper piping and strong screws, as well as with strategically-placed indentations on the metal.  While that was going on, we were busy with our own DIY, icing and decorating Gingerbread Stanley.  A couple of hours of mixing up icing and figuring out good colour schemes with the Smarties, gumdrops and other sugary goodies and we had created a reasonable edible facsimile of our beloved home and source of transport.  It was Terri's first-ever gingerbread construction project, and she absolutely loved it.  It was fun over the course of the holidays to try to fuse together our differing family traditions to create our own rituals to mark Christmas and New Year.

That day as we sat out by the waterhole watching birds, we fell into conversation with a couple of American Peace Corps volunteers who were working in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in central Swaziland.  They said that the veneer of prosperity and good roads and houses that we had glimpsed on our trip so far didn't extend far into the countryside away from the asphalt roads.  They said that poverty and AIDS made life pretty tough for the majority of Swazis, with many Swazis moving to work in South Africa, and the country suffering from the highest incidence of HIV of any country in the world (although specific regions of South Africa, like the province of KwaZulu-Natal, have even higher rates of infection).  It was a sobering reminder that Swaziland, for all that we had had a great time in the country, is a tough place for the majority of its citizens to live.  This situation has been exacerbated by the drought, which has reduced maize yields for subsistence farmers.  The biggest problem in the country, though, as we heard from many different sources, is the king, the last absolute monarch in the world.  His lavish spending on himself, his multiple wives and extended family while the country grapples with poverty, food shortage, AIDS and a stuttering economy does nothing to improve the situation.  He crushes dissent with an iron hand, and the economic and political malaise seems unlike to to improve until he either exits the throne or makes himself a constitutionally limited monarch.  Neither seems likely in the immediate future.  In June of 2016 there were howls of protest from outside the kingdom when the king took over the rotating chairmanship of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) despite his heavy-handed draconian authoritarianism at home.

Two white rhinos jousting gently with their horns, Hlane

White rhino, Hlane

Another great supper of grilled steak and mushrooms, washed down by great South African red wine, and we were in bed for the last time in Swaziland.  The next day, Friday December 30th, found us up, quickly breakfasted and out for a game drive.  Lions had been roaring loudly in the night, and we were ready for some big game.  The repeated big rainstorms meant that the tracks inside the park were mostly muddy quagmires, but luckily we didn't have to go very far to find Hlane's premier attraction:  white rhinos.  Barely a kilometre into the park we ran into a group of 5 of them beside the track and we spent a long time just sitting and watching them.  Two of them were fighting, jousting with each other with their enormous horns, and it was fascinating to see them push and nudge each other quite hard for a minute or two before settling down to some serious grazing and then starting up again.  We had a perfect view of these behemoths and it was bittersweet to reflect that this species was rescued from near-extinction (fewer than 50 left in the wild around 1900), painstakingly restored to plenty and now faces the spectre of extinction again, all because of the long, elegant "horns" (really made of something closer to matted hair or fingernails) with which they were now battling.  A few days ago, a white rhino was killed inside a zoo in France for its horn, while museums have seen their rhino specimens dehorned by determined thieves.  Last year about three white rhinos a year were poached in South Africa alone.  There are still estimated to be about 20,000 white rhinos left in southern Africa (the northern subspecies is probably extinct in the wild now), but at 1000 poaching incidents a year, that leaves only a few decades for the remaining rhinos.  All this went through our minds as we sat watching, spellbound, this slow-motion intermittent sumo.  We realized how lucky we were to be able to see it, and that perhaps in a generation no-one will see this sort of spectacle ever again outside a heavily-guarded zoo.

White rhino crossing our jeep track, Hlane, with his valuable horn

We drove back to the campsite, tucked into a hearty post-game-drive brunch of eggs, bacon and corn fritters and drove south out of the country into South Africa, past a string of commercial sugar farms that should be making the country wealthy, but is apparently benefitting mostly the king.  It had been a fun, interesting and thought-provoking week in Swaziland.  Now it was time for our tour of South Africa to begin.

Tune in a few days from now (I hope) for a longer blog post on our shorter-than-expected exploration of South Africa.