A week’s worth of excitement in Southern Africa

Since we last updated the blog our activities have run the gamut from mountain climbing to partying to watching elderly dance-offs, with a little bit of work thrown in here and there… For some reason, Swaziland never seems to be boring! Two weekends ago Eric, Ben, Grace, Will (a South African friend of ours that lives on the farm with us), Stewart (a med student in Scotland that was working at the hospital for a few weeks) and I went on a beautiful drive (that ended up being about 4 hours each way) to the Ngwempisi Gorge in southwest Swaziland. We packed 6 people in Will’s VW Golf (not advisable) for a 1.5-hour drive to the Malkerns valley where we met up with the Swaziland National Historical Society, a group led by old South African and British ex-pats, and about 20 other people representing 6 different nationalities and spanning ages 1 through 65. We drove about 30 minutes before we turned off the paved road onto a glorified dirt path (most of the roads in Swaziland are similar…) for 2 hours of 4X4ing (thankfully we were no longer 6-high in Will’s Golf at this point) to one of the most incredible places that we have yet encountered in Swaziland! (Considering the abnormally positive way we talk about our weekend trips you might think that we have become Swazi tourism ambassadors—unfortunately, it is an unpaid position…) It is so nice to go to so many beautiful locations that feel untouched by capitalism—most Swazis don’t even know that this place exists and you can tell by the condition of the roads! We spent 8 hours driving for about 2 hours of hiking and sightseeing but, nonetheless, it seemed to be well worth it.

We weren’t quite ready to head home at that point so we went to the Summerfield Gardens for some Cokes (the food was expensive so “dinner” turned in to “drinks” quite quickly) and wandered about the beautiful grounds for a while. This is yet another example of “whoa, I didn’t expect that”. It was so nice that Ben and Grace went back this past weekend.

This past week was Stewart’s last week in Siteki prior to heading to Cape Town for a month so we took the opportunity to have multiple parties to celebrate. We had an evening braai at the lily pond that involved copious amounts of food, as usual, a great sunset, and S’mores! It’s amazing how good S’mores taste when you’re not expecting that you can make them. We had to be creative with some of the ingredients but overall it was a great success.

With party #1 out of the way we were on to planning party #2—Grace started planning early on what kind of cake she would make, we got large quantities of beef, we found a new location for our party (we try out a new location almost every time we braai to keep things interesting) and we were set. Grace made yet another knockout cake, we gorged ourselves on beef, and we finished off the night with some very interesting, very strong orange liqueur.

The week at school was interesting, as usual. Very rarely are any classes on time or in the correct order, classes are cancelled on a whim, and teachers just don’t show up sometimes so you just learn to go with the flow. I’ve been trying to work on the concept of accountability when it comes to doing work and consequences for actions, but that is probably going to take more time to resolve than the two months we have left here… Anyway, things are going as well as possible, especially with the advanced students that I have been working with. They are moving pretty well through the new subject matter that we have been covering and it has been pretty satisfying to see the results. I’ll keep you posted on how the others fare…

This past weekend we sort of split ways—Ben and Grace had a day to themselves to celebrate their anniversary (two weeks after the fact) while Eric and I went hiking in Mlilwane Nature Reserve. I’ll let Ben and Grace tell you about their time but Eric and I had quite a time not only in the park but also just trying to get there to begin with. Ben and Grace took the car for their relaxed day together while Eric and I made our way to Mlilwane via bus, taxi, and leg-power. We road on the bus for the hour drive to Manzini, then hopped a taxi to the Malkerns valley, which dropped us off at the road to the park. We then walked 3.5 km to the park entrance and then another 7 or so km through the park to get to our destination: Executioner’s Rock. This mountain is an incredible sight—sheer rock faces going up to an impressive peak surrounded by huge pieces of granite, waterfalls and trees. We didn’t want to go to the welcome center where we would have gotten our park maps because it was another 3.5 km in the opposite direction so we trekked out with barely a clue, just trying to go in the overall correct direction. After a while of hiking we found a trail that looked promising (although we went the wrong direction on it for about 10 minutes before we realized that it wasn’t going to pan out) and we started heading up as fast as we could because we wanted to hike the mountain and still have time to make it back to Manzini to catch a bus back to Siteki. The trail looked very promising until we got to something that you don’t see every day: a toilet inset in a small crevice between two 10-ton boulders. That was the end of the trail. The end. The trail clearly said that it went to the summit so what were we to do? We jumped over the toilet between the 10-ton boulders and started making our own trail as directly up the mountain as we could. This highly fined activity (leaving the posted trails) involved jumping from boulder to boulder on the side of a decently steep mountain, trying to maintain forward momentum while avoiding the occasional hidden chasm. After a rather exciting deviation from the posted trail, we picked up another one that took us to the top of the mountain for incredible views of the surrounding area. You may wonder why it has the name “Executioner’s Rock”. If you see the photos (although they probably don’t do it justice) there is a sheer rock face that descends quite a long way to an unfortunate end at a rock pile—the mountain is aptly named due to its rather barbaric previous use. But, putting that mental picture aside, it is quite a sight to behold that begs to be experienced in more depth later on.

By the time we got to the top and had our fill we were quite a bit past our “turn-around” time, which meant that we had to figure out a faster way to get back to the bus stop. We quickly justified more illegal behavior that involved cutting cross-country far from any posted trails, through brush, across streams, and over “koppies” to a farm that looked like our ticket out. Unfortunately, we found a gatekeeper on our road to freedom that, after talking with his supervisors, said that he would be fired if he let us out that gate. That means that we had another 7-10 km walk across the park in store for us to get out the front gate.

We did not do that.

We then went around the corner out of eyeshot and hopped the fence, barbed wire and all, to achieve our long-sought egress.

Then we got caught.

The beauty of Swaziland is that no one really cares so we just said “sorry…too far…” as we kept walking. At that point, our highly motivated gatekeeper turned around, hung his head and walked back to his ill-attended post. We never saw him again. We eventually got past the kids (and adults) asking for sweets and money and made it back to the main road. Thankfully, luck-sack Eric was with me so we got a taxi within 30 seconds of getting to the road. We made up enough time with that fortunate turn of events that we had just enough time for Malandela’s (good, wholesome, fattening food) for dinner outside on a perfect evening prior to catching another taxi to Manzini in a downpour, and the last bus of the night to Siteki.

What a great weekend! We seem to have way more than our fair share of those. Grace will enlighten you about the rest of the fun we had this past weekend (involving “gogo” dancing grannies and never-ending quartets) so stay tuned!

Thanks for continuing to follow along with us as we live and learn in Africa.

-Brad