The first stop after our escape from the truck was Swaziland. It’s a very compact country, but still full of things to keep us entertained, so we stayed for a week (what I hear you say 1 whole week in a country, we must have lost our minds!!!). We stayed in the Ezulwini Valley, from there we hired mountain bikes and spent a day exploring the area, well I (dan) spent most of my day struggling to make the gears on the bike work and failing miserably in my attempts to ride uphill. Though we did see some great stuff when we got off the bikes and I was able to refocus my eyes. We stopped off at the Swazi Cultural village and had a little poke around to see the way people used to live, then it was back on the bike to visit a near by waterfall, and then back on the bikes to the cultural village again to see some traditional Swazi singing and dancing. They sounded fantastic and the drumming was very powerful, needless to say that Heather and I ended up getting dragged up to learn the dance. Afterwards the one girl said to Heather “you really do struggle don’t you”, makes a nice change from them saying it to me, though my lady had led me back to my seat along time before anyone else finished dancing – I can’t think why. Afterwards we had a cruise around the area, stopping for a rather fantastic lunch, we are no longer in proper Africa and it tastes great. When I finally managed to get the bike back to the campsite, some time after Heather, the rental guy asked how the bike was, I mentioned that it seemed to struggle changing gears, and he said yes that one was a bit lazy, what a perfect match we were. Though having him say this did restore a little of my pride. The following day we headed off to Mkhaya Game reserve, where we got to get very up close and personal with white rhino. Our driver stopped the car and asked if we wanted to get out, Heather was a little unsure to say the least, but it was great to get that close to them, and I think she enjoyed it in the end. The biggest difference with this and other safaris that we have been on was the lunch, we were taken to a rather swanky lodge and fed, Impala stew and lots of other nice food. After lunch we went in search of the elephants that had eluded us that morning, when we finally did find them we got a little to close to a mummy elephant and her baby, which resulted in mummy waving her trunk at us (only a few feet away) and possibly heather requiring new underwear.
After a couple of days we moved on to a different campsite, this time located in the Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary. Stunning location, with warthogs running all round the place, the baby ones were very cute, if a little ugly. We spent a lot of our time here just hanging out in the pool and taking in our surroundings. We did hire mountain bikes again, and had a cruise around the park. We were lucky enough too see a crocodile make a kill and death roll a baby wildebeest. I am pleased to say I had a fully functioning bike, this however did not stop my bum aching. The following day we went for a hike through the park which I loved and Heather tolerated. Oh yeah we also got to eat warthog, and it is very good.
We were sad to leave the Swazi, a very laid back and beautiful country. But we are now in South Africa and the steaks are great.
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