Swaziland

I had some adventures in Swaziland a while back. I set off with 7 others for a weekend of rafting and the Brushfire annual music festival.

 A visit from some larger-than-life party animals.

The first part of the adventure was just navigating the roads. It’s a ~5 hr drive in good circumstances, and roads in SA are rarely good circumstances. In this case, the road is single lane each way for most of the drive, and they were doing work on probably ~40km of road. This meant lots of stops as they turned the road into a one-way alternating road. It’s classic SA road work: rather than devoting a lot of resources to quickly finishing sections, they tear up big chunks that take forever to complete. (On the way back some signalman switched the sign on the other end too early, and we ended up dodging oncoming cars for most of the stretch.)

My car eventually made it to the border, where we stopped at a tiny border crossing – 2 guards on each side with not much activity. Both the SA and Swazi guards were watching the final of the SA soccer league (the Orlando Pirates came out champions), and that struck me as an interesting statement.

After the border post we bumped along dirt roads for several km. Swazi was truly a sleepy country as a whole and sparsely populated; the whole country felt like rural hill country Texas – and had the same beauty to me. Most of the country is ringed by a range of low mountains, so it really feels separate/quasi cut off from its neighbors. It’s also the last remaining absolute monarchy in Africa, though that has recently been challenged by riots and I don’t anticipate that lasting too much longer.

A friend of mine sells insurance in Swaziland and said she had to modify their policies when she encountered an issue. “Where do I put my other wives? You mean I can only insure one wife and kids as my family?” Their policies now accommodate multiple wives. (The king had to stop taking more wives because of a tight government budget.)

Bush Fire was different than I expected. It was much smaller – maybe 1000 people there on Saturday night. The crowd was much whiter (~50%?) than I anticipated; lots of Portuguese speakers, which I peg either as Mozambicans or tourists who came over from Moz. At ~$30 for a one-day ticket, however, they definitely weren’t aiming this at the local crowd.

Between acts at Bush Fire 2011.

That was also the evening of the Champions League final, and they deferred to this by setting up a tent with a projected screen. The place was absolutely packed; I got their early and got a seat, but didn’t leave when my group couldn’t find a spot because there would be no reclaiming my prime real estate. The trash talk was lively and the elbows were sharp when jockeying for space. In the end Barcelona handily beat Man U and made it look pretty. I’d say more than half the crowd was pulling for Man U, however.

I can truthfully say I’ve been all over Swaziland, because the next day we drove ~ 2 hours to the rafting site across the country. Half was on dirt roads. There is no way even with good directions I could find my way back to where we went in/came out of the river.

The photos of the king and king's mother.

On our way out that night my car realized we had entered the country a different way than the rest of the group, so we exited by the main border post to SA – which meant there was a metal building with marked parking spaces outside.

Swaziland was beautiful. It’s definitely impoverished, but for now you can visit a mostly undisturbed country and enjoy it.