Swaziland for the day

We were initially supposed to have had 9 build days in Mozambique. However, the village we were working in at the last minute decided to hold a grand meeting for the whole village for 2 days - something about doing some rain dancing, or to prepare for the government elections, I'm still not sure which - which meant we had to find something else to do! Given that we were very near the southern tip of the country, about an hour away from the border with Swaziland, we ended up going to a new country as a day trip.

I actually know very little about Swaziland, except from the limited information I got from Esther and Clare, who have both done Technoserve there. Apparently it is one of the more developed countries in southern Africa, 'a bit like Switzerland'. When we told Aida our Habitat contact in Mozambique that we were going, she literally screwed her face up and said 'it is very cold ... and very small'. Hmmm.

Our main destination was Hlane Royal National Park, a game reserve focused on the conservation of animals, which were previously almost wiped out in the area. After having been to Selous in Tanzania and the Maasai Mara in Kenya, I thought I would be safari'ed out by now, but it is magical seeing animals in the wild.

We saw masses and masses of white rhinos:

Got scared by elephants - we also did a walking safari where we were told to walk very quickly away when we saw one!:

And there were my favourite animals, the hippo - if you squint really hard they really are in this picture, honest:

We managed to try some Swazi food too whilst we were there. They had their own version of porridge-like stodge, which was much coarser and nowhere near as nice as xima. We also inadvertently had some wildebeest sausage. We all thought it was beef, and then found out what it was! It was all a bit heavy though:

We also sampled their local beer - although I suspect this is a South African brand brewed in Swazi:

All in all, not a bad little day trip! We only saw a little part of the country, but it was certainly a lot better than Aida had prescribed it to be.