Friday 6/13/2008- Sunday 6/15/2008
On our 8 hour bus ride into Swaziland, we met three girls and one guy staying at the same backpackers as us. Two sisters from Sweden (Joann and Marie), one guy from Sweden (Joe) and a girl from Manchester, England (Hannah) joined us as we went to Sundowner’s Pub next door for dinner and some football. Dermot had peri-peri chicken and Katie had a chicken burger as we watched Italy almost lose to Romania in the Euro 2008 competition. We felt slightly old as we learned that our fellow Baz Bus travelers are all under the age of 25…. But we enjoyed sharing our travel stories.
We slept in the next morning and had breakfast with the girls that we met. (Joe from Sweden left for Mozambique early in the morning) We dropped off our laundry at the front desk and then headed into town to check out the markets. Catching a ‘bus’ into town was rather entertaining. There are no proper buses; of course…this is Africa. So we simply hailed down a ‘soccer mom’ type mini van to give us a ride into town. The cost was very reasonable, around $0.50 for an 8 km ride. Once we got into town, we explored the markets and small downtown area. We picked up some groceries for breakfast tomorrow as we as our bus ride to Maputo, Mozambique.
Back to the backpackers, we had to catch two little buses, as well as pat twice the price—got to love Africa. It was still all less than US$1, but just random. We ended up resting for a bit, then catching another minibus into the eZulwini Valley. We visited another craft market, but we still couldn’t bring ourselves to buy anything…just yet. We walked to the closest hotel/casino at the Royal Swazi Spa Hotel and had a nice sundowner.
For dinner, we caught a taxi to Malandela’s, a very tasty western African fusion restaurant. We thoroughly enjoyed the incredibly reasonable priced food and drinks before heading into the nightclub next door, House on Fire. We apparently went in the back door, where we soon realized…we were wedding crashers. We were supposed to meet our friends from the hostel here, but we put two and two together when we saw the white table cloths and copious amounts of wine bottles for free on all the tables. We headed back to the hostel soon after, and we packed up for our big day of travel to Mozambique tomorrow.
Since it was Sunday, we realized that the ‘minibuses’ won’t start heading to Maputo until 10:00am. So we rounded up our two Swedish sisters and one Dutch friend (Aggie), as well as Hannah (who wanted to know where the buses were) to head to the “Old KFC” where we’ll apparently find minibuses heading to Maputo, Mozambique. We were glad to have our safety in numbers as we took our 200km ride to a new country.
Katie was the only non-local riding in the front seat, next to a local woman and our driver. The driver played one of Tupac’s hip hop albums for the entire 4 hour ride, along with drinking red bull energy drinks and eating nothing but mint candies. Katie was also the only person to have put on her safety belt, which proved to be a hazard. Why? As we were driving along, the truck in front of us had a huge piece of plastic fly off to completely cover our windshield! About 2 seconds went by when Katie noticed that the driver was not decelerating, so she whipped off her seatbelt and pulled the plastic from the front windshield. Although Katie’s heart was racing, no one else even seemed to have noticed…it may as well have been a bug that hit the windshield. Meanwhile, in the back of the minibus, Dermot and our three new friends were crammed like sardines.
We all got a break once we reached the Mozambique boarder, where we walked across to get our passports stamped and pay our visa fees. We then all hopped back in the minibus taxi and drove another hour until we reached Maputo.