Globetrotting

On the first weekend of June, we went to Swaziland, which is about four hours from Joburg by car. Our first trip outside of South Africa since we got here! We made use of the fact that our friend Marco from INSEAD was still staying in Mbabane, where he had been volunteering for a few months since the end of the MBA. In addition, there was the Bushfire festival going on that weekend, which made for another good reason to go check it out.

We left Joburg very early on Saturday morning and drove all the way to the border, where we thankfully didn’t have to wait to get in. Marco picked us up shortly behind the border and took us to his apartment where we were going to stay. After some resting, we then went to the Bushfire festival grounds, where we stayed for the rest of the afternoon, chatting and meeting some of Marco’s friends, watching the acts on the main stage, enjoying the food and the rest of the activities at the festival. The probably most impressive thing we saw was a traditional Swazi dance performance. It consisted basically of ongoing rhythmic drumming and sometimes also singing/chanting and then different groups of dancers doing their individual dances (old mamas, kids, women, and men). All of the dances looked different, but most had a common element: A high kick in which the leg went up to the forehead or even beyond (on the side of the head)! Very impressive.

On Sunday, we wanted to leave in the early afternoon so that we wouldn’t catch the rush hour of all the leaving festival visitors at the border, so we didn’t have too much time for other activities – but we did manage to go to Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary and have an hour-long horseback safari, which was awesome – our first “real” African wildlife other than the Wildebeest we had seen from afar in Golden Gate park: Zebras (the Zebras native to Swaziland are shorter than other Zebras), Kudus, Bonteboks, more Wildebeests, and even some Hippos from afar (that we wouldn’t have been able to distinguish from rocks if the ranger hadn’t pointed them out to us).

After the park, we went to Swazi Candles, a shop that Marco recommended where you can watch them make candles in animal shapes, and then we took off back to Joburg.

Some pictures follow.