Breakfast is included, which is good as it’s a full english, and relatively good, especially compared to dinner yesterday. It’s served in silence by our semi-mute host. We decide to stay another night but to get dinner elsewhere.
We drive into town for provisions and find a ‘U-Save’ supermarket, where everything is half the price of Mozambique. They also have a fridge full of bottled water but it’s ‘flavoured’ water, and Nick is unimpressed. He seems to get through several gallons a day.
Thirty kilometres south of Pigg’s Peak is the M___________ Nature Reserve. The road to get there covers some spectacular scenery, and frequently passes cattle simply standing still by the side of the road. You’ll round a bend and see a cow just stood in the centre of the road, absolutely oblivious to the obstruction it’s causing.
We come to a bridge curving over a picturesque valley, and a man is standing in the road waving at us. I slow down, never sure in these situations whether the frantic waving means ‘Help! My children are trapped in an abandoned mine shaft’, or ‘Please visit my shop’. To be honest it has always been the latter so far. In this case y slowing down is greeted by even more enthusiastic gesturing and pointing at the side of the road, where two small children, dressed in costumes covered in leaves, start bobbing up and down in a bizarre dance.
I drive around him. Nick refuses to take a photo on the grounds that they’ll want paying for it.
At the other end of the bridge, another pair of identical performers await, this time with a less enthusiastic chaperone, and start bobbing again as we approach. Nick hasn’t got his camera ready.
Getting into the park, we’re on Africa time again. It involves making a hand drawn copy of the park map (which they’ve run out of), and signing the visitors register (last visitor yesterday afternoon). The roads within the park are ingenious, consisting of concrete ridges embedded in the grassland, making the road surface green and well camoflaged against the landscape. The weather is perfect, with a few white clouds in an otherwise clear sky.
Following Nick’s map leads us to the first picnic spot, where there are fixed tables, toilets and the start of a marked trail. I decide to sit under a tree and chill out for a while, while Nick tackles the trail. Ninety minutes later he returns complaining that he has become unfit in the last two weeks.
We drive on to the next point on our map – a trailhead for four trails, which are marked with meaningless symbols like triangle, square, trapezium, parallel curves. On the way we suddenly spy an antelope of some kind standing on a hill. Nick spies his first opportunity to use the SLR for a wildlife shot, and starts the lengthy process of getting the camera bag out, extracting camera, strap around neck, turn camera on…. fortunately the antelope has clearly been to the Nick Ambrose school of wildlife photography, and stands absolutely still while he faffs. We follow the signs to the parallel curves trail, which is supposed to go past a waterfall. The trails are well marked with red pumpkin-like stones painted with symbols and icons in white. Following the trail for around half an hour, we start hearing water bubbling, and discover a stream. Nick, as ever, wants to dam it. Considering the environmental impact of excessive whimsical damming of rivers, and the lack of suitable building materials, we agree that a bridge would be a better idea. I sit in the shade to apply another layer of sunscreen while Nick finds a stick, lays it across the stream and declares his bridge open to traffic. Insect traffic, presumably.
The trail splits into the triangle trail and the curves trail, though the triangle trail is closed due to a Bald Ibis nesting. I’m impressed that the Swazi parks service are this attentive to the maintenance of the park and the wildlife. After all, if we’re the first visitors today, then they’re making a pittance from the entrance fees at £2 a go.
It takes another 40 minutes to get to the end of the trail, which meanders through open grassland and over and round several hills. The last few hundred metres are particularly steep, first up, and then down. Overall we’ve descended more than we’ve climbed, and yet we end up at the top of the waterfall. A French couple are already there, having overtaken us while Nick was planning and building his bridge.
On our way back, black clouds start congregating in a corner of the sky, and we head rumbling in the distance. We’re still 20 mins from the car when the sky is mostly black overhead and the thunder is coming quite distinctly from all directions. The temperature drops ten degrees, and the wind picks up suddenly. This gradually gets worse and as we scramble over the top of the hill to see the car in front of us, the few drops of rain is starting to turn serious. We get a few spectacular shots of the storm, with the clear sunny weather clearly visible on the other side, before fleeing the park before it becomes impassable by a weedy two-wheel-drive hire car.
We get to the exit gate at about quarter to six (park closes at 6pm). For dinner we’ve decided to try the Hawene Lodge, an upmarket hotel village about 5km further along the road. We arrive to find an immaculate complex of ‘beehive’ cottages build in a combination of Swazi and western style, set around a circular thatched restaurant. We enter to find it deserted, and ask the barman if we can book for dinner. He tells us it’s fully booked – a big disappointment considering the distance to the next decent restaurant. At least it’s still early. We leave the – still deserted – restaurant and head for the exit, and are briefly acknowledged by a friendly but important-looking chap who asks us if we’re guests. I explain that we had simply intended to come to dinner but had discovered that the restaurant is fully booked, and this causes him some confusion. He insists that it is not fully booked. Following him back into the restaurant the staff get a firm dressing down from the chap who is presumably the owner, and we sit in the bar area waiting for dinner to be served.
The bar area has a TV tuned to CNN, and in our 20 minutes of being back in touch with the ‘real world’ we discover that Hillary Clinton has NOT said what her role is in the new Obama administration. This is CNN’s lead story for half an hour.
Nick disappears saying something about taking photos of the sunset, but I am reading the paper and not concentrating. He returns with some spectacular pictures and I’m kicking myself for not going out to see it.
Dinner is a ‘brie’ – African word for barbeque. Three different meats, ‘pap’ (which I know as Sadza from my time in Zimbabwe) and salad. It’s fantastic, and cheaper than the dodgy dinner we had last night. The restaurant does fill up a bit more, but gets nowhere near full.
It’s about 40km back to our hotel, where we find that the power is out. In fact it’s hard to spot the hotel at all with no lights on. Since we’re only going to bed anyway it doesn’t matter much.