Now open your eyes! See one in five people infected with HIV/Aids, see an entire country living from international aid and a king with ten wives, who imposes a five year sex ban on the country’s youth to stop the HIV pandemic spreading just days before marrying a teenage girl. See this and wake up to the harsh realities of Swaziland!
This weekend I went on my first trip since coming to South Africa: Ewa and I decided to visit our fellow ODI’s in Swaziland and Daan, Phoebe and Nicolene to join us on our road trip!
The journey there was very scenic and peaceful: Driving through lush mountains while singing along to the Killers and eating nougat is great fun and the journey would have been perfect if not for that unfortunate bird and Jenny’s (ODI Swaziland) appalling directions! Whilst slightly speeding on the motorway, a bird was so stupid as to dive in front of our car and never made it back up. When stopping at a petrol station, we realized that the poor creature was slammed across our grill and stuck! Yuk! We tried to brush the poor thing off, but if broke into two pieces – half a dead bird was now on the floor and the other even more stuck to the car... I will spare you the rest of the story! And then after managing to get through customs and boarder controls without major trouble, so close to our destination that I could almost feel the glass of wine in our hands, we got lost because Jenny’s directions might have just as well been clues taken from a murder mystery! Five reasonably bright young people (all desperate for a drink) could not decipher them and we almost spend longer driving around Mbabane (the capital city with a stunning 16.000 inhabitants) than getting there…
Once we got there, we enjoyed a quick drink and shot straight off to Swazi’s finest (and possibly only) nightclub, where the Swazi Jack Johnson was playing his first live concert in a long time. The venue was breathtaking! Designed like a big homestead with straw roofs, rocks and open fires, the place had the most amazing atmosphere! It was great to see that it wasn’t trying to be a New York style fancy nightclub, but really fitted into its surroundings! The singer was brilliant – I would have bought a CD straight away but unfortunately he has not managed to find a device in Swaziland that lets him record one – and we chilled and danced with our drinks around a fire!
The next day we went for a walk in one of Swaziland’s beautiful game parks. Set in between lush mountains and with an abundance of little lakes, the Mliwane National Park allows visitors to walk around unguarded. Obviously this means that there are no major predators in the park, but we saw lots of zebras, wildebeest, warthogs, hippos (the mammal, which kills most people on the African continent) and crocodiles. It is a pretty scary experience to walk along a scenic peaceful lake and suddenly discover a five meter long crocodile by the shore … fortunately it did not seem to be hungry as it showed very little interest in us. Still, we chose to leave it alone and go to the Royal Swazi Hotel for a drink by the pool.
The Royal Swazi Hotel is situated on top of one of the hills and it feels like entering a whole new world. The main roads are filled with street vendors, the occasional cow crossing and children playing with old wheels. Turning into the long driveway of the hotel, all of this suddenly disappears – the grass seems to be cut by hand, the golf course is one of the best in Africa and the actual hotel breathtaking! Sitting by the pool with our drinks, felt amazing and so wrong at the same time. Surrounded by other expats and wealthy local families, all the problems of the country, the poverty and the daily struggle for survival suddenly became unreal… I guess this is the place posh tourists stay at when they want to “explore” Africa and when they come home, they tell their friends that the country is really not as poor as media make it seem.
In the evening we celebrated an epic party for Jenny’s birthday and braiied the biggest steak I have ever seen. Everything else had to come off the grill first as it filled the whole damn thing! It was also the best one I have ever had and sitting there under the Swazi sky, with a glass of wine and my steak I could not have been happier. The trip was a real break from Pretoria and a holiday during which we could completely relax and enjoy life!
At the same time I realised once again just how lucky we South African ODI’s are. As much as I loved my weekend in Swaziland, I do not think I could live there. The work that the ODI’s do is fantastic and they get an incredible amount of responsibility (one girl seems to be doing the budget singlehandedly!), but at the same time they told us tales of having to share one computer with seven other people! Seven! But what would really be a problem for me is the complete lack of social life. There are three restaurants in Mbabane - the posh one being Nando’s – but no cinemas, no bars, no nothing! The next problem is that all the locals are much poorer than the expats so that in order to spend time with them, you have to do things that really do not cost any money at all. A beer after work is already too much for their budget, so that you are almost forced to spend time with the other expats. And as lovely as I am sure they all are, I would find it very claustrophobic to have such a restricted circle of friends. Most of them are volunteers, who only stay for a few months to work on HIV projects anyway and I imagine making good friends really must be a bit of a challenge!
So as we left Swaziland, I took with me some great memories and the promise to come back and visit soon. But as we left, it almost felt like a relief that we could do so and return to the “safety” and comfort of Pretoria’s busy roads, the malls with all the shops and all other “luxuries” of life in a big city!
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