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After taking a look at the nice beach outside Maputo we returned to the "safety" of Swaziland. The next day we took the bus to Johannesburg and stayed the night at the Drifters Inn. On our final day in South Africa we went on a guided tour of Johannesburg before flying home to Norway in the evening.

South African Adventure 1999, Part 11: From Swaziland back to Johannesburg and home to Oslo

Jan Arild Teland
2006-05-08 20:37:40

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but when we stopped and got out of the car, two children came up to us begging for food. We gave them some of our leftovers, they seemed very happy with.

We could hardly see anyone bathing, but there were some sort of religious groups that seemed to be having some kind of seremonies at the beach. We couldn't quite figure out what the purpose of their behaviour was, but some people were playing drums while some other guys were being held under water by other members of the group. According to Borgny and Gunnar these seremonies could last all day, and got more and more "violent" with time. However, we didn't have time to wait around this long, as we had to get back to Swaziland.

After returning from the beach, Gunnar drove us around a little bit in the center of Maputo while pointing out interesting sights to us. There were a lot more people in the streets now and it seemed to be getting quite lively here today as well.

Next, we just drove the same route back to the borderpost at Namaacha where we had come in yesterday. Today the border was a lot quieter, probably because it was Sunday. After completing the formalities at the Mozambique side, we got into the car to drive across to the Swaziland side. However, suddenly a guy came up to our car, stopped us and demanded to see our documents. Gunnar was quite suspicious, but showed him the papers. The guy looked at the documents and then told us that we had to pay him a tax of 50 Rands. Now Gunnar was 100% sure that the guy was just a conman, so he grabbed the papers from him, ignored his wild protests and drove off.

After crossing the border, we made another compulsory stop at the petrol station of Gunnar's friend. It was quite amusing being back, because the guy once again had to shake everyone's hand before he could get on with filling up the car with petrol!

We now drove straight back to Manzini where we made a short toilet stop and bought some ...