Home » South Africa Swaziland » Southern Africa 2000 - Part 5: Soweto and Swaziland

After spending one day in Pretoria and going on a guided tour of Soweto, we headed for Swaziland. We stayed two days at the orphanage in Nhlangano before travelling by kombi to Mbabane. From there we arranged a hiking tour in the Komati Valley. It was a really beautiful place, although our crazy guide turned out to be slightly disorganised.

Southern Africa 2000 - Part 5: Soweto and Swaziland

Jan Arild Teland
2006-05-09 00:02:39

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to do with the recent demonstrations in favour of implementation of democratic reform.

Around 12.50 we arrived in Mbabane. It was now raining heavily, so we just ran to the nearest shelter we could find and stood there for a while hoping the rain would subside. It eventually got a little better and we went out into the rain towards Mbabane Backpackers, which was located only a few hundred meters from the bus station. They only had dorm rooms, which was okay by us since we got a large room to ourselves, at least for the moment. The room was nice and big with 8 bunk beds, so there were many to chose from. We told Bruno, the guy in charge, that we wanted to do their Komati Valley tour tomorrow, which he said would be arranged.

We were both hungry and went down to "The Mall" to find somewhere to eat. We ended up sharing a pizza at a place called Pizzapasta. After that we walked around looking for the National Parks office that we both thought we had seen there last year, but it wasn't there today. It turned out to have been closed a few months ago, as Bruno at Mbabane Backpackers told us later. The same had happened with the two cinemas in town!

We also looked in some shops for Christmas presents to the kids, but decided to leave it for the last day. Our flight tickets home needed to be reconfirmed, so we looked for a travel agency where this could be accomplished. On Allister Miller Street we found one. They wanted a commission of R25 to reconfirm each ticket, so we were given the phone numbers to make the calls ourselves. However, on calling the airlines, the number either didn't work, or we were put on hold, and in the end we decided it was cheaper to have it all arranged at the travel agency. The man made the phone calls for a discount price of R30 and everything was fine.

At an Internet café (R10 for 30 minutes) in the Mall we sent some e-mails to family and friends, before buying some bread, cheese and jam at ...