Exciting Trip to the Kingdom of Swaziland!

Houses and garbage on the outskirts of Maputo. I find it hard to get used to the garbage everywhere.

In order to get our residency visas (DIRE) to work and stay in Mozambique, we had to travel to the capital of Swaziland, Mbabane (pop. 60,000), and visit the Mozambican Chancery with our duly notarized papers. We had a wonderful visit to this small, beautiful, clean, cool, friendly, mountainous country – embedded between Moz. and South Africa.

Left: The bus station in Mbabane with small mini-buses, called chapas in Moz and combi in Swaziland. Right: Swazi Plaza shopping centre - an example of how clean we found Swaziland. Garbage cans were everywhere, garbage men worked on Sundays (!) and swept the streets and sidewalks as well. People seemed to take great pride in their country.

The population of Swazi is 1.1 million people – roughly the population of Maputo or Ottawa. Swazi gained its independence in 1968 and King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch, has ruled the country since 1986. Democratic reformers would like to have a constitutional, rather than an absolute, monarchy. Sadly, Swazi has “the highest HIV infection rate in the world (almost 39% for adults between 15 and 49 years of age) and life expectance has fallen from 58 to 33 years”. (Lonely Planet’s Southern Africa, 4th ed., 2007 p.601)

We took a chapa (mini-bus holding 16-18 tightly packed passengers clutching their knapsacks and bags on their laps) from Maputo to the frontier at Goba (75 km), were all processed through each country’s border, this took about 1 hour total, and then drove onto Manzini (72 km). There we caught another chapa to Mbabane (31 km). The entire trip takes about 4 hours depending on border and passport complications of all the passengers.

In Mbabane, we stayed at the Thokoza Church Stay/Conference Centre which was very clean, safe and reasonably priced – since VSO was covering our visa travel costs. A small room with 2 single beds, desk and chair, and clothes cupboards costs 240 Rand (approx. $29 US) per night and included breakfast for 2!

The Moz. Chancery accepts passports and papers early in the morning and processes them for 2 pm the same day so, in between visits, the taxi took us to Swazi Plaza, a shopping centre. It is cheaper to shop in Swazi for clothes, shoes, electrical products than in Moz – so I bought a 9 band radio so we can listen to the news in English and Portuguese back in Maputo (100 R or $12 US).

Once we picked up our passports, we paid for a little holiday to Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary in the Malkerns Valley (45 mins. from Mbabane).

Read my next blog entry to see wildlife pics... We were all very excited by this little holiday!!!

Love Karen