Melodies of African Kingdom
Short visit to one last real kingdoms of Africa, where the king is The King, has tens of wives and hundreds of children and where life goes slooow
Swaziland is one those 2 countries that lie in the middle of Republic of South Africa (the other one being Lesotho). It’s a small country and it’s still a proper kingdom, where the king has 70 wives and 250 children. Respect, dude, ehm, sorry, Respect Your Majesty!
It is mountainous country and our first night we stayed in a mountain hut, after driving long hours in dark, curvy roads full of pedestrians walking as if they just wanted to get run over. Pretty tough driving I can tell you. It was truly cold at night and we had to make fire to warm us up. Luckily our cute mountain cottage was well prepared and had fireplace and some wood to burn. We did a bit of hiking in the mountains, that seemed world apart from the Africa of the lowlands, I chased some wild zebras and antelopes that roamed the mountains, and well that was it for our little mountain getaway.
Swaziland is peaceful and scenic country. After checking the capital city Mbabane for a day, we went to see one cultural show in a preserved traditional village in Ezulwini Valley. The village was in reality long abandoned of course, although they pretended that they still live there, but despite being fake it was really nice. And the singing and traditional dancing show that the “villagers” put on was simply breath taking. Normally I try to avoid these “cultural shows” set up for tourists, but this one was really beautiful. First of all it was happening somewhere deep in Swaziland and not in Hilton hotel in Maui, and second, the singing was so amazing that I almost started to cry. They sang some African traditional songs and some gospel and I was sitting there in awe, seriously touched by the beauty of their voices, melodies and harmonies. Those folks surely can sing!
For the last of the 3 nights in Swaziland we actually slept in one of those traditional houses (of course a fake one), near the border with South Africa.
