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“How are you today, sir?” asked the young Swazi policewoman who’d just pulled me over. Angela and I had driven around a bend in our hire car and the lady in question, together with a colleague (armed with a speed camera) had just flagged us down from their hiding position inside a bus stop. After telling the woman I was fine she smiled and informed me I’d been exceeding the speed limit. I turned to look at Angela who looked mildly amused but offered no sympathy and so turned back to the officer.

Buggeration, I thought bitterly. Speeding in Swaziland! Mustering the most shame-faced expression I had at my disposal, I told the officer I was sorry and added that I would pay more attention to my speed from now on. She nodded but asked me to get out of the car and asked me to look at the camera that had recorded my speeding offence. I had been doing 71km/hour in a 60km/hour zone. Wondering what would happen next I was pleasantly surprised when I was made to cough up only 60 Emalangeni (£5.50). After handing over the money to the extremely cordial and professional police officers, I was passed a receipt and allowed to proceed, armed with my first ever speeding ticket in over twenty years of driving, courtesy of the Swaziland Big Bend Police Station.

Swaziland was my seventieth country visited. From Johannesburg, Angela and I had driven east for about four hours until we’d reached the South African border. Like many roadside borders, it was a ramshackle collection of buildings where we had to queue with a mob of people all waiting to get this piece of paper stamped, or that form filled in, and then to be told that we hadn’t got this section stamped by that person in the booth over there. Conversely, the Swazi border building, just along the road from the South African one was highly organised and after fifteen minutes we were free to enter one of the smallest nations in Africa.

Swaziland, I found out, was only one of three remaining monarchies in Africa (the other two being Lesotho and Morocco) and the current king, Mswati III featured heavily on the front of the local currency. He became king in 1986 aged just 18, and inherited a country with two startling facts: one was that statistically speaking, Swaziland was the place in the world where a person was most likely to be hit by lightning, and the other was that over a quarter of the adult population was HIV positive - one of the highest rates in the world.

In 2001, to combat the deadly thread of Aids, King Mswati reinstated an old law whereby all Swazi women aged below 18 were banned from having sex. To implement this ruling, girls under the age of 18 were required to wear a blue and yellow tassel, effectively marking them off-limits to any lusty lads. And if anyone was caught breaking this rule they were fined one cow. Clearly, policing this bizarre law was difficult, especially when the king himself decided to marry a local 17-year-old girl (his thirteenth wife). However, to pay his dues, Mswati did relinquish a cow as remittance. Mswati’s father also had an eye for the ladies. He’d ended up marrying seventy women and fathering over two hundred children. As of 2010, the current ruler has only managed to sire a paltry twenty-four.

The Swazi border town was made up of a petrol station, a line of trucks and a few small eateries, all of which we bypassed in favour of heading onwards to the capital, Mbabane. Billboards advertising casinos were placed along the roadside, as were stalls selling fruit and vegetables. Occasionally we’d pass people waiting for the minibus taxis that plied the route, always a feature of African roads. The scenery beyond the highway was what caught our eye though, a blend of limestone rocks and torrid hills and mountains. Just then the heavens opened (thankfully with a lack of lightning) and a fog descended, obscuring the tops of the peaks. “It’s like the Lake District,” I said as we drove up and down a winding two-lane highway devoid of busy traffic. “And I can’t believe we’re in Africa.”

The Mountain Inn Hotel was located just south of Mbabane, and we arrived with the rain pelting down. The lady at the desk apologised for the weather. “But perhaps tomorrow will be okay,” she told us. “But during the rainy season I do not trust any weather reports. I only trust what I can see through this window. And I will see what it is like tomorrow with my own eyes.” We finished off the evening in the Irish-themed hotel bar, where I managed to sample the local lager, Sibebe. It was delicious.

The next morning we awoke with a dense layer fog covering the nearby hills. With the hellish sound of rain drumming down upon the roof of our apartment, a dip in the pool was clearly out of the question. The weather was actually scuppering our plans for the day because we’d been planning to visit one of the game reserves in Swaziland, but with the weather so foul, we didn’t fancy sitting in the back of an open-topped jeep with only the sounds of hooves being audible through the mist. Instead we decided to drive into the capital, only five minutes from our hotel.

Mbabane turned out to be a small town flanked by some gorgeous mountains in the distance. Thankfully our arrival had coincided with a lift in the weather, bringing colour and heat into the otherwise nondescript town. Swaziland’s capital actually looked fairly okay, with none of the piles of rubbish or honking traffic that seemed to plague other African cities. That said, Mbabane would never win awards for its beauty or tourist sites but it did have a nice shopping centre complete with a plastic Santa.

In one shop I bought the Swazi Observer because a headline had caught my eye. The article described the funeral of a royal prince and led with the headline:Prince’s widow goes bananas, bolts out of mourning house, insults mourners, takes dead husband’s car and runs over two mourners.Another story described how a 23-year-old woman had been assaulted with sticks and fists by her own mother-in-law over an argument about washing powder.

A further story involved gruesome murder and mayhem. According to the report, residents of a small Swazi town had been left grasped by fear when a 38-year-old man involved in the drugs trade was found dead under a bridge. Apparently his murderers had shot him and then had tried to dispose of the body by throwing it in a local river. The corpse hadn’t disappeared though and was soon washed up, forcing the murderers to rethink their disposal methods. This time they chopped the body into pieces and set it alight. The murderers were still at large. But perhaps the most worrying article was tucked away on page 16. It talked about how a seventeen-year-old albino girl was in hiding. She was the older sister of an 11-year old girl, also an albino, who had been shot and beheaded in August.

“I can’t believe they still do this,” I said, talking about the article I’d just read. Across certain sections of Africa, albinos were killed for their body parts which were then sold to witch doctors because people believed the parts could cure disease or even prolong life. In Tanzania, a fifty-year-old man had chopped off the limbs of a 5-year-old albino girl and had then drunk her blood. For this he’d received the death sentence.

“Let’s go to Piggs Peak,” suggested Angela. “It’s about an hour away and along the way there are lots of craft stalls to stop at.” Piggs Peak (no apostrophe) was a small town in the northern part of Swaziland named after William Pigg, a gold prospector who’d founded the settlement. Today, the main industry was logging and as we headed up a narrow road with dramatic mountains on both sides, we could see evidence of this. Large swathes of forest had been felled with piles of logs left along the roadside.

Piggs Peak turned out to be a bit of a let down. It was a busy trading town with large groups of people going about their daily business and not much in the way of tourist sites. The story we’d read about the woman running over some of her fellow mourners had occurred in Piggs Peak the day previously. With nothing much to do or see, we didn’t linger and instead drove onwards.

“This is gorgeous,” said Angela as we gazed down into a valley below. We were sat in a restaurant which was part of a craft stall populated by weaver birds and large lizards. As in most other places in Swaziland, we had the place more or less to ourselves and could watch the weaver birds at work up in the branches of a nearby tree. “Just look at the view. We can see for miles.”

“What are they doing,” I said as we rounded a bend an hour later. The whole area seemed to be covered in a lush forest of evergreens. Five or six small children were stood at the side of the road and seemed to be dancing. An adult was with them and was beckoning for us to stop. Angela laughed and told me that they were the banana dancers she’d read about, small kids dressed in banana leaves who danced for passing motorists in the hope of getting a bit of change. We stopped the car and watched them for a minute or so before passing them some coins.

Soon we were back on the empty road heading to Mbabane. “What the hell is this about?” I said as the cavalcade of vehicles approached us from the other direction. In front of us, and approaching rapidly, was a convoy of police cars, armoured military vehicles and strangest of all, trucks filled with young men armed with sticks. As we passed the lead vehicle, it flashed its lights and the driver stuck his arm out of his window, gesturing that we should slow down. This we did, and the lead vehicle quickly passed to be replaced by about twenty or so other vehicles. Soon they were all gone leaving Angela and I to wonder what the hell it was all about. It was only later that we learned that they were heading to a traditional dance ceremony linked to the harvest.

The next morning, we set off in a southerly direction towards Durban, South Africa. It was along this stretch of road that I obtained my speeding ticket from the Big Bend Police. Despite this, our short time in the Kingdom of Swaziland had been a good one.

Strengths:
-Small enough to see the sights
-Safer than surrounding South Africa
-Beautiful scenery
-No ‘hassle factor’ like in other African cities
-Not much litter
-A lot to see for such a small country

Weaknesses:
-The fog and rain of August.
-Speeding fines!

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