I actually slept until 8 AM, getting 10 hours of sleep again. Ash was up a little before me and was ready to go so we went out for breakfast pretty much right away.

We made our way to the first thing on our list for the day, which was the Swazi Cultural Village about 25 minutes away.

If you are not familiar with the history: Eswatini used to be known as The Kingdom of Swaziland. It was formalized as a kingdom in 1881, then was a British protectorate from 1903 to 1968. It has been independent since September 6, 1968. They changed their name to Eswatini in 2018. And it is actually always referred to as the Kingdom of Eswatini. We actually met a current Prince at dinner last night. He asked us to reach out to him and we did. If he ever reaches back, there might be a story to tell there.

We stopped here to pay for the entrance and to get instructions. It was about a kilometer drive down to the village.

The visit consisted of a tour as well as a performance by the local dancers. A young local man met us to give us the tour. He was quite articulate about the history and the traditions of Swaziland culture that still exist today in rural parts of the country. Let’s just say it is a very male dominated culture, where the expectation was that they had at least two wives. Wealth was measured by how many cows they owned. Today, most modern citizens practice a more western culture and are Christians.  so far we haven’t encountered anyone who doesn’t speak English. He said they start learning it when they are five years old. 

The mountain you see in the background is known as Execution Rock. When someone was found guilty of a crime whose punishment was death, that was accomplished by making them jump off the top of the rock over to the steep side. The fall was so steep and so far that it would surely kill them. The bodies were left to be eaten by wildlife. In this culture, bodies were buried in the ground within the home as laid out above. So they weren’t allowed to be brought back in because they didn’t want the bad spirit coming with them. 

I am doing this from my phone again with limited bandwidth and I can’t seem to get the videos uploaded. I will try to remember to do them when we get back to Maputo. 

The other thing to do here was to walk about 10 minutes to a waterfall.

We just stopped at the first sight of it and decided to not go any further. You can see it in the middle of us there.

At that point we had been there about two hours and we were pretty done. We headed back into town, which was about 15 km on the other side of where we were staying. We made it to the main market, which was on everyone’s list of things to do. But it very quickly felt like a place for tourists to be swindled and so we decided to move on.

We ended up going to a mall about a half a mile away figuring we could find something to eat there. And we did.

The 3 women there were sweet, but it took them 45 minutes to make a very simple lunch. It was pretty tasty and only cost us about 19 American dollars. It’s a good thing we weren’t on a schedule. After this, we came back to the resort and I am right now, sitting by the pool, listening to the waterfall and enjoying the lovely weather. Ash is taking a nap. I’ll finish this up when we go for dinner.

There was a male peacock roaming around where I was. He came right by me and I got a video of him, but perhaps I can get that uploaded later.

We heard back from the Prince. We’ll see what happens with that. Perhaps we will meet up with him in Maputo.

We returned to the same restaurant for dinner a little after 6 PM.

Ash had the same starter that he had for lunch yesterday, the rissoles.

Remember, it is winter here. It is 59° now and it’s supposed to get down to 49 by the time we get up in the morning. So we figured out the heater and turned it on before we left for dinner. It should be nice and toasty when we get back.

It is 7:31 PM and we are done. We will head back to the room for some TV and maybe an early bedtime. We are not looking forward to the drive back to Maputo tomorrow which was pretty stressful yesterday. At least this time we know how to handle the border. We will see how it all goes.