One night in Swaziland

We spend a night in Swaziland only because on our journey through South Africa, to reach Kruger from Tembe Park, it's the shortest route. But since there are opening and closing times at the customs, and since, from what I've read, the time to enter the country is uncertain, and since there are often low speed limits and the roads aren't always optimal, in short, we're forced to spend a night there. At customs we indeed spend more than an hour: there's a whole coach of French people before us, only 2 counters are open and it seems that all the operating employees are in the same hall as us, to keep changing the order of the queue, rather than on the other side of the counters.

In the end, mix and remix, racism, all the black people who arrived before and after us pass well ahead of all the white people! Oh well! In any case, luckily there's no entry visa to pay, just a kind of toll for the car, a very small one. I chose to take the eastern road, along the border with Mozambique, instead of crossing the country through the capital, because it seemed to me anyway the shortest route. I had read a lot about the fact that this country is much poorer and more "African" than South Africa. In reality, maybe it's the road we took, but it doesn't seem so at all to us; on the contrary, it seems to us very industrious. What we see are sugar-cane plantations as far as the eye can see and a lot of sugar mills and mines, I think of coal.

Apart from about thirty km with a really rough road, where children now and then filled the potholes with stones and other materials and then asked for alms as a reward for the service rendered, I didn't see other signs of particular poverty. We slept near the town of Siteki, in a very pretty little house inside the Mabuda Farm, and in the evening we had dinner in the restaurant of the only hotel in the town, a town where we didn't see any other white people. It's a mountainous area also distinguished by trees and not very dense vegetation, but typically tropical. The next morning we set off again and, in this case, the customs crossing was very quick. If you get the chance, fill up with petrol and/or buy food if needed, because everything is much cheaper than the already cheap South Africa.

There's another currency more or less equivalent to the Rand, which they gladly accept anyway, and be careful, because they often don't have the device for credit cards. They had warned us to take the opportunity here to buy some souvenirs, again for the good prices, but we didn't find a single vendor along the road.