Couldn't post this one while I was actually *in* Swaziland...

The dinner drum is drowning out Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So be it. I’m bloody hungry, and this movie has aged very poorly since the time I was ten.

Last night we arrived at Sondzela’s, a hostel deep in tiny Swaziland, a beautiful, astonishingly ill-governed monarchy sandwiched between wealthy South Africa and slightly war-torn Mozambique. King Mswati III is a useless tumour of a ruler, even by the miserable standards of Sub-Saharan Africa. His spasms of idiot largesse are the only things that occasionally drag his little-noticed country of 1 million into international view.

You might think that a minute, impoverished country, dependent on international food aid to stave off famine, would have more pressing priorities than a private royal jet (price tag: $47 million US) or a fleet of dozens of luxury cars ($100,000 apiece). You’d be right, but Mswati III seems to disagree. You’d also be right to think that a culture competing with Botswana for the title of most AIDS-ravaged nation, with an infection rate of about 40%, could use a better national role model than this polygamous lout. But Mswati, in keeping with his favourite annual tradition, will choose his thirteenth wife September. There have been questions in the past about whether all his brides actually want this particular honour, but in Swaziland, that’s a secondary consideration.

Fortunately, (for me, at least) Mswati has as yet been unable to destroy Swaziland’s wide variety of stunning landscapes and lush greenery. When we four entered the country yesterday, beginning the final leg of my African wandering, we met forests, the first reals ones I’ve seen since I arrived. They were thick with pine aromas and shrieking birds. That quickly gave to alpine meadow and then Botswana-style scrubland, and at last the patchy rainforest of Mlilwane Nature Sanctuary, where I now write.

The Vancouver-style drizzle tht has cooled the whole area markedly has thus afforded me a few opportunities that would otherwise have been prohibitively sweaty. This afternoon I rented a mountain bike to wheel around the reserve and fill in a few of the gaps in my wildlife checklist. No big cats live in the park, so sadly I’ve seen not one lion since I arrived in November. I did, however, see hordes of Burchell’s zebra, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that their stripes are terrible camouflage against the dark green grass here. Their symbiotes, the not-actually-blue blue wildebeest, congregated nearby in small herds of a dozen or so. It’s calving season, so most of the animals are guarding midget versions of themselves. Taking a bike, rather than a guided game drive, brought me much closer to these creatures, and to countless other varieties of antelope and the omnipresent warthogs. I kept a safe distance from a three-metre crocodile, though he seemed well (and recently) fed, and not the least bit interested in moving at all, let alone eating me. I similarly avoided the half-metre wide dark tunnel that marked the entrance to a wild dog den, though I would give a kidney for a few photos of those rare animals. Being nocturnal though, and probably with new pups, they apparently don’t take kindly to daytime disturbances outside their dens. I saw a documentary a few weeks ago showing a pack of them devouring an antelope (about my size, instructively enough) in less than a minute, and gave them a wide berth.

Kelly, Natalie and Andrea, my remaining travel companions (Kristi having split in Maputo a few days ago) departed early this morning for their jobs in Gabs. The fools. I’m going to linger in Swazi (everything gets abbreviated around here) for a few more days, trying to find rhinos, giraffes, and maybe even a lion before I head back to Botswana to wrap up the final details of my trip.

Hopefully Mswati III will abide.