My Travel Adventures

With my time in Africa running out, I decided to spend one of my last spare weekends in Diani. I had intended to visit the local sacred forest when I last visited Mombasa, but a last-minute work commitment kept me from extending my trip by a Friday afternoon. Thus, I went with my friend Wei, leaving Nairobi by plane on a Saturday morning and returning late in the afternoon on Sunday. As far as I can remember, this was the first time I used Wilson Airport, and while I got lost a few times trying to find my way around the place – where each airline seems to have its own departures hall – I found the breakfast at the Safarilink hall surprisingly excellent.

Wei and I arrived in Zanzibar at around half past eight on Friday evening. Our plane had left Nairobi earlier than scheduled: as soon as everyone was seated, it simply headed for the runway and took-off. It seems some African airlines – especially the smaller city-hoppers – are more flexible and informal than their big and unwieldy counterparts. With the half hour we had saved, we had ample time to go through all the formalities at Zanzibar airport. We were apparently the last plane to arrive that evening, so a particularly motivated staff member did his best to rush us through the process, telling us to skip entire sections of the visa application form and shepherding us from one booth to the next.

On my second day in Luanda, I took a guided tour of the city. I had originally booked it since I was a little concerned for my safety in the farther reaches of Luanda and since I also wanted to visit the so-called Viewpoint of the Moon, which can only be reached by car or public transit as it lies over an hour southwest of the city. The Viewpoint of the Moon was the first place we visited. It is a lookout over a barrage of red and beige pinnacles that have been eroded out of the cliff close to the sea, forming a moonlike arena whose bottom is filled with small hills and baobab trees. I imagine these trees must be of special pre-Christan significance to local people, as there is an entire hilly grove of baobabs by the road just south of Luanda where people go – our guide said – “to be closer to God.”

I arrived in Luanda on a Friday morning just in time to clock into my job online. Angolan Airlines operates a direct route between Nairobi and Luanda, but it runs at somewhat strange hours and does not fly every day, hence why I caught my flight at six on a Friday morning and flew back at eleven in the evening on Saturday. Still, I was impressed by the quietness and smoothness of the apparently new and mostly empty Airbus. Not that I was expecting crowds on it, but I found it strange that when we arrived in Luanda, all the passengers fit on a single airport bus.

Scouring the websites of Eswatini’s Tourism Authority, I learned that Eswatini’s Umhlanga festival generally takes place on the last week of August or the first week of September, and that the exact date is announced about a month in advance. Since this is very little time to put together an international ten-day itinerary for four people, I emailed the authority in July to ask whether they already had some idea of the tentative dates. Much to my surprise, I received an answer within a day. The gentleman wrote that the dates of Umhlanga are determined by a council of elders and that there is no way of saying for certain when the ceremony will occur, but that – given the festival has taken place on the first week of September in the past four or five years – he was fairly sure this year would be the same.

We left our hotel in Amsterdam at a leisurely nine o’clock, as we did not have much to do for the day. Our plan was to drive to Barberton and follow the educational route through the Barberton Makhonjwa Mountains, after which we would drive along the border with Eswatini, cross the border on the road leading to Mbabane, visit the Ngwenya Mines, and check into our hotel at the Ludzidzini Royal Village. We were specifically cautioned not to cross the border at the end of the Barberton Mountain route, where the road was supposed to be awful.

We woke up a little after six in the morning to catch our six-thirty safari tour of iSimangaliso. Having returned from our night safari at ten o’clock, I felt too tired to make conversation with the driver for the first hour, so I was exceedingly glad for Joel’s outgoing personality. What we saw on our safari was much less impressive than the previous night’s yield: a few red duikers, some gnus, warthogs, hippos, lots of monkeys, and various birds. However, we explained to our guide at the very beginning that we were interested in strange little critters, so we were not disappointed, and he did not feel under pressure as the morning slipped by and we came across no big cats or elephants.

We woke up at our slightly dinghy guesthouse in Bergville at half past six. We had gone to sleep thinking that we would make an early start to visit the rock art under Giant’s Castle, but Joel woke up to a message from a guide he contacted the night before saying that they were closed – there had been a fire near Giant’s Castle last year and the tourist amenities had not reopened yet. Since we did not want to squander our time, we quickly figured out an alternative plan and set off to procure a junk food breakfast from a nearby gas station.

The hotel shuttle to the parking lot under Sentinel Peak picked us up at half past seven. For three quarters of an hour, the rocky road rattled our bones while the car trundled its way above precipitous cliffs both left and right, so I was glad when we finally hopped off the car and I stood on my own feet. Our group of four quickly separated into two pairs, with me and Brent speeding towards the waterfalls while Joel and Tiana made a more leisurely walk to the nearer view over the so-called Amphitheatre.

Having booked rooms at the Thaba Bosiu Cultural Village, we began the day by driving just a little way up the road to the Thaba Bosiu Visitor Centre. The Visitor Centre was where we were told we could begin our guided hike up Thaba Bosiu, a plateau that served as Lesotho’s first seat of power in the nineteenth century when King Moshoeshoe I established his royal village there. After uniting several clans, King Moshoeshoe repelled invaders and raiders from Thaba Bosiu, whose name translates to “The Mountain of the Night.” The name allegedly refers to the idea that Thaba Bosiu was protected at night by a magical rope that the Basotho women wove and buried at the trailhead on Moshoeshoe’s command. When invaders crossed the rope, they fell asleep, and after waking up, they could only walk a few steps before falling asleep again. The invaders, in turn, thought that the name Thaba Bosiu referred to the mountain growing at night, as they could never reach the top.

We set off from our quaint guesthouse in Ventersburg and refuelled at the local gas station before continuing directly to the border of Lesotho. We left South Africa easily enough: we queued up to have our passports stamped and passed through the light vehicle inspection booth without anyone trying to stop us. Complications only arose when we arrived at the Lesotho border. The customs official in the drive-through booth had no idea what the Czech Republic was, much less whether it had a visa waiver agreement with Lesotho. One can usually search this information on a computer, but the official said the system was not working and asked me to come to his office while the others waited in the parked car.