(click on a photo to enlarge)
The main problem with South Africa so far has been road safety. AIDS isn't the only thing keeping life expectancy down in South Africa - the locals wrote the book on dangerous driving. Passing over hills and around blind corners, driving at night without headlights and refusing to share the road with cyclists are just a few of the tricks I've seen here. Often I feel that I'm spending too much time worried about getting hit by cars (and there are lots of them) and not enough time enjoying the landscape. One thing I've learned to do is ride in the middle of the lane when a car is approaching from the rear rather than on the shoulder. This sends the message that I'm actually using the road and that the driver must go into the other lane in order to pass me. Then I dart over to the shoulder just as he/she does so to give myself extra space. However, this doesn't work when there's a line of cars waiting to pass, as South Africans tailgate so close that none but the driver of the first car would see me.
A couple of days after arriving in South Africa I climbed over the Drakensberg, the escarpment that runs along much of the length of South Africa and separates the highlands and the lowlands. The Drakensberg is the fluted, ribbon-like remains of a geological uplift. In it you can see countless layers of sediment, and riding through it was quite an experience. Then I reached the rim of Blyde River Canyon. Looking down into the canyon floor was breathtaking. Between Blyde River Canyon and Nelspruit I rode through a very green area covered by mountain pastures and tree plantations. My feelings were tempered somewhat by knowing that much of this area was originally covered by rainforest, which survives only in isolated pockets today, but going from a predominantly brown landscape to a predominantly green one still had a positive effect on my attitude entering the home stretch of the trip.
There was a bit of excitement as I crossed into Swaziland, the seventh and final country of my trip (plenty of miles left in South Africa, though). As I was getting my passport stamped at the normally-quiet border post, which only sees a few people crossing from South Africa per day, a man who had been talking to the guard in his car jumped out and started running into the South African side. The guard sprinted after him, then another guard raced off in the same direction in the man's car. It turned out that the car had been stolen in Johannesburg, and the guards figured this out while looking at the guy's paperwork. There was nowhere for him to gobut straight along the road,, as the road into South Africa drops off precipitously. I didn't wait around to find out what happened, but I could swear that I heard a couple of gunshots as I was riding away. That left me in the Kingdom of Swaziland. It really is a kingdom in the sense that the king has nearly absolute power. Swaziland is a tiny country between South Africa and Mozambique. In some ways it's like a forgotten corner of South Africa, but in other ways it has its own identity. The capital, Mbabane, is only about twice the size of the little town I grew up in, and t's funny to think that when I see something like a golf course or a shopping mall along the way it's probably the only one of its kind in the whole country.
On October 19, my second day in Swaziland, something unusual happened. It rained. This was the first time I had cycled in the rain since the second day of my trip, way back in Kenya at the beginning of August! It had rained at night two other times, once in Zanzibar and once in Zambia, but this was the first time the rain had really affected me. Since I am cycling in sandals and have no socks or shoes, all of my digits were frozen by the time I got to Mbabane. To make things even more interesting, I was on the steepest roads of the whole trip. I couldn't even shift gears! There don't seem to be any passes in Swaziland, rather the roads go right over the top of the highest mountains. No complaints though - there have been so many times along the way where, in the middle of hot, dry, featureless terrain I wished in vain for a bit of rain and cold mountain air that when it finally came it was quite welcome. It rained the whole way through Swaziland, which isn't saying much since I cycled across most of the country in a single day. I didn't feel that I was missing out on too much by rushing through to get back to dry ground, as the central part of the country is nothing but overblown cultural tourism and the eastern part of the country is pure sugarcane plantations.
Back in South Africa, I was invited to spend a couple of days on a private game reserve in the Hluhluwe area. This was a fantastic experience, something that I never would have been able to afford. I finally got a chance to see rhinos, the one "typical" large African mammal that I hadn't seen so far. The rhino isn't really all that typical these days, as it was poached almost to extinction until the 1990's, mainly so the Yemenis could have nice handles for their daggers. What a waste! There were three white rhinos on the reserve, and since it's been so dry here they, like most of the other animals, have to be fed hay because there is no grass left anywhere. Quite a contrast to St. Lucia Wetlands, my next stop and one of the greenest places I've ever been, drought or no drought. This is an amazing area where five different ecosystems come together. My favorite was the empty beach with beautiful forested dunes, warm water and perfect surfing waves and sand. In fact, the whole way along the coast from St. Lucia down to Durban is full of this type of beach. To beat the heat I could jump in the ocean practically whenever I felt like it with a stretch of beach all my own. The area away from the coast is Zululand, with its own charms, but that will have to wait for another trip.
