World Cup - Ezulwini Valley

The next day it was 24th and I wanted to walk around the Ezulwini valley and visit a traditional Swazi homestead and learn a little about the culture of the Swazi people. At the dorm I met Eujeen who was a South Korean who had taken a 6 month Hiatus for her work and planned to backpacking in Africa. We decided to visit the homestead which was located in a national reserve.

At the Swazi village, we saw the traditional dance of the Swazi’s and I even tried my hand at it. We were later taken through a small homestead explaining how the Swazi family system works. Its not uncommon for a lot of Swazi’s males to have multiple wives. Infact, the current King of Swaziland, Mswati III has 14 wives and he is just 42 years old. His father Sobhuza II, was reputed to have 70 wives and over 1000 grandchildren! I believe the Swazi male can marry as many wives as he wishes as long as he can take care of them.

I guess it would be very easy to look at it from my narrow prism and say the Swazi culture is not appropriate in today’s times to allow for polygamy but the fact remains that the Swazi’s are proud of their culture and happy about it and continue to respect their tradition and King. Personally, I am indifferent to it, but it hardly matter as long the Swazi’s are ok with it.

Above: Male Swazi dance                    Below Left: Female dance                 Below Right: Traditional Healer

The setting of the homestead and the dance performance was really nice even though it was slightly staged and touristy. I really would have loved to seen that in a real life setting.

That rest of the afternoon was just spent walking around the local handicraft market and planning for the day the next day.

I wanted to visit largest game park in Swaziland called the Hlane National Park situated to the north east of the country not far from the Mozambique border. Eujeen was interested in tagging along and so were a couple more backers at the hostel I was staying at. One of them was lady from called Michal the other person was Michael from France. Since we had 4 of us going that way we decided to rent a car and head to the Hlane National Park early the next morning.

Both Michal and Michael were traveling together and were serious backpackers all equipped with tents and cooking utensils wherever they went. Michal was a school teacher in Israel and Michael was a tour guide in France and had met each other while backpacking in Central Asia. Their modus operandi of backpacking was taking a hiatus of a year or so from their respective work and then just go backpacking in different regions of the world. Work for them was just a way of earning enough money so that they could go backpacking again. That quite a different reason that what most of us go to work for and it was very interesting interacting with them.

That evening I just laid low and watched the Denmark vs. Japan game on TV not expecting Japan to turn in a fabulous performance. I think that was Japan’s best ever performance at the World Cup.