More Than One Road Through Swaziland

We left Durban for another long drive to Kruger National Park. We had had to change our original plan to go to Mozambique. The missionary family we were going to visit in Maputo are leaving their post and our rental car company would not allow us to bring our car into Mozambique. So, we decided to follow the advice of several folks at our church and do a safari.

There is more than one way to drive from Durban to Kruger. Our friends Scott and Susan in Durban said, why don't you drive through Swaziland. Is it difficult? we asked. There's really only one road, they said. Suffice it to say, we found the other road. This time of year Swaziland is dry and kind of desolate. There are few to no signs on the highways. Brooke was navigating and started to have a bad feeling they weren't on the right road. Despite gender stereotypes, Ben stopped to ask for directions. They were heading toward the interior of the country rather than due north toward Kruger.

Back on the right road, the new challenge was that they were running low on gas. No petrol stations in Swaziland take a credit card (only bank cards). At the border back into South Africa, Ben asked where the nearest petrol station was. 30 kilometers. They made it to Naas and rolled into a petrol station to learn that they, too, did not take a credit card. They drove to another, more obscure, petrol station. The manager had just received and unwrapped his credit card machine the day before. After much trouble shooting, he figured out how to make Ben's card work. Yes, a full tank.

They continued to White River, near the Numbi Gate to Kruger, where their lodging was. It was getting dark and the airtime on the mobile phone was running out. Ben called the lodge and got directions while Brooke wrote them down. We tried our best to follow them, but got lost again, driving down a hill into a township. At one point, stuck in traffic, we looked up and the hillside was on fire. It was a vision on hell at the end of driving 11 hours.

Finally, we called the lodge again, got some clarification, and found our way along an unlit dirt road to the lodge entrance. There were bunkbeds in the room and Marin and Sophia laughed and played and lightened their parents' spirits.